-Caveat Lector-
>From www.bullatomsci.org/issues/1999/mj99/mj99schwartz.html
> <Picture><Picture>
>
> May/June 1999
> Vol. 55, No. 4
>
> <Picture>
>
> A very convenient scandal
>
>
>
> By Stephen I. Schwartz
>
>
>
> What a difference eight years make. On November 22, 1990, the New
> York Times published an article headlined, "Chinese Atom-Arms
> Spying in U.S. Reported." It began, "Chinese intelligence agents
> succeeded in stealing nuclear-weapons secrets from the
> government's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the 1980s,
> and the Federal Bureau of Investigation later conducted a long
> espionage inquiry into the theft, American intelligence experts
> said today."
>
> The story had in fact been reported a day earlier by the San Jose
> Mercury News. Five paragraphs down, the Times noted the Mercury
> News had reported "that data stolen from Livermore had been used
> by the Chinese to construct a nuclear device, identified in some
> published accounts as an experimental neutron bomb, which the
> Chinese detonated in September 1988."
>
> What was the fallout from this article? Publicly, there was none.
> The story was not picked up by other major media outlets, there
> were no calls for congressional investigations or the firing of
> high-level officials, and it faded away. It was resurrected this
> March in the wake of the latest scandal du jour, the alleged
> theft by China of the design of the W88 warhead carried aboard
> U.S. Trident II D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
>
> Why didn't the 1990 story generate the same sort of media
> firestorm, charges of cover-ups, calls for resignations, and
> angst about the China threat? Was it because the story ran on
> Thanksgiving (and on page five rather than page one)? Was it
> because the ultra-competitive, ratings-conscious news media we
> have today was not yet fully developed? Was it because George
> Bush, unlike Bill Clinton, was considered credible and did not
> face a sustained movement determined to drive him from office? Or
> was it because the massive military buildup in the Persian Gulf,
> which began three months earlier in response to Iraq's invasion
> of Kuwait, preoccupied the minds of journalists and elected
> officials alike? Interestingly, Brent Scowcroft, President Bush's
> national security adviser at the time, told the Washington Post's
> Walter Pincus in mid-March that security at the labs "was not an
> issue" during his tenure, and that "he was surprised to hear that
> stories were published about the alleged Chinese stealing of
> secrets about the neutron warhead." (Pincus confirmed that
> Scowcroft was surprised both by the allegations and the fact they
> were reported in 1990.)
>
> Fast-forward to late 1998. On December 31, the Times ran another
> article, this time on page one, by Jeff Gerth and Eric Schmitt.
> Headlined "House Panel Says Chinese Obtained U.S. Arms Secrets,"
> the article described the results of a seven-month-long
> investigation by a select House committee chaired by California
> Republican Christopher Cox. The subcommittee investigated charges
> that China had bolstered its satellite-launching capabilities
> through the acquisition of sensitive U.S. technologies, charges
> first reported by the Times last May.
>
> Although the article asserted (in the sixth paragraph) the
> discovery of "a pattern by the Chinese of stealing
> nuclear-weapons design technology from American nuclear
> laboratories," no details were provided. The Washington Post
> followed with a page-three article by John Mintz the next day,
> the lead paragraph of which stated that the House report "focuses
> in part on allegations that Beijing developed the neutron bomb in
> the late 1980s after Chinese spies stole technology from a U.S.
> Department of Energy laboratory."
>
> Despite the prominence of these articles, little notice was taken
> because of the long New Year's holiday weekend. The Wall Street
> Journal weighed in on January 7 with a few new details apparently
> leaked from the Cox committee's report, including the allegation
> that China had obtained "secret design information" on the W88
> warhead and that the FBI was conducting an investigation into the
> matter. Journal reporter Carla Anne Robbins noted that "China
> hasn't developed a weapons system using the W88 information, and
> officials say it still faces very high design hurdles."
>
> Compared with the often sensational coverage that was to follow,
> Robbins also carefully qualified the allegations: "There is
> considerable debate about how much information was passed to
> Beijing. It appears, however, that China didn't get any
> equipment, blueprints, or advanced designs. Instead, officials
> believe, China was given general, but still highly secret,
> information about the warhead's weight, size, and explosive
> power, and its state-of-the-art internal configuration, which
> allowed designers to minimize size and weight without losing
> power."
