I WISH THAT THIS were a bigger surprise:

Investigators have discovered that the nuclear weapons designs obtained by Libya through a Pakistani smuggling network originated in China, exposing yet another link in a chain of proliferation that stretched across the Middle East and Asia, according to government officials and arms experts.

The bomb designs and other papers turned over by Libya have yielded dramatic evidence of China’s long-suspected role in transferring nuclear know-how to Pakistan in the early 1980s, they said. The Chinese designs were later resold to Libya by a Pakistani-led trading network that is now the focus of an expanding international probe, added the officials and experts, who are based in the United States and Europe.

This also suggests that the Chinese are, well, dumb as rocks. Arming an unstable nation with whom one shares a border with nuclear weapons just seems awfully stupid to me. (See also Russia and Iran). I suspect that corruption played a role in that decision: probably Saudi money that bribed Chinese officials to give nuclear secrets to Pakistan that wound up in the hands of Libya. And where else?

The good news is that the end of Saddam’s reign seems to have destabilized a lot of these connections, and brought a lot of information out.

UPDATE: Jim Dunnigan has a lot more interesting background and commentary here.