Spies Versus Sweat: The Debate Over China's Nuclear Advance query.nytimes.com , via taipeitimes.com
[ The "past decade" thing is a conveniently truncated timeline in this context , it seems. Who, exactly, was president in 1992 anyway? ]
By William J. Broad
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Wednesday, Sep 08, 1999,Page 9
When American bomb makers began visiting China in 1979, they?were startled by increasingly pointed questions that suggested?their Chinese peers were hot on the trail of the secret to building?a modern nuclear arsenal.
The breakthrough allows H-bombs to be?made so small that many can fit atop a single missile or be fired?from trucks, submarines and other mobile platforms.
China succeeded on Sept. 25, 1992, according to a spy who told?his American handlers that Beijing had exploded a bomb based on the?miniaturization secret.
A team of scientists at the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New?Mexico set to work on a whodunit with huge potential implications:?Was China's advance the result of espionage, hard work or some mix?of the two?
Today, the debate rages on.
Experts agree that spying occurred,?but clash violently on how much was stolen and what impact it had?on Beijing's advance, if any.?The Los Alamos team concluded in 1995 that China's stride was?probably based on espionage. A report this year by a congressional?committee that made the case public went further, claiming that it?would have been "virtually impossible" for China to have made?small warheads "without the nuclear secrets stolen from the United?States."
The congressional report unleashed a torrent of criticism from?scientists inside and outside the government who said the?importance of the espionage was overstated, and that China could?well have achieved the breakthrough on its own, as it insists?publicly.
A review of the dispute, based on months of interviews and?disclosures of weapon and intelligence secrets, suggests that the?congressional report went beyond the evidence in asserting that?stolen secrets were the main reason for China's breakthrough.? The review also bolsters an important point of agreement among?feuding experts: that the federal investigation focused too soon on?the Los Alamos National Laboratory and one worker there, Wen Ho?Lee, who was fired for security violations.
The lost secrets, it?now appears, were available to hundreds and perhaps thousands of?individuals scattered throughout the nation's arms complex.
Federal officials asked that some aspects of the spy case?involving weapons and intelligence secrets not be published, and?The New York Times agreed to refrain from doing so.
For the Los Alamos team of detectives, the overall spy theory?was confirmed strongly in 1995 when the CIA obtained an internal?Chinese document that included a description of America's most?advanced miniature warhead, the W-88.
Revealing for the first time?their top evidence in the case, the document's secret contents, federal officials say the Chinese text cited five key attributes of?the warhead, including two measurements accurate to within four?hundredths of an inch.
But the critics, who are also revealing new information, insist?that Beijing, even if it spied, made the miniaturization breakthrough on its own, after pursuing it for at least 13 years,?from 1979 to 1992. The prowess of Chinese scientists, American?experts said, is suggested by a camera it built for photographing?nuclear blasts, which was far better than a similar one made by the?United States.
"They don't need any help from us," said Harold Agnew, a past?Los Alamos director, visitor to China and federal intelligence?adviser. "They're just curious, as we are curious about them."
The debate over Chinese spying has been blurred by issues that?range from Republican distaste for President Clinton's China policy?to allegations of racial bias in the investigation to fears among?scientists that the uproar is prompting security measures so tight?as to damage work, morale and recruitment.
As in most spy cases, the evidence is open to interpretation,?some experts seeing the glass half full, others half empty.
Several critics familiar with the Chinese document obtained by?the CIA said that its description of the American warhead, which?includes the size, shape and position of crucial components, was?not by itself sufficient to build a miniaturized warhead.?The Energy Department official who supervised the Los Alamos?inquiry, Notra Trulock, agreed with this assessment but said the?information was secret and had never been mentioned in any public?document or Internet posting.
Anyone who had it, he and his team?reasoned, must have also obtained access to a much broader range of?secrets about the warhead's design.
In addition, Trulock said in an interview, knowing the?approximate size and shape of the components provided a road map to?Chinese bomb makers, probably allowing them to skip years of?preliminary testing.?Trulock added, however, that the congressional committee was too?categorical in its report, which was based in part on his?testimony.
"When I testified, I used the appropriate caveats to express?uncertainties in our evidence and our conclusions," said Trulock, formerly the Energy Department's intelligence chief. "We typically?said: `Probably this. Probably that.'" The committee, he said,?"made judgments" about the centrality of spying in China's?breakthrough.
Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., who was chairman of the?committee, defended the work of his staff of 47, which included no?one with nuclear design experience. The panel, he said in a lengthy?interview, drew largely on Clinton administration witnesses for its?expertise. The conclusion that espionage allowed Beijing to skip?decades of research, he said, was an appropriate one, based on the?government's own evidence.? "Judgment matters," he said, responding to Trulock's?criticism. "We don't know everything to a certainty. The question?is what is more likely than not."
