Our Secrets Are of No Use to Them

Let’s, as those Apple computer ads implore, think different. There are no nuclear weapons secrets or, indeed, nuclear “weapons” for China to have stolen.

Nuclear bombs are not actually weapons because, in today’s world, they cannot be employed to win battles but can serve only as instruments of mass terror. They are icons of power, admired perhaps as the phallic tips of sleek missiles, but unusable as weapons of war.

We cannot nuke Yugoslavia without killing those we seek to save. Nor will the Chinese ever be able to launch a first strike against the U.S. without being destroyed themselves by a retaliatory attack that would remove every vestige of their society from the face of the Earth.

There are, in short, no plausible nuclear war fighting scenarios, even for the U.S. or Russia, which each possess upward of 10,000 such bombs and the most sophisticated means of delivering them.

But if nuclear weapons are only useful in the hands of suicidal terrorists, and if that were assumed, despite all evidence to the contrary, to describe the intent of the Chinese leadership, then there are no secrets they need to obtain. As an instrument of terror, the “sophistication” and “miniaturization” of the W-88, the possibly pilfered design cited as the basis for lurid headlines in even the most respectable newspapers, is irrelevant. A crude nuclear device placed in a suitcase and smuggled across the Mexican border will do much better because its point of national origin will likely go undetected.

You won’t find in all of the hyperventilated verbiage in Congress and the media about the possible Chinese theft of our nuclear weapons secrets or missile technology a single explanation of just what it is the Chinese were supposed to have done with this knowledge.

The W-88 was developed by the U.S. as a second-strike weapon for our Trident submarines to counter a possible Soviet first strike. What is its value to the Chinese, who have only one submarine, which leaks so badly that they are afraid to let it leave its home port? The Chinese have not even bothered to properly repair that lone sub in the 15 years since they are said to have stolen codes for the W-88. We, on the other hand, have up to 192 W-88 warheads on every one of our 18 fully operational submarines. The payload of one of those subs could end civilization.

The China threat exists only in the minds of politicians who are playing fast with national security concerns and the New York Times, which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for publicizing their most stark warnings. Rarely do they take the counsel of those who have dealt seriously with the national security question.

For example, Gen. Lee Butler, who was commander of the Strategic Air Command and in charge of nuclear threat assessment for the Joint Chiefs during the Bush administration, whom I found easy enough to interview:

“China has a pretty primitive nuclear weapons capability. They have one submarine that’s not safe enough to operate, they don’t really have any long-range aviation worthy of the name, and they have a handful of liquid-fueled missiles which could conceivably strike the United States, but they take 24 hours to activate and are not highly precise. They have a very small force that they are trying to upgrade, probably as much from a concern for safety and security as anything else, but in some respects they are responding to a United