>
> Although the Journal article propelled the story forward a notch,
> the looming impeachment trial of President Clinton continued to
> dominate the news. On February 17, a few days after the trial
> concluded, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post weighed in.
> Pincus revealed that the trigger for the investigation into the
> W88 diversion was a top-secret Chinese nuclear weapons program
> document showing warhead designs "uncomfortably similar" to the
> W88. (The 1988 document was handed over to the CIA by a defector
> in June 1995, according to a subsequent Post report.) An FBI
> investigation, code-named "Kindred Spirit," was begun, focusing
> on persons with access to W88 information in the 1980s and, in
> particular, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico,
> where the W88 was designed.
>
> Then, on March 6, the Times published a lengthy front-page
> article by James Risen and Jeff Gerth under the headline, "China
> Stole Nuclear Secrets for Bombs, U.S. Aides Say--Espionage Case
> at New Mexico Lab Is Said to Be Minimized by the White House."
> Using details and interviews provided by Clinton administration
> officials (who apparently hoped to blunt the criticism expected
> to follow from the release of the Cox committee's findings), the
> article described the genesis of the case, the role of Notra
> Trulock, the then-director of Energy's intelligence office, in
> piecing it together and, most importantly (from the perspective
> of those critical of the Clinton administration's foreign policy
> in general and its China policies in particular), the apparent
> decision by National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and his staff
> to downplay the charges and delay acting on them to avoid
> ruffling relations with China.
>
> Despite running on a normally slow Saturday, the story caught
> fire, aided no doubt by the post-impeachment news vacuum. One
> month later, as of this writing, it shows few signs of slowing
> down.
>
> Putting it in context
>
> By necessity and design, China's nuclear arsenal has always been
> modest (see "Nuclear Notebook," page 79). The threat it poses to
> the United States is real but small: Of some 400 warheads, only
> about 20 are capable of reaching the United States (which has
> more than 8,300 operational warheads, nearly all of which could
> be targeted against China). China's long-range ballistic missiles
> number fewer than two dozen, carry a single warhead, and are
> liquid-fueled. All 982 U.S. ballistic missiles, including 432
> aboard invulnerable Trident submarines, carry multiple warheads
> (MIRVs) and are solid-fueled, and thus can be launched on short
> notice.
>
> A new chapter in the mushrooming story began April 21, with the
> release of an intelligence assessment--based largely on the
> still-secret Cox report--that the Chinese had stolen design data
> for the W88 warhead. But even if true, it won't alter the balance
> of power any time soon. There is no evidence that China has
> manufactured, flight-tested, or deployed MIRVs. At present all it
> may have is the capability to miniaturize a nuclear warhead, the
> first step toward MIRVing. But getting from there to deploying
> large numbers of accurate and reliable ballistic missiles is a
> lengthy and very expensive process. Moreover, the W88 data, by
> themselves, cannot be used to produce other warheads of different
> designs. As Republican Pete Domenici of New Mexico cautioned in a
> March 24 speech on the Senate floor, "In many ways, China's
> nuclear weapons program is not capable of utilizing the W88
> design."
>
> In any event, it takes only a few nuclear weapons--or perhaps
> just the capability to manufacture them--to achieve deterrence.
> Anything beyond that is irrelevant from a security standpoint
> unless one seeks a nuclear war-fighting posture, something that
> China has not shown any interest in. During the Cold War, the
> United States built 70,000 warheads and spent more than $5.5
> trillion (in constant 1996 dollars) on nuclear weapons and
> weapons-related programs, figures that no country could or would
> want to match. China's estimated total annual military budget is
> $35 billion--about what the United States spends each year on its
> nuclear weapons programs alone.
>
> Spying and politics
>
> Congressional Republicans and those running for president
> apparently want to extract as much mileage (and campaign money)
> as possible from the scandal by contrasting their approach to
> that of the Clinton administration. For the first time in years
> foreign policy may become a serious campaign issue, even though
> Republicans admit they lack a coherent foreign policy plan
> themselves. GOP foreign policy expert Robert Kagan, a senior
> associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told
> the Los Angeles Times that China is "a core grassroots issue for
> Republicans. When a candidate goes before a conservative
> audience, China is an applause line."
