Though I haven't seen this possibility mentioned anywhere, I'm certain that the folks at Fort Meade have spent a fair amount of time and effort trying to get a definitive answer to that question.

When I saw a map showing how close China's supersecret main complex for making nuclear warhead fuel — codenamed Plant 821 — is to the May 12 magnitude 7.9 earthquake's ground zero, accompanying William J. Broad's May 16, 2008 New York Times story about Western efforts to monitor possible radiation leakage as a result of the quake, I couldn't help but turn cause and effect around and wonder, what if?

More from Broad's article: "Closer to the epicenter of the quake that struck Monday is Mianyang, a science city whose outskirts house the primary laboratory for the design of Chinese nuclear arms. It is considered the Chinese equal to Los Alamos.

"Nuclear experts said that closer to the epicenter of the earthquake, in rugged hills a two-hour drive west of Mianyang, China runs a highly secretive center that houses a prompt-burst reactor. It mimics the rush of speeding subatomic particles that an exploding atom bomb spews out in its first microseconds.

"North in an even more rugged and inaccessible region, nuclear experts said, China maintains a hidden complex of large tunnels in the side of a mountain where it stores nuclear arms.

“It’s very close to the epicenter” (below),

said one specialist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because, to the best of his knowledge, the exact location of the secret complex had never been publicly disclosed."

Huh.