China has battleships, missiles and awfully effective computer hackers. Soon it will have tasty American-made pork parts in its arsenal to threaten the United States.

To the Chinese government, pork is a strategic concern. It even has a strategic pork reserve, like the United States has a strategic oil reserve.

Some senators are objecting to a large Chinese food producer, Shuanghui International, buying Smithfield, the largest pork producer in the United States, in a $4.7 billion deal. Smithfield owns 460 farms and has contracts with 2,100 others that raise about 15.8 million hogs a year just in the United States. The lawmakers want the Obama administration to block the sale of the pork company for the same reason it recently blocked the sale of a wind-power company to a Chinese company — as a threat to this nation.

The fear is that China would somehow control the pork we eat or, perhaps worse, get our critical pork production technology and our secrets of manure management. If China got mad at the United States, instead of hacking our computers they’d choke off our pork-chop supply. (That the Chinese company is willing to pay handsomely — a 31 percent premium — for our pork technology, not steal it, should be noted by the senators as a step in the right direction.)