The rocket scientist key to cold war efforts on both sides

A 1948 photo of Qian Xuesen

Qian Xuesen, the Chinese rocket scientist who has died in Beijing aged 98, was a unique figure in the history of the world’s missile and nuclear arsenals, with a career that straddled the secretive military establishments of the capitalist west and his communist homeland.

Qian was recruited as a brilliant student in the US in the 1940s to join the war effort, briefly working on the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb and later on weapons to match Nazi Germany’s rocketry. But his life was upended in 1950 when the FBI alleged he had once been a communist and then detained him as he attempted to leave the US for China.