On the world-threatening nuclear conspiracy front, today’s big news is that the designs for Armageddon found in Libya trace back to China.

Investigators have discovered that the nuclear weapons designs obtained by Libya through a Pakistani smuggling network originated in China, exposing yet another link in a chain of proliferation that stretched across the Middle East and Asia, according to government officials and arms experts.

The bomb designs and other papers turned over by Libya have yielded dramatic evidence of China’s long-suspected role in transferring nuclear know-how to Pakistan in the early 1980s, they said. The Chinese designs were later resold to Libya by a Pakistani-led trading network that is now the focus of an expanding international probe, added the officials and experts, who are based in the United States and Europe.

The packet of documents, some of which included text in Chinese, contained detailed, step-by-step instructions for assembling an implosion-type nuclear bomb that could fit atop a large ballistic missile. They also included technical instructions for manufacturing components for the device, the officials and experts said.

“It was just what you’d have on the factory floor. It tells you what torque to use on the bolts and what glue to use on the parts,” one weapons expert who had reviewed the blueprints said in an interview. He described the designs as “very, very old” but “very well engineered.”