WORLD AFFAIRS

Sweeping charges

The Cox report has clearly gone beyond available evidence in levelling nuclear espionage charges against China.

M.V. RAMANA

TOWARDS the end of the 1990 film Flashback, Dennis Hopper predicts that "once we get out of the eighties, the nineties are going to make the sixties look like the fifties." Unfortunately, that prediction has not come true. Instead, as the 1990s en d, some things do look like the 1950s all over again. In what appears to be the beginning of a new Cold War that certain interests within the United States would like to initiate, China is being assigned the role that had been earmarked for the Soviet Un ion earlier. Attempting to gain political mileage from the situation is Christopher Cox, a Republican Congressman from California and the Chairman of the House Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China (PRC).

The committee was set up in 1998 after disclosures that two U.S. aerospace corporations were under criminal investigation for providing data relating to rockets to China. Its full report, classified Top Secret, was released on January 3, 1999; a declassi fied version, the so-called Cox report, was released on May 25. The report accuses China of stealing nuclear secrets from the U.S. and using "elements of the stolen information" to build warheads for its new Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). Among the specific systems listed are the W-70 enhanced radiation warhead (popularly known as the neutron bomb), the W-88 thermonuclear warhead, and the Minuteman II, the Minuteman III and the Trident C-4 missiles.

The Cox report received wide media coverage, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, including India. Less attention was paid to the responses it generated. After having issued various statements attacking the Cox report, China released an official document on J uly 15 entitled "Facts speak louder than words and lies will collapse by themselves". The issues raised by the Chinese official responses, as well as numerous critiques of the Cox report within the U.S., suggest that the Cox report and some of the allega tions therein go beyond what was implied by available evidence.

Two questions need to be analysed. First, was China involved in nuclear espionage? Second, does information thus obtained give China a new, substantial capacity to design weapons that it was previously incapable of?

According to the Cox report, the answer to the first question is yes. The report states: "The People's Republic of China (PRC) has stolen design information on the United States' most advanced thermonuclear weapons."

There are many people who think that the Cox report goes beyond what the evidence would suggest. For example, John Spratt, a Democrat in the House of Representatives and one of the members of the Cox committee, called the charge a "sweeping" one. Spratt criticised the haste with which the report was produced and said that his objections to some sections of the report were not taken into account.

The sweeping nature of the charges is also clear from another example. The report claims: "The stolen information includes classified information on seven U.S. thermonuclear warheads, including every currently deployed thermonuclear warhead in the U.S. b allistic missile arsenal." Spratt maintained that "the select committee did not find evidence that China obtained design information on all our (that is, the U.S.) most advanced nuclear weapons."

It would not be surprising if China, like most nations with nuclear ambitions, does indulge in nuclear espionage. But to prove it is another matter. Certainly nobody in either country has stepped forward and admitted to spying. Even Wen Ho Lee, who was f ired from the Los Alamos laboratory for security violations, was not charged with any crime; he denied being involved in espionage (Frontline, June 18). Thus, it is difficult to conclude from public reports whether or not China stole classified in formation.

What is worth noting is how the U.S. obtained details about China's nuclear arsenal and plans. According to William Broad of The New York Times, details about Chinese weapons designs became clear only after "a Chinese nuclear expert who had been r ecruited to spy for the United States delivered an intriguing report to his American handlers". In other words, the U.S. got this information through its own espionage networks - what is diplomatically termed "intelligence". The U.S. has an annual intell igence budget that is estimated at $30 billion (the actual sum is classified), and for it to talk of Chinese espionage amounts to the pot calling the kettle black.

With regard to the second question, it is important to remember that China has worked on nuclear weapons for decades. China's first hydrogen bomb test came less than three years after its first atom bomb test. In comparison, the United Kingdom took over five years, the Soviet Union over six years, the U.S. over seven years and France nearly nine years to test a hydrogen bomb. While the Soviet Union helped with technologies to produce fissile material, the break between the two countries occurred in part owing to the Soviet Union's refusal to transfer nuclear weapons designs to China.

Some U.S. scientists who have visited Chinese weapons laboratories and talked to their counterparts also attest to the fact that the Chinese programmes are, for the most part, quite advanced. Harold Agnew, a past director of the Los Alamos nuclear weapon s laboratory, found that in some cases Chinese capabilities were better than that of the U.S. As an example he mentions an advanced X-ray camera called the pinex for which the Chinese design was superior to the American one. Such evidence for the advance d nature of China's nuclear programmes has led some American critics of the Cox report to point out that Beijing, even if it did spy, has made major breakthroughs on its own.

Further, there is a lot of information on different aspects of nuclear weapons technology - including the weapons that China is accused of spying on - available in the public domain; much of this can be found on the Internet. When a set of weapons scient ists with large financial resources and government support gain access to such information, even coarse details may suffice to suggest research possibilities for newer weapons designs. Making use of publicly available data as a guide to research cannot b e considered espionage.

Even if China resorted to espionage, it is unlikely to have acquired complete details about any weapons system. Any espionage is more likely to yield in partial design tips and, perhaps, computer codes. But, as Harold Agnew wrote in a letter to The Wa ll Street Journal, "No nation would ever stockpile any device based on another nation's computer codes." Thus, even if some classified data or computer codes from the U.S. had reached China, its scientists would still have had to do extensive researc h and conduct explosive tests in order to devise usable nuclear weapons based on them.

KARIN COOPER/AP
Christopher Cox, Republican Congressman and Chairman of the House Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with People's Republic of China.