In the interview, Cox expressed surprise when told of the depth?and breadth of China's interest in the miniaturization secret. He?also played down the fact, reported by intelligence officials and?trumpeted by federal critics, that most of the world's nuclear?powers have figured out the secret of bomb miniaturization.
Can China, Cox asked, "develop it indigenously because France?did? That is a stretch. It's almost apples and oranges."
The main evidence cited by Cox's committee was the Chinese?document obtained by the CIA in 1995 and a 1980s inquiry into?spying at the Livermore weapons lab in California that concluded?China had likely obtained design secrets of the neutron bomb. The?unclassified version of the report gave no details of the 1995?document's secret details about the W-88.
The report was signed by the committee's four Democrats. But?immediately after its release, Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. of South?Carolina, one of the Democrats, criticized it as rushed,?superficial and exaggerated. The witnesses heard by the committee,?he added, "did not have the technical background to fully assess?the nature or value of the information lost."
Since then, Spratt's critique has been echoed and amplified by a?range of top scientists and bomb designers who say Beijing could?have miniaturized its warheads on its own without spying.
Richard L. Garwin, a physicist who has long advised Washington?on nuclear arms, recently on a bipartisan team led by former?Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said, "There is no reason to?believe that China could not have built perfectly adequate?warheads" for a range of modern missiles "from nuclear technology?that it developed itself."
China, several officials said, simply went down the same path as?other nuclear powers, helped along by the general knowledge of what?the United States had achieved: proof that hydrogen bombs can be?made very small but nonetheless very powerful. "Every state has come to it," said one federal official, referring to breakthroughs in atomic triggers by the Soviet Union, Britain and France. "Now they've got it, too."Houston T. Hawkins, head of international security studies at Los Alamos, which is clearly on the defensive because of the spy scandal, said the basic physics of bombs and missiles push weapons designers in roughly the same direction. To obtain the best performance, he said, engineers are invariably led toward narrow?nose cones about 16 degrees wide -- if cut from a pie, a very modest slice.
"Once you realize that," Hawkins said, "it drives every nation down similar paths. Eventually, all weapons systems will look alike. It has to do more with physics than espionage."
That view is not universally accepted.
Robert M. Henson, an intelligence analyst who first sounded the?alarm at Los Alamos, said there was nothing in the design of missile nose cones that propelled a scientist to shape the core of an atomic trigger into an oval.
Do scientific and technical analyses automatically "draw you to?a watermelon?" he asked, alluding to the shape of the US's?top-secret design for its atomic trigger. "That's not true. It's beyond a shadow of a doubt. Major espionage took place." American intelligence agencies are less categorical. Analysts have concluded that espionage played a role in Beijing's advance, but cannot identify a hard link comparable to the Soviet Union's theft in the 1940s of the American design for the first atom bomb.?"We don't have a smoking gun," said a top administration?official who has closely scrutinized the secret data.
A damage assessment by the American intelligence community, made?public in April, said a mix of espionage, openly available data and?scientific acumen had greatly lengthened Chinese strides. Stolen?secrets, it said, "could help" Beijing develop a mobile missile?and "probably accelerated its program to develop future nuclear?weapons."
In June, the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board,?which did its own investigation, said both congressional and?administration leaders had engaged in "simplification and?hyperbole" in the spy case. Neither dramatic damage assessments?nor categorical reassurances, it said, were wholly substantiated.
And Hawkins said the specific secrets known to have been seized?by the Chinese, principally those detailed in the 1995 document,?would have been little help to a bomb maker, and far from Trulock's?road map. As for an H-bomb's innards, what designers call the?physics package, Hawkins said the documents "describe nothing?significant."
It remains unresolved how China got the W-88 secrets in the first place, but a consensus is emerging that the search for the leak narrowed too quickly to Los Alamos.
Studies by the Senate as well as the president's foreign?intelligence board this year raised serious questions about whether?the FBI and Energy Department had too quickly focused on the?weapons lab. No evidence has pinpointed it as the leak's source. Lee, fired this year from Los Alamos for security violations, has?not been charged with a crime and has denied spying.? However Beijing made its miniaturization advance -- on its own,?by theft or a combination of the two -- it is apparently proud enough to boast about it publicly, at least among its friends in the mountains of New Mexico. Henson said a Chinese arms scientist, Sun Cheng Wei, bragged of the breakthrough a few years ago at Los Alamos, telling an open seminar that China had forged significantly?ahead in nuclear arms.
"What he said," recalled Henson, who attended the talk, "was?that for a long time they were dealing only with round designs, and?then only watermelons." |
