China Spy Case Takes Aim at the Wrong Issue

The “Chinaman” did it. The diabolical Asian has long been a staple of American racism, and it’s not surprising that the folks attempting to whip up a new red espionage scare would focus on Wen Ho Lee.

No matter that Lee was born and raised in militantly anti-communist Taiwan and that, as he stated convincingly Sunday on CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes,” the whole reason for his years of hard work on nuclear weapons design at Los Alamos was to help defend his adopted country against its enemies. Nor that there is not a scintilla of evidence that any secret data from Lee ever made their way to any unauthorized person.

Facts evidently don’t matter to those in Congress, led by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), and in the media, where the august New York Times has acted as head cheerleader for those sounding the alarm of a Chinese nuclear threat. They seem not to have noticed that the Chinese nuclear weapons program is minuscule and 40 years behind our own.

The Chinese have, at most, 30 primitive nuclear explosives, atop unstable liquid fuel rockets, capable of hitting the U.S. The United States has 6,000 of the most ultramodern of such weapons, ready at the wait on land, at sea and in the air, providing an unstoppable and total life-obliterating retaliatory force.

There is, in short, no evidence of a criminal or a crime. After years of exhaustive investigation, the Justice Department is finally getting ready to charge Lee--not with criminal espionage but rather with the immensely underwhelming charge of doing his work on an unsecured computer.

If the Justice Department has any sense of proportion, a deal will be brokered, and Lee will be slapped on the wrist for a sloppiness that is all too common at both the Livermore and Los Alamos labs. After all of the fuss, the grand result will be a call for increased tidiness in the operation of the nuclear weapons labs, and we can all toast to that. Neatness is a virtue to be respected.

As for the sexier stuff of espionage, forget it. The dirty secret of the nuclear weapons business is that there are no secrets. Nothing has happened since Hiroshima and Nagasaki to render these weapons any more plausibly useful as weapons. A crude nuclear weapon dropped from a propeller-driven plane or carried in a suitcase does the job of terrorizing civilian populations--the only function of nuclear weapons--as effectively as the modernized warheads, whose technology some claim Beijing has stolen.

Indeed, the argument made by the U.S. government in pushing ahead with weapons modernization was that the newer nuclear weapons would be more stable and less threatening. Mobile missiles on land or on subs were presumed far less vulnerable to a first strike, freeing the man with his finger on the button from the obligation to make a decision within a matter of minutes to “use them or lose them.”

As matters now stand, if the leaders in Beijing think the U.S. has launched a preemptive nuclear strike, they would have 12 minutes in which to decide whether to launch their fixed land-based missiles before U.S. rockets arrive to obliterate them. That was the choice that a rudely awakened Boris Yeltsin faced in 1995, when a Norwegian rocket launch was misinterpreted as one of ours. Fortunately, Yeltsin decided to go back to bed when his advisors learned in time that they had made a mistake.

In today’s heightened hysteria between the U.S. and China, decision-making might not be quite so restrained. In the perverse logic of the nuclear arms race, it would be in our national security interest to supply the Chinese with a Trident-class sub that works, as opposed to their lone sub contender that leaks radiation so badly that it isn’t operational.

And, heresy of heresies, we should give the Chinese some submarine-suitable missiles armed with the miniaturized W-88 warhead that they are supposed to have stolen. That way, even if they thought a nuclear weapon was en route to them, they would not have to instantly respond, being secure in the knowledge that they possessed survivable retaliatory power.

Sounds nutty, I know. But that’s nuclear war for you. Perhaps that is why work at the nuclear weapons labs sometimes veers into ditzier realms. What the nuclear weapons scientists know full well, even if some in Congress and the media don’t, is that if these weapons are ever used, the only beneficiaries from their work will be the radioactive-proof cockroaches that then will inherit the Earth.