The commission, in its report, notes that China has supplied Pakistan with ``a design for a nuclear weapon and additional nuclear weapons assistance. It has even transferred complete ballistic missile systems to Pakistan (the 350-km range M-11) and Saudi Arabia (the 3,100-km range CSS-2).''

Stating that, ``China poses a threat to the US as a significant proliferator of ballistic missiles, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and enabling technologies,'' the commission headed by former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and including America's top missile and intelligence experts, said the ballistic missiles armed with WMD payloads ``pose a strategic threat to the US.''

``This is not a distant threat. Characterising foreign assistance as a wild card is both incorrect and misleading.Foreign assistance is pervasive, enabling and often the preferred path to ballistic missile and WMD capability,'' the report says.

Accusing China of carrying out extensive transfers to Iran's solid-fuelled ballistic missile programme, the report says North Korea, Iran and Iraq as well as India and Pakistan ``now have increased incentives to cooperate with one another.''

``They have extensive access to technology, information and expertise from developed countries such as Russia and China. They also have access through commercial and other channels in the West, including the United States,'' it says.

It adds that ``through this trade and their own indigenous efforts, these second-tier powers are on the verge of being able to provide to one another, if they have not already done so, the capabilities needed to develop long-range ballistic missiles.''

The commission says that it examined the ways in which the programmes of emerging ballistic missile powers compared with one another. ``For example, wetraced the development histories of the related programmes of North Korea, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan and the relationships among them.

``This comparison helped in identifying the similarities between programmes, the extent to which each had aided one another in overcoming critical development hurdles and, importantly, the pace at which a determined country can progress in its programme development.''

A new strategic environment, the report says, now gives emerging ballistic missile powers the capability, through a combination of domestic development and foreign assistance, to acquire the means to strike the US within about five years of a decision to acquire such a capability and 10 years in the case of Iraq.

Available alternative means of delivery can shorten the warning time of deployment nearly to zero, it adds.

The threat, says the commission, is exacerbated by ``the ability of both existing and emerging ballistic missile powers to hide their activities from the US and deceive the US about the pace,scope and direction of their development and proliferation programmes.''