A Habit of Distrust

WASHINGTON — Last week, the long-anticipated Cox committee report on Chinese espionage was released. While Chinese pursuit of U.S. secrets has been on the front pages for the past few months, the 1,016-page report unleashed a frenzy worthy of the best Cold War scandals. No doubt Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) and his congressional colleagues see themselves as America's saviors, with a finger in the nuclear dike. Ignore for a moment the partisan undercurrents in this modern-day who-lost-China fever and put aside disagreements over President Bill Clinton's China policy. Let's just examine the report's main assertions.

Four are made about nuclear weapons: First, the Chinese have conducted a pervasive and successful penetration of U.S. nuclear-weapon laboratories for the past 20 years. Second, the secrets stolen were essential to China's modernization. Third, Chinese weapons are basically copies of ours. Finally, in highly inflammatory language, China is depicted as an emerging nuclear nemesis. Sounds pretty bad, but let's take a look at each claim.

The Central Intelligence Agency's April 21 damage assessment on Chinese spying is perhaps a better guide than the Cox report. It concludes: "China's technical advances have been made on the basis of classified and unclassified information derived from espionage, contact with U.S. and other countries' scientists, conferences and publications, unauthorized media disclosures, declassified weapons information and Chinese indigenous development. The relative contribution of each cannot be determined." The Cox report makes it seem as though everything the Chinese may have learned came from spying and not from Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine or the latest physics conference.

An extraordinary amount of information covering a wide range of technologies is available in the public domain, useful to Chinese, or anyone else for that matter. The basic concepts of nuclear weapons are widely known. Scientific secrets are neither absolute nor one nation's property.

It is somewhat arrogant, especially after the Iraqi experience, to believe other nations' scientists are incapable of building weapons of mass destruction. Unless interrupted for some reason, every nation that has set out to build a nuclear weapon has succeeded. Refinements soon follow. The tricks Chinese may or may not have learned from us about how to make a missile warhead lighter and more compact have been "discovered" by other nuclear powers. Chinese are traversing paths others have taken and would have eventually discovered the "tricks" on their own, given enough time and effort.