((I'm stupid it's Project 517 not 751))

There are two superpowers in the world: The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. What makes them superpowers? Their capacity for power projection, their international diplomatic weight, their military superiority, their industrial capacity, oh, and of course their possession of the single most destructive force ever created by humankind. Atomic weaponry.

The People's Republic of China will have no way of creating her own atomic weaponry any time soon, as the industrial know-how and expertise required is at least several years ahead of China's current stage. There are other, simpler, if perhaps less effective, deterrents against weapons of mass destruction. Project 751 is our effort to explore those deterrents.

The first route to go down is that of developing chemical weapons. We've experience with chemical weapons, they've been used against the Chinese people on more than one occasion, notably during the War of Resistance Against Japan and during Soviet incursions into Xinjiang. Already most nations have developed counter-measures to chemical weaponry, so any use would have to be quick and massive to have much of an effect. Hopefully it will never come to that. It is a relatively straight-forward procedure to procure these weapons, and so we will do so, acquiring small stockpiles of mustard, hydrogen cyanide and phosgene gas with which we will test various methods of delivery before moving on to full fledged arsenal.

The second route is a much more dangerous form of deterrence: Biological weaponry. Again we have experience being on the receiving end, as during the War of Resistance the Japanese extensively used bubonic plague, cholera, and anthrax to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Chinese people. Due to the nature of plagues and pandemics it is possible that a biological arsenal can be much more destructive than a nuclear one, and would be a much greater deterrence than chemical weapons. This means that all research will be done with the utmost caution, and a special laboratory will be constructed in the foothills of Western Sichuan for the purpose of research into various biological agents. We will also be prepared to completely and utterly destroy the laboratory and its surrounding region should a leak of any sort occur.

The fact of the matter is that China needs weapons of mass destruction to prevent a nuclear attack on her, and until we've developed the ability to produce enriched uranium, these will have to do.