The China Spy Scandal That Never Was

For the past year, the news has been punctuated with lurid stories heralding a China spy scandal. Most of that fear-mongering was based on the report of a congressional committee headed by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) and compiled by a staff that included not a single nuclear weapons expert.

Yet when five of the leading national security experts released a study last week showing that the Cox committee report was riddled with factual errors, its language “inflammatory” and its key conclusions “unwarranted,” the media barely noticed.

The report, compiled by a research team at Stanford University’s Center for International Security, was coordinated by Michael M. May, director emeritus of the Livermore National Laboratory, where he was a leader in the U.S. nuclear weapons program for 36 years. The Stanford study concludes that “there is no credible evidence presented or instances described of actual theft of U.S. missile technology.”

Most of the Cox report--600 of its 900 pages--dealt with that supposed sale or “theft” of missile-launch technology. That was also the claim of stories in the New York Times last year that won the paper a Pulitzer Prize. The paper has not reported on the Stanford report.

However, the congressional and media hysteria did result in legislation that threatens U.S. leadership in the information age. According to the report, “Probably the most damaging consequence for this nation’s technology and business leadership in space is the Cox committee’s ill-timed and poorly thought out overturn of the existing satellite export-control regime,” which has created bureaucratic barriers to satellite launches.

U.S. satellite makers had used the Chinese to launch their products because the U.S. program, which had relied on the success of the space shuttle, was scuttled after the Challenger disaster. As one of Stanford’s missile experts, Lewis R. Franklin, notes: “Although the Cox report wanted to portray it otherwise, it was not a bad outcome for the People’s Republic of China to have more reliable commercial space launching rockets, as they mostly launch U.S.-built satellites. . . . By taking advantage of the PRC launch capabilities over the 1990-1998 period, one French and eight U.S. satellites were successfully launched . . . resulting in U.S. commercial dominance of the Asian communications satellite market.”

The other major concern of the Cox committee centers on the “theft” of nuclear warhead technology. Wolfgang K.H. Panofsky, the world-renowned Stanford physicist who has been active in the nuclear weapons program since the first nuclear bomb, offers a blistering dismissal of the Cox committee claim that China stole the W-88 technology. While the Cox committee refers to this as the most modern weapon in the U.S. arsenal, it is actually a design that is more than 30 years old.

Panofsky offers a detailed brief as to why the Chinese did not require advice from the U.S. or the transfer of high-powered computers to develop such a weapon. The W-88 was originally developed with “computers of much lower capacity than high-performance computers now on the open market.”

Although the Justice Department has charged former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee with improperly downloading classified files between 1993 and 1997, they do not claim that this has anything to do with China’s explosion of a weapon like the W-88, which occurred before that time on Sept. 25, 1992. Also, as Panofsky states, the Chinese weapon “is believed to be larger than the W-88” and is not even remotely a copy or a “knock-off,” to use Congressman Cox’s term, of the W-88.

Nor would the W-88 provide a strategic advantage to the Chinese nuclear force, which consists of 20 antiquated, liquid-fueled missiles hardly capable of challenging the more than 5,000 modern intercontinental weapons possessed by the U.S. They could not even begin this Herculean task of catching up without nuclear testing, which the Chinese stopped in 1995. “New designs,” based on purloined data, Panofsky wrote, “without nuclear testing are extremely difficult, if not impossible.”

The truth, as the naked eye of holiday shoppers can attest, is that if there is a Chinese threat, it’s not in that nation’s puny nuclear force but rather the cheaply produced products flooding U.S. stores exported by a country hellbent on attaining economic prosperity rather than nuclear weapon supremacy.

Robert Scheer is a Times contributing editor. The full Stanford report can be found at https://www.stanford.edu/group/CISAC/.