CHINESE TAKEOUT
SOKOLSKI, HENRY
CHINESE TAKEOUT by Henry Sokolski For nearly a year now, the media have detailed how China has been stealing America's strategic technology. Last week, though, the New York Times dropped a...
...Finally, because of the codes it has stolen and the advanced U.S...
...If the United States and its allies can close ranks and convince Beijing that such moves would be self-defeating, China may well decide to restrain itself...
...Finally, early in January, Congress sent the president an additional written warning...
...The White House may still argue that ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is our best hope to prevent further nuclear proliferation...
...China currently has a relatively small strategic stockpile: 20 ponderous intercontinental-range nuclear rockets and about 400 nuclear weapons that can threaten its Asian neighbors...
...So far, their aim has been to prevent anything like this from happening again...
...And in this, they can't help but succeed: After what Wen Ho Lee stole from the laboratories, there are hardly any nuclear weapons design secrets left to protect...
...Still, given Lee's known communications with convicted Chinese spies and his effort to hide evidence (he tried to erase between 1,000 and 2,000 of the stolen files after his last interview with investigators), it's reasonable to assume the worst...
...Intelligence officials recently established that someone accessed his home computer...
...But China—which signed the treaty only months after Wen Ho Lee downloaded the last of Los Alamos's nuclear weapons codes—knows better...
...What it won't tell you are the key aspects of any given warhead design...
...This prospect, however, will depend far more on what Congress and the White House do now to strengthen U.S...
...computer technology our government has allowed to be transferred, China will be able to build this force without the warning afforded by nuclear testing...
...nuclear testing...
...What they lack is legal proof that Lee passed this information on to China...
...Now, no fewer than nine congressional committees are investigating...
...Whether Beijing will actually build up its nuclear forces and spread the strategic technology it has gained to others remains to be seen...
...It's designed to predict how nuclear weapons will perform...
...Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist already suspected of handing China information about a U.S...
...The last briefing, in November 1998, detailed more examples of spying at the laboratories...
...Unlike previous stories of Chinese thefts instigated in the Carter and Reagan years, this news immediately put President Clinton in the penalty box...
...The legacy code is a computer file containing all the information scientists have gleaned from over four decades of U.S...
...nuclear warhead known as the W-88, may have compromised every nuclear weapons design in America's arsenal...
...In the next decade, expect all of this to change...
...And the White House's response...
...and Asian security than on anything they might belatedly attempt concerning the security of our national laboratories...
...Two kinds of nuclear weapons design information: the national laboratories' "legacy code" and their input data...
...In fact, the FBI began a formal criminal investigation of Lee in 1996...
...national missile defenses...
...China, ever eager to increase its production of nuclear weapons materials, recently acquired the latest in uranium enrichment technology from Russia...
...Henry Sokolski is executive director of the Nonprolifera-tion Policy Education Center...
...Worse yet, White House officials, including the president, had reason to know...
...These new systems, moreover, would be small enough to be placed on hard-to-target mobile launchers (which China is developing) and could be clustered on their intercontinental rockets in numbers sufficient to challenge planned U.S...
...and thousands more deployed to face down our Asian allies...
...In mid-March, the president insisted he had not been told of any espionage that had occurred on his watch...
...Larger in number, smaller in size, higher in accuracy, and with faster reentry speeds, these new Chinese warheads are guaranteed to complicate development of U.S...
...That is largely captured by input data...
...missile ü defenses for Asia...
...Last week, though, the New York Times dropped a bombshell...
...On at least three separate occasions, the FBI subsequently briefed the president's national security adviser on the Lee case and the "acute threat" of Chinese nuclear computer espionage at the laboratories...
...Wen Ho Lee was allowed continued access to all of Los Alamos's most sensitive weapons information until late last year and was only fired on March 8. As for highly visible corrective actions, the Department of Energy did— regrettably—take one step: It removed its security chief, an official known for persistently criticizing the department's lax security procedures...
...Before he was fired, Wen Ho Lee was updating these codes and, from the FBI's investigation of what he downloaded onto his home computer, it looks as though he pretty much stole everything Los Alamos had...
...The systems that can reach the United States, because of their crudity and enormous size, are vulnerable in the ground and would be relatively easy to deflect with missile defenses...
...Put the two together and you not only can project a weapon design's likely performance, you can generate a blueprint of the weapon itself...
...They even have documents proving that China secured exact data on at least a half-dozen of America's most advanced weapons...
...Wen Ho Lee, however, transferred the bulk of several thousand secret nuclear weapons files in 1994 and 1995...
...Not 20, then, but hundreds of weapons could before long be trained at the United States...
...So, what did he lift...
...With the new, highly efficient nuclear designs it has stolen, though, it will require only a fraction of what it previously needed to modernize its arsenal...
Vol. 4 • May 1999 • No. 33
