The Chinese military offered an Australian weapons inventor $100 million for information on a revolutionary new gun—capable of firing 1 million bullets per minute—currently being developed in Australia.
The gun, known as Metal Storm, is still being developed by a publicly listed company based in Brisbane. It can fire bullets by remote control. The technology can be applied to any weapon and is considered so deadly that the U.S. Department of Defense has determined it must remain in allied hands.
Speaking on Australia's Nine Network, the inventor of the gun, Mike O 'Dwyer, said the Chinese had been after the Metal Storm technology for decades, but that a particular telephone conversation with an American accented man representing the Chinese army had set alarm bells ringing.
"He said: 'We don't need any Metal Storm weapons, we don't need any of the paper work, the history,'" O'Dwyer said, "'We want you and your family in Beijing.'"
"What I was expected to do in Beijing simply was, as I understood it, to work with a group of people to divulge all the knowledge I possessed regarding Metal Storm, to enable prototypes to be built for the weapons systems to be developed."
O'Dwyer said he was offered $50 million on arrival in China and another $50 million a year later. He turned the offer down and decided, instead, to report it to the Australian government.
O'Dwyer said the response of the Australian government was just to provide him with advice on how he "should continue the discussions" and "personal safety." O'Dwyer said he would have liked to have seen a little more concern.
"I think it's very unlikely the Australian government has understood the significant persistence and determination of this effort," he said.
He said the Chinese had been approaching the company from "all sorts of quarters" and the representative he had spoken to had indicated he was determined to gain the technology.
"You could certainly sense a total resolve on his part, a total understanding looking through his eyes that sooner or later he was going to succeed."
An Australian Chinese man, Jun Yang, was also approached in Beijing by a senior bureaucrat who offered him a large sum of money to buy the Australian gun for the Chinese army.
Jun Yang was a prominent figure in the Chinese-Australian community in the '90s as a student association leader.
His wife, Jane Wu, said she and her husband had decided the regime was not to be trusted and turned down the offer despite the considerable remuneration.
"We believe they [the Chinese regime] would use the gun against the West and the Chinese people," she told The Epoch Times.
"It is too dangerous for the Chinese Communist Party to have," she said.
Chief Operations Officer of Metal Storm, Ian Gillespie, said Mike O'Dwyer was no longer involved with the company on a day-to-day level and those overtures from the Chinese Communist regime had been made over a year ago.
Gillespie said it was not unusual for countries to seek out military technology and while he would not exclude doing business with China he said the Metal Storm gun was still another 18 months away from production and they were presently focussed on the American and Australian markets.
"At the moment we're only working with the Australian government and the U.S. government and to some extent our partners in Singapore and here in Australia," he said.
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