>
> Presidential aspirants Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer, and Patrick
> Buchanan quickly condemned the Clinton administration after the
> March 6 Times story, with Buchanan saying that the security
> breach was the "most serious since the Rosenbergs went to the
> electric chair in 1953." Even Sen. Richard Lugar, the normally
> cautious Indiana Republican, opined in the Washington Post that
> "the United States may now be at significantly greater risk from
> a Chinese ballistic missile attack," although he did not explain
> why. But capabilities and intentions are not necessarily
> synonymous, as any student of the Cold War knows. The parallels
> to the infamous and ultimately discredited bomber and missile
> gaps of the 1950s, and their impact on U.S. politics, foreign
> relations, military spending, and force structure are troubling.
>
> Some Republicans immediately demanded Sandy Berger's resignation,
> citing "dereliction of duty." Senate Intelligence Committee
> Chairman Richard Shelby called for a moratorium on scientific
> exchanges with China, and warned, "This is perhaps just the tip
> of an iceberg." Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma characterized the
> still-evolving case as a "story of espionage, conspiracy,
> deception, and cover-up--a story with life and death implications
> for millions of Americans."
>
> Vice President Al Gore told a CNN interviewer on March 9 that the
> alleged espionage occurred "during the previous administration."
> Ten days later, former Vice President Dan Quayle, in a speech to
> the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, accused the administration
> of "appeasement" and complained, "How dare Al Gore blame
> Presidents Reagan and Bush for negligence that clearly happened
> on his and President Clinton's watch?"
>
> Never mind that the W88 incident did occur well before Clinton
> took office, that the Bush administration also sought closer
> relations with China, or that the General Accounting Office has
> been issuing highly critical reports of lax security at Energy
> Department laboratories and weapons facilities since the
> mid-1980s (see "Security?," page 39). The Clinton administration
> at least deserves credit for identifying the problem and working
> to resolve it, including increasing Energy's counterintelligence
> budget from a paltry $2 million in 1995 to more than $39 million
> for fiscal 2000.
>
> And never mind, as columnist Jim Mann pointed out in the Los
> Angeles Times on March 17, that until this story broke, the
> pro-business Republican Congress had renewed China's
> most-favored-nation trading status four times, approved plans for
> American companies to provide civilian nuclear power technology
> to China, and--under the Senate leadership of Trent Lott--watered
> down a ban on sales of American satellites to China.
>
> The story also broke at a fortuitous time for advocates of
> legislation promoting the swift deployment of ballistic missile
> defenses. Bills that last year failed on close votes were
> overwhelmingly approved by both the Senate and the House on March
> 17 and 18 after President Clinton and congressional Democrats
> reversed their long standing opposition (see "Missile Defense:
> It's Back," page 26). Ironically, China may have become
> interested in mirv technology in order to preserve its nuclear
> deterrent in the face of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)
> in the 1980s. Based on the exaggerated claims for SDI's potential
> effectiveness, China's minuscule 1980s arsenal appeared to
> present little challenge to the system. But if China countered by
> deploying many warheads atop each missile, SDI's task would
> become significantly more difficult, perhaps impossible, and
> deterrence might be maintained.
>
> The man in the middle
>
> Wen Ho Lee, a 59-year-old computer scientist at Los Alamos, was
> fired in early March on the recommendation of Energy Secretary
> Bill Richardson. Lee, who had been at the lab since 1978, remains
> an enigma. According to the Wall Street Journal, in six
> unclassified technical papers published between 1984 and 1988,
> Lee focused on how high explosives can be detonated to create
> shock waves capable of compressing a sphere of metal. Such
> studies are relevant to understanding the behavior of the
> "trigger" of thermonuclear weapons, the relatively small fission
> bomb used to ignite the much larger fusion reaction. He
> apparently was part of the team that designed the W88 warhead,
> focusing on calculations relating to implosion of the primary.
