Spy Scandal Is Much Ado About Nothing

The yellow horde is coming, once again. Everywhere, there are alarms being raised about the Chinese, who are said to be stealing not only our political innocence through campaign contributions but our rocket technology and nuclear secrets as well. As Henry Kissinger observed, “You cannot open a newspaper without reading an attack on China. It’s a nostalgia for confrontation.”

The charges are absurdly overblown. The Chinese do nothing toward us that we do not do to them. For the past century, we have meddled in Chinese affairs as if the Middle Kingdom were nothing more than a playground for our great power fantasies. How many Chinese politicians have we bought, how many plots hatched and secrets stolen while we cynically played one China card after another? Our power for mischief-making has been overwhelming, including threatening China with nuclear annihilation during the Korean War, but always we insist on playing the role of the victim.

Yes the Chinese spy on us; so do the post-Soviet Russians, the Israelis and the French. “We should be adult enough to understand that major countries are going to be spying on us,” Kissinger notes with the confidence of one who has ordered up a spy mission or two. “I’m assuming that we are spying on China.”

The current China spy hysteria is based on a hyping of threats that are woefully irrational. Take the most ominous sounding one, the matter of stealing nuclear weapons design data by a native of Taiwan working at the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab. First, the crime in question was committed in the ‘80s, when Ronald Reagan was president, and there is no indication that the fellow involved passed on any secrets after that time. Nor has Wen Ho Lee, an apparently loyal naturalized citizen with high security clearances approved by five administrations, been charged with any crime; the Los Angeles Times reports FBI sources saying they have no case. Yet the hoary charge raised in press accounts sounds so threatening--that the Chinese learned how to build an equivalent of the W-88 nuclear warhead that we mount atop the Trident submarine’s D-5 missile.

No one in the media or Congress has stopped to ask just what the Chinese would or could do with such a weapon. After all, the Trident sub, of which the Chinese have none, and its nuclear-tipped warheads were developed as part of a nuclear war-fighting strategy against the old Soviet Union, ensuring a retaliatory nuclear capability after the Soviets had launched an all-out nuclear first strike. Always a nutty scenario, since neither we nor they could have survived such an attack, but this policy of mutual assured destruction, with the all too accurate acronym of MAD, at least was granted a shred of plausibility by the fact that the Soviets matched our nuclear weapons capacity.

But China is a joke as a nuclear enemy. China is a half-century behind the U.S. in the deployment of an intercontinental nuclear weapons arsenal, possessing a mere 20 unreliable, liquid-fueled, land-based, nuclear-tipped missiles to wave at our 10,000 super modern weapons deployed on land, air and sea. It is demagogic blathering to ascribe any sort of nuclear war fighting credibility to the Chinese now or in the foreseeable future.

The current nuclear bomb threat has nothing to do with advanced weapons design or rocketry but rather with the acquisition of weapons materials sufficient to make a crude bomb to be transported in a suitcase by terrorists. Such material and the engineering know-how to assemble it are escaping the old Soviet Union like water through a sieve.

Nor does one need a rocket to transport such a weapon, given that truckloads of marijuana and cocaine easily evade our border security daily. Why in the world are we focusing on the easily monitored and, relative to us, anemic weapons program of the Chinese government while ignoring the far more potent threat posed by well-financed fanatics?

Shame on the media, led by the New York Times, and Republican politicians who play the frayed China card in order to boost circulation and win elections. In the process they undermine a sensible policy of engagement pioneered by President Richard Nixon some 30 years ago.

Nixon was right. In ensuing decades, China has moved from a posture of embittered military isolation to take its place as one of the major producers of peaceful goods desperately needed to improve the well-being of its massive population. China, now a warrior in the world of trade, is menacing not in the manufacture of unuseable nuclear weapons but in the far more profitable piracy of video tapes.

Robert Scheer is a Times contributing editor. He can be reached by e-mail: rscheer@robertscheer.com.