SEN. TOM COTTON: Huawei 5G is like Soviets building west’s submarines.

Deploying Huawei, the politician continued, “would be as if we had relied on adversarial nations in the cold war to build our submarines, or to build our tanks. It’s just not something that we would have ever considered.”

The senator was speaking before a defence subcommittee inquiring into UK proposals to allow Huawei to deploy up to 35% of 5G equipment, which has come under heavy criticism from the White House and the Conservative right.

Ten days ago, an increasingly nervous Downing Street said it was reviewing a plan put forward by Boris Johnson as recently as January and indicated that it could be prepared to eliminate Huawei involvement entirely by 2023.

Cotton said that he would welcome the UK removing Huawei “even earlier” and argued that the Chinese company’s kit could be targeted by People’s Liberation Army hackers to track the movement of key parts of US F35 fighter aircraft if it were compromised.

The senator has recently submitted an amendment to the US 2021 National Defense Authorization Act that would block the deployment of US air force F35s in countries where Huawei equipment is used, and told the committee “we believe our airmen could be at risk”.

Huawei is a communist front corporation built atop the bones of Nortel, after picking them clean.