The Politics of Nuclear Espionage

In 1995, the CIA acquired a top-secret Chinese document that described some classified details of the small nuclear warheads that arm missiles aboard U.S. Trident II submarines. The intelligence agency obtained the document in another Asian country “close by” China, according to one U.S. official. Although the Chinese document did not include actual blueprints of the warhead, the W-88, it contained enough information to cause great alarm inside the U.S. government.

Suspicion immediately focused on the Department of Energy’s weapons laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M., and ultimately on a Taiwan-born scientist there, Wen Ho Lee, who was fired Monday at the request of Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. According to Richardson, Lee “stonewalled” the FBI during three days of questioning. He has not been charged with any crime, and no arrests have been made in the case. Nor is it entirely clear as yet that the leak to Beijing came from the lab.

The reports of Chinese nuclear espionage have touched off a political uproar. Lost amid the hubbub is the irony that the indication of China’s spying was learned as a result of U.S. spying on China.

Republicans lost no time in adding the spy case to the menu of political charges afflicting the Clinton administration. Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), for example, lumped the espionage report with earlier accusations that the administration accepted illegal campaign contributions from Chinese donors in 1996 and allowed the transfer of technology to Beijing by U.S. satellite manufacturers. Some Republican presidential hopefuls charged that the White House downplayed the spy case lest it undermine the administration’s policy of “engagement” with China. In all this, there are faint echoes of “who lost China?” the Republican cry that bedeviled the Truman administration after the communists took control of China in 1949.

In what might be called a counterattack in the politics of espionage, the Democrats carefully noted that the apparent security breach occurred in the mid-1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president. Officials also point to a Clinton presidential directive, PDD-61, issued in February 1998, and designed to reorganize security at weapons labs. Richardson announced he is ordering several thousand lab employees to take polygraph examinations over the next few years.

Currently, according to Robert S. Norris, a military analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, China has about 20 long-range missiles, the DF-5, capable of reaching the entire United States. Each carries a huge three- to four-megaton warhead. Because the United States has been able to miniaturize its warheads, Trident missiles carry five to eight warheads, each ranging in size up to 500 kilotons. Against this background, China worked to develop its own miniaturized warhead.

Piers M. Wood, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information, noted that multiple, or “MIRVed,” warheads are more effective, because they enable one missile to hit several dispersed targets or, alternatively, to do a better job of destroying a single target. Having smaller warheads, he adds, “permits you to put them on submarines, so you can get in closer and don’t need missiles with great range.”

China clearly has lagged behind the United States in nuclear and other weaponry. As one intelligence official who declined to be identified puts it, “There’s no doubt they got technology, and it helped them a lot. The U.S. did a thousand tests, some in air in the early days, some underground, to get to the small warhead. The Chinese did it in 44 tests.”

A 1997 CIA study, the official said, estimates that, “whatever China got saved them time, two to 15 years. And saved them resources.” A much larger CIA damage assessment is underway and may shed more light on what happened and to what extent Beijing benefited. The study is expected in a few weeks.

China’s acquisition of W-88 details raises the question of what else China might be trying to steal from the United States. The answer, according to Norris and other experts, is just about anything they can get. “They would want guidance systems,” Norris says, “on-board computers, very sophisticated specialized instruments, data about safety improvements, more measures to guard against accidental or unauthorized launches, communications equipment and early warning and radar systems.”

One DOE source emphasized that nuclear weapons are complex, deteriorate with age and require constant monitoring to ensure that they will work if launched. “If the Chinese have the W-88, the next thing they would be looking for are the computer programs to maintain these systems. There is a high possibility of failure unless you understand these weapons. There are computer codes that simulate what would happen to the warhead if it is fired. Age and other data go into it. It has to be constantly tested over time with computer simulations.”

Lax security at the nation’s nuclear weapons labs has been a source of controversy for years. In 1981, another Taiwan-born scientist, working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, resigned after being investigated. At the time, the FBI was seeking to determine if secrets of the neutron bomb, which China later tested, might have leaked from the lab. One DOE report found that enough plutonium was left unprotected at the lab to make a nuclear bomb. At Los Alamos, a Government Accounting Office report a few years ago disclosed that mock “intruders” in a test were able to “kill” 24 guards. Tritium gas, a key ingredient of nuclear bombs, has disappeared in shipments from the government’s facility at Oak Ridge, Tenn.

After the CIA acquired the secret Chinese intelligence document in 1995, Notra Trulock, an Energy Department intelligence official, pushed hard within the government for action. In 1996, the FBI opened a criminal investigation, focusing on Los Alamos as the likely source of the leak.

But the problem of loose security at the labs, according to intelligence officials, was systemic. For many years, both the CIA and the FBI had assigned an agent to DOE headquarters to help officials monitor security. But when John F. Lewis Jr. became assistant FBI director in charge of counterintelligence in February 1997, he declined to assign the customary FBI agent to DOE. Lewis did so because he discovered that DOE headquarters had no control over the largely autonomous nuclear-weapons labs. As chairman of the National Intelligence Policy Board, a little-known interagency group, Lewis enlisted the support of FBI Director Louis J. Freeh; the panel studied the security problem at the labs and made recommendations. Both Freeh and CIA Director George J. Tenet urged DOE to tighten security at the labs.

There will be more political infighting and congressional hearings on what happened between 1995, when the Chinese document was obtained, and last Monday, when the spy scare, fueled by published reports, burst upon the scene. Although much attention has focused on Lee, the dismissed scientist, and on Los Alamos, details about the W-88, similar to the information in the Chinese document, are contained in half a dozen classified manuals distributed widely within the U.S. government. The manuals have circulated inside DOE, the Pentagon and the armed services, raising at least the possibility that the leak may have occurred somewhere other than Los Alamos.

Whatever the truth, intelligence officials are not underestimating potential damage. Paul Redmond, former CIA assistant deputy director for counterintelligence, has suggested that the nuclear spy case is even more damaging to national security than that of Aldrich H. Ames, the CIA officer who sold secrets to the KGB, resulting in the execution of 10 Soviets working for the United States.

Redmond, who helped revive the mole hunt that eventually caught Ames, says, “The Chinese appear to have stolen enough information to emulate our most advanced warheads, which if used against us, makes it harder to defend ourselves and also would make it easier for the Chinese to project their power in South Asia, to the detriment of our allies.”*