So China Has the Latest Technology? So What?

Despite all the speculation about possible Chinese nuclear espionage at Los Alamos, we still don’t know what actually happened or how serious any breach might be to U.S. national security. My assessment is: not all that much.

Nuclear weapons expert Edward Teller once said, “The most difficult thing about making a nuclear weapon is to make one that doesn’t work.” In his own quaint way, he was fundamentally right.

After World War II, nuclear warhead requirements were put in terms of performance and reliability that never were related to military reality. (I’m ashamed to admit that I once was part of this process.) The military, in all its profundity, decided that it understood strategic nuclear operations sufficiently to give very precise requirements to the laboratories working on weaponry, when the truth was that it hadn’t the wildest understanding of nuclear strategy--never has and never will. But this didn’t prevent the Defense Department from formulating requirements that sometimes the labs could meet and sometimes not--all based on exploiting physical and mathematical (including computer) science to the hilt.

Despite the very considerable technical progress we have made in the strategic nuclear warhead area, we have yet to come up with a credible strategy for waging nuclear war that allows our nation to fight and win a purely military war adhering to “just war” principles intended to limit the war to the warriors, without what is euphemistically called “collateral damage.” Our profound weakness in military nuclear intelligence has denied us the ability to understand the overall nature of the enemy’s strategic nuclear forces, particularly its intercontinental ballistic missiles. (For President Clinton, supposedly quoting CIA estimates, to proclaim that the Chinese have perhaps 20 or 30 ICBMs has to be preposterous. What numbers of missiles they have and where they are, we simply don’t know; they could be 10 times the U.S. “official” estimate.) This fundamental ignorance has denied us the ability to fight and “win,” whatever that means, such a conflict with China.

Half a century into the Nuclear Age, we are left with our original immoral strategy of deterrence based on mutual assured destruction, or MAD, involving the decimation of the enemy’s urban-industrial complex. In this context, knowing the precise performance and reliability of our thermonuclear warheads has little, if any, meaning.

All we can do is pray that the next half-century will provide the same deterrent results, assuming a measure of sanity exists in nuclear-capable countries. It is hoped that this will be the case, but don’t hold your breath.

If China has acquired the vaunted W-88 thermonuclear technology from Los Alamos computer files, there is no U.S. intelligence to indicate it could not have developed very acceptable warhead technology on its own; it has been at this business for four decades and has not been living in the nuclear Stone Age. Every little bit helps, it can be argued; but whatever China may have gained through such espionage will have no meaningful quantifiable effect on America’s MAD (insane) nuclear doctrine. Even if it has acquired the W-88 technology, which still is debatable, by no means does this imply that it has acquired a meaningful advantage in its ability to wage nuclear war against us.

However, this will not prevent the Defense Department and Congress from giving doomsday warnings about the dire consequences of such Chinese perfidy; but that’s the way the nuclear game has been played in the U.S.: demagogically. So be it, but one should not be taken in by such political rhetoric.