Reason for Disarmament - report alleging that China stole U.S. nuclear secrets unsubstantiated

In late May, a Select Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives headed by Christopher Cox, Republican of California, issued a report entitled "U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China." The 700-page document known as the Cox Report said that China "has stolen design information on the United States' most advanced thermonuclear weapons," adding that the spying at "our national weapons laboratories spans at least the past several decades and almost certainly continues today."

The report is unsettling, to say the least. It is dismaying to think that our national weapons laboratories have been so lax about security. But the hysteria over the alleged Chinese spying scandal is not warranted.

First off, the Cox Report may not prove much. There's a big question about how compromised, exactly, U.S. national security is. "If you look at the Cox Report, nobody really knows what they got, if anything," says Lisbeth Gronlund, senior staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"It's amazing how many conclusions they've based on a relatively small amount of information," says Frank yon Hippel, a physicist who teaches nuclear control and disarmament issues at Princeton University. "They don't seem to have enough information to prosecute anybody."

Not only does the report hedge repeatedly, but members of the intelligence community and even members of the committee that came up with the report are saying that it may be wrong. For instance John Spratt, Democrat of South Carolina, said the report may not be accurate in some of its assumptions.

"The conclusions of the report have been written in a worst-case fashion," added Norm Dicks, Democrat of Washington, and a member of the committee.

The intelligence community also disputes the findings. One of the few voices of caution recently has been the CIA, which, according to a New York Times report, has said that no one knows for sure whether. China did steal documents from weapons laboratories.

And an April 21 report by a CIA panel led by Admiral David Jeremiah concludes, "To date, the aggressive Chinese collection effort has not resulted in any apparent modernization of their deployed strategic force, or any new nuclear weapons deployment."

Other critics have claimed that the report's conclusions seem extreme. "The report draws some conclusions in its public version that go beyond what you can conclude from the classified version," Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, told The New York Times. "There's some language that is stronger than the facts."

Most troubling is the situation of the chief suspect in the case, Wen Ho Lee, a Los Alamos scientist who allegedly gave the Chinese access to computer programs on our nuclear weapons. Apparently, there is not enough evidence even to charge Lee with a crime--though he did lose his job.

While the report comes to some strong conclusions, it also admits that there is no way to know at this point how much information was stolen or what China might do with that knowledge.

Even if the Cox Report were correct, China would not pose a big threat to the United States. Any assertion that China may be catching up with the United States in the nuclear technology category is a serious exaggeration.

"The use of the term `strategic' in the Chinese case needs some qualification," reported the May/June issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. "China has only about twenty missiles capable of intercontinental distances and another 100 with ranges from 1,800 to 4,750 kilometers. Although bomber forces are normally considered part of strategic forces, Chinese bombers cannot go great distances, and China's single ballistic missile submarine does not venture far. Compared to the nuclear weapons systems of the other powers, especially those of the United States, China's are modest in size and capability."

China may or may not have the capability to build advanced atomic weapons. But capability is no guarantee that a country will aggressively pursue a weapons-building program. And even if it does, say critics, such a production system could take decades and the kind of money that China has not so far poured into its military.

"China's estimated total annual military budget is $35 billion--about half what the United States spends each year on its nuclear weapons programs alone," observes The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

The Cox Report does make some guesses about why China might want that technology, however. "The stolen design information will assist the PRC [People's Republic of China] in building smaller nuclear warheads--vital to the PRC's ongoing efforts to develop survivable, mobile missiles," it says. "Current PRC ICBMs, which are silo-based, are more vulnerable to attack than mobile missiles."

The Cox Report acknowledges that China's main fear is that an attack by the United States could destroy its nuclear arsenal. China, says Gronlund, wants missiles it can move around easily, "a game of hide and seek," so it can have a "more survivable force."