The Cox report states: "With the stolen U.S. technology, the PRC has leaped, in a handful of years, from the 1950s-era strategic nuclear capabilities to the more modern thermonuclear designs." China may well be in the process of developing more modern th ermonuclear designs, but this would not imply that it stole those designs from the U.S. Indeed, there is substantial evidence that China is working on a new, more modern range of missiles. A few months ago, China conducted a test of the DF-31, a mobile I CBM. There are at least two reasons to expect it to work on such missiles and deploy them.

The first is that current Chinese ICBMs are large and cumbersome. Hence they may not survive a pre-emptive nuclear attack by, say, the U.S. Smaller mobile missiles that are more easily hidden require modern, miniaturised warheads, the kind that China is believed to have tested in the 1990s. The second reason stems from institutional pressures. Nuclear weapons laboratories derive their rationale for existence and financial support from developing new or modified weapons designs. Chinese weapons laborator ies, therefore, are likely to push for modernising the arsenal to further their own institutional goals. In this process, they may well use any information that may become available from spying. Nevertheless, with China signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), it would be difficult, if not impossible, to verify adequately any new designs that weapons laboratories may develop from now on.

What is worth noting is that these modernisation programmes have had long gestation periods. This suggests that the Chinese government does not place a high priority on developing these missiles. Once again, there are reasons for this low priority, and f or the assumption that even if the weapons laboratories did develop more modern missiles, China would not deploy them in large numbers.

China adheres to a no-first-use policy, which means that it will use nuclear weapons only if attacked by nuclear weapons. Given such a policy and the relatively small size of its arsenal, estimated at around 400 warheads with only about 20 ICBMs capable of reaching the U.S., the Chinese strategy is to target cities rather than missile silos and other military sites. It matters little whether a large nuclear weapon explodes in the centre of Los Angeles or Moscow, or whether it explodes 2 km from the cent re of the city. In either case, hundreds of thousands of people will die.

Unlike China, U.S. and Russian strategies involve localised hardened targets like missile silos. This requires highly accurate missiles like the Trident with high-yield warheads. Such accuracy, however, comes at a price. The re-entry vehicle of a very ac curate missile has to be extremely narrow so as to reduce the impact of high winds that may buffet the missile as it re-enters the atmosphere. This necessitates one of two requirements. One is to keep the warhead away from the tip and add ballast in fron t of the warhead so as to prevent the re-entry vehicle from tumbling as it re-enters the atmosphere. This, however, leads to a loss of payload capacity.

The alternative is to develop a warhead that is small enough to fit close to the tip of the missile. One of the special features of the W-88 warhead that is employed on Trident missiles, for example, is that its primary fission explosive (that ignites th e secondary fusion explosion) is not spherical and can be placed near the tip of the missile.

Developing such a small warhead would, even given China's level of technological prowess in this field, require major advances, especially in manufacturing the supplementary parts that go with a warhead, the fuses, electronic components and so on. Accord ing to Richard Garwin, a physicist who has had extensive experience in nuclear weapons work, these technologies may be more of an impediment than the explosive parts themselves. (Frontline, July 16, 1999). In his judgment, therefore, "even if Chin a were confident that it had every detail of the W-88 and its Mk-5 re-entry vehicle, it would not reproduce the weapon."

The first hydrogen bomb test - the mike test - by the United States.

On the "enhanced radiation" weapon (the so-called neutron bomb) design that China is accused of stealing, Chinese officials claim that work on it started in the late 1970s and achieved success during the mid-1980s. Indeed, in 1988, The Washington Post had reported that China had tested a "neutron bomb" design. This indicates that China may not have had to rely on espionage as the Cox report suggests. Nevertheless, at a recent conference in Shanghai, a senior Chinese weapon scientist said that suc h bombs were not deployed because they were not suited to the country's military plans. Once again, institutional pressures from weapons scientists rather than any initiative from the armed forces may have been responsible for the 1988 test.

The signs of vested interests are evident all over the Cox report and the media hysteria over it. Two such interests are obvious. Clearly the Republican Party welcomes anything that can be used against President Clinton and his administration. And, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the defence establishment has been left without a major enemy; China provides the best substitute.

Unlike the case of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, however, the U.S. has strong business interests in China. These are behind sections of the U.S. government and business community arguing for an "engagement" with China. U.S. policy towards China w ill ultimately depend on how the conflict between these two camps is resolved. As of now, the report has damaged relations between the two countries, but only to a small extent.

In the final analysis, the Cox report and the brouhaha surrounding it says more about the current climate in the U.S. than it does about China. It comes at a time when high levels of military expenditure and exorbitant, technically ineffective programmes such as Ballistic Missile Defence are sought to be rationalised by invoking threats of irrational "rogue nations". Alongside this is the bogey of a new peril from terrorism, based on a presumption that there are "others" who are unethical and fundamenta lly opposed to the U.S. Feeding indirectly on such images, the Cox report's allegations about espionage adds to the sense of the U.S. being under threat, internally and externally.

In such a milieu, one effect of the report is likely to be a curtailment of civil liberties and scientific freedom, especially when it comes to foreigners, within the U.S. And, if the supporters of the report and its message, including nuclear hawks of many stripes, have their way, these allegations would be used to decelerate the already slow pace of nuclear disarmament. If that happens, the world will continue to remain within the confines of the nuclear prison.

M.V. Ramana is a research associate at the Centre for Energy and Environment, Princeton University, United States.