>
> Lee, who was born in Taiwan but is an American citizen, was fired
> for failing to report contact with people from "sensitive"
> countries, not properly securing classified materials within his
> office at Los Alamos, failing a second polygraph test in February
> (he passed his first one in December 1998, but was nevertheless
> transferred to another job at the lab), and for refusing to
> cooperate with investigators on the last of three days of
> questioning. FBI and intelligence officials have been quoted in
> the press as saying they have too little evidence to arrest Lee
> for espionage. They were not even able to muster enough probable
> cause during the initial investigation in mid-1996 to obtain a
> wiretap on Lee's telephone. An unnamed official told the Times in
> mid-March: "The guy violated some rules and was fired for doing
> that. But we really don't know what his motivations were. . . .
> We really don't know enough about what he did. . . . There are
> huge unknowns at this point." Said another: "The admissions that
> he made [during FBI questioning] were not things that were
> against the law, but against [Energy Department] regulations.
> "Lee's lawyer, Mark C. Holscher, calls the charges against his
> client "categorically false."
>
> In 1986 and again in 1988, Lee requested and received permission
> to travel to China to attend and speak at conferences related to
> the unclassified aspects of his work (which are relevant to a
> broad number of scientific and industrial applications).
> According to the Wall Street Journal, Lee "presented a paper
> discussing 'detonation velocity' and the hydrodynamic effects of
> explosives" at a 1986 conference organized by Beijing's Institute
> for Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics.
>
> Two years later he presented a second paper, "about voids in
> metal that could interfere with a fast-moving explosion." The
> Journal added that, according to a spokesman for the laboratory,
> both papers had been cleared by laboratory officials. The FBI
> reportedly suspects that Lee provided information to China on the
> W88 warhead during the 1988 conference. But according to
> Newsweek, "Senior law enforcement and intelligence officials . .
> . are not at all confident Lee passed on critical secrets to the
> Chinese--or even that espionage was involved at all." Chinese
> officials have confirmed Lee's attendance at two scientific
> conferences, but they adamantly deny the charges of spying,
> complaining they are part of an effort by anti-China forces in
> the United States to sabotage U.S.-China relations.
>
> It's the pattern that troubles some officials. Following the 1990
> revelations about the loss of neutron bomb data at Lawrence
> Livermore, another unidentified Taiwan-born scientist working
> there resigned following a two-year FBI investigation, which
> remains open. He was never charged.
>
> And finally--on April 8, the day China's Prime Minister Zhu
> Rongji met with President Clinton in Washington--the New York
> Times reported that in early 1996 a spy working in China for the
> United States told U.S. intelligence officials that officials
> "inside China's intelligence service . . . were boasting that
> they had just stolen secrets from the United States and used them
> to improve Beijing's neutron bomb."
>
> According to the article, China's September 1988 test of a
> neutron bomb was unsuccessful, leading China to attempt to
> acquire additional classified information to try and perfect the
> weapon. However, there is "no evidence that China has produced an
> improved neutron bomb."
>
> A subsequent Energy Department investigation found that Wen Ho
> Lee attended a classified 1992 meeting during which "solutions to
> the [U.S.] neutron bomb's design flaw were discussed." The FBI
> also discovered that Lee had "made at least one telephone call"
> to the suspect in the 1980s neutron bomb case at Livermore.
> Despite these intriguing connections, the FBI "has not been able
> to establish that Lee has any connection to the neutron bomb
> case."
>
> In late 1997, Peter H. Lee (no relation to Wen Ho Lee), a
> physicist and laser fusion expert born in Taiwan who worked at
> Los Alamos and later for TRW's Space and Electronics Group in
> southern California, pled guilty to providing classified data on
> simulated nuclear detonations to Chinese scientists during a 1985
> visit to China. He was sentenced to one year in a halfway house
> and ordered to pay a $20,000 fine and undertake 3,000 hours of
> community service. Compared with the case of Wen Ho Lee, Peter
> Lee's arrest and plea arrangement received almost no press
> coverage.
>
> Science v. security
>
> These cases and others represent the dynamic tension at the
> weapons laboratories, where from the beginning scientific inquiry
> has been tempered by strict security regulations. Science
> functions best in a free and open society, where ideas can be
> exchanged, tested, thrown out, and refined. Nuclear weapons
> scientists understand the need for secrecy when it comes to
> nuclear weapons, but they sometimes chafe against the regulations
> when they threaten to inhibit the scientific process or have
> become outdated.
