Chinese Space Program 2 - History 2
At the end of World War II, the Russians and the Americans both captured German rocket scientists and rocket technology. Mao Zedong led a communist revolution and rose to power in China in1949. Concerned with the U.S. threat to use nuclear weapons in the Korean War in the early Fifties, Mao decided that China needed to have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them in order to be respected and taken seriously by the other major powers.