White House Sees Peril in Anti-China Steps

A senior White House official warned Wednesday that attempts to punish China for nuclear espionage could backfire, causing Beijing to update its antiquated atomic arsenal, a step that would increase the danger faced by the United States and its Asian allies.

“If we treat them like a threat, they may become one,” said Gary Samore, President Clinton’s point man for the controversy touched off by reports that a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico leaked nuclear secrets to China in the mid-1980s.

Samore’s comments to a seminar organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace were crafted to launch an administration counterattack on Republican critics who have accused Clinton of covering up Chinese espionage to avoid damaging U.S. commercial relations with the world’s most populous nation. Anti-China measures could damage the U.S. security interests that GOP critics insist they are trying to protect, he asserted.

In a related development, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson told a closed-door hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee that he has ordered new security measures for the nation’s nuclear weapon laboratories.

The new steps include stricter controls on secret documents, tighter safeguards on computer messages and a reexamination of all of the department’s counterintelligence files “to identify cases that may need further review and possible investigation,” department officials said.

Richardson also said that he has asked former CIA Director John M. Deutsch to review the weapon laboratories’ foreign visitor program to ensure that it “meets the highest standards of security.”

Despite what Samore conceded was a “compromise of sensitive technology” 15 years ago, China has not updated its nuclear force, which includes only about 20 missiles capable of reaching the United States and 300 or so more that are within range of Japan, India and Russia. By contrast, the U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals each include several thousand warheads capable of reaching any target on the globe.

So far, China has not deployed the small warhead technology that it is suspected of stealing from Los Alamos, apparently because the leadership in Beijing has determined that a more potent nuclear force is not worth the high cost, Samore said. But, he added, if Chinese leaders perceive that Washington is becoming hostile, they could order a nuclear build-up.

Earlier this month, Richardson fired Wen Ho Lee, a University of California contract employee at Los Alamos. Richardson said the scientist was suspected of leaking sensitive information to China. U.S. officials said Lee had been kept on the payroll for months after he came under suspicion to avoid tipping him off. He has not been arrested.