>
> Non-scientists often wrongly believe that the laboratories are
> bastions of classified information and that there is a "secret"
> to nuclear weapons that must remain locked away lest other
> countries acquire it. But the only true secret concerning nuclear
> weapons was exploded over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Once
> scientists knew that such weapons could be built, it was only a
> matter of time before the basic physical and computational
> principles were understood.
>
> There are a great many things kept secret about the U.S. nuclear
> weapons program, but even assuming that we could somehow prevent
> any information from ever leaving the confines of the
> laboratories, dedicated and skillful scientists will be able to
> design and even build a basic nuclear bomb, given enough time and
> money, as the clandestine efforts by South Africa and Iraq
> demonstrate all too well. It's worth recalling that "Little Boy,"
> the gun-type atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was considered so
> reliable that it was never tested.
>
> Moreover, a Manhattan Project-style policy of isolation would be
> anathema to most scientists and would seriously complicate
> efforts to retain workers whose raison d'�tre has undergone a sea
> change since the end of the Cold War. A survey of scientists,
> engineers, and technicians at the weapons laboratories, conducted
> by an independent commission appointed by Congress and
> coincidentally released in the midst of the uproar over Wen Ho
> Lee, found that nearly 42 percent of them believed their
> continued work on weapons was predicated on being able to do work
> in unclassified areas.
>
> Excessive secrecy may also impede the detection of alleged
> nuclear espionage. Because nuclear weapons information is so
> tightly held, U.S. intelligence analysts, according to Newsweek,
> apparently didn't know what to look for when reviewing
> intercepted communications and other raw intelligence. Much of
> the information collected by programs under the auspices of the
> National Security Agency and other agencies was never even
> translated and analyzed; the sheer volume simply overwhelmed the
> analysts. Only now are they going back to see what they missed
> the first time.
>
> Where to now?
>
> Because of its status as the world's only remaining superpower,
> its strong and diverse economy and leadership in many
> technological fields, and not least because it is an open and
> democratic society, the United States has been and will continue
> to be a target for espionage. Whether or not the case against Wen
> Ho Lee is ever proven, more can and should be done to ensure that
> classified and sensitive military information and technologies do
> not leak out. But we should recognize that we will never be able
> to completely wall ourselves off from the rest of the world.
>
> The reaction in some quarters to this scandal has been
> disturbing. Lee's wife Sylvia, who like Lee was born in Taiwan
> but is a U.S. citizen, was reported to be under suspicion as well
> for attending events for Chinese scientists at Los Alamos and for
> being invited to a scientific conference in China. An editorial
> in the Bangor (Maine) Daily News asked why "many foreign
> scientists, Chinese and otherwise, have the keys to some of the
> most top-secret rooms at Los Alamos." (Because "America does not
> produce enough scientists," it responded.)
>
> While no one in the current scandal has yet called publicly for
> the expulsion of or restrictions on Chinese or Chinese-American
> scientists working in the United States, that is the unmistakable
> logical extension of the statements of those in Congress and
> elsewhere who criticize the Clinton administration's laxity and
> call for tighter security. Shelby and others have called for a
> moratorium on foreign visitors to the labs. "If you've got
> someone hemorrhaging, the first thing you stop is the blood, and
> then you see what's in the wound," said Shelby recently. "We
> haven't stopped the hemorrhaging at our labs." It is hard to
> imagine that Chinese-American graduate students and scientists
> will not face increased scrutiny as they go about their work. How
> many will lose their clearances or encounter professional
> difficulties because of their ethnicity?
>
> Whatever the final outcome of this case, Americans must guard
> against turning the national laboratories--and the country--into
> a fortress against threats both real and imagined. They must
> avoid, in Henry Kissinger's words, a "nostalgia for
> confrontation." Warns former Defense Secretary William Perry, "If
> we treat China as an enemy it will surely become one." If that
> happens, American society and science will be the big losers.
>
> Stephen I. Schwartz is the publisher of the Bulletin and
> executive director of the Educational Foundation for Nuclear
> Science. He is the editor of Atomic Audit: The Costs and
> Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (1998).
>
A<>E<>R
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
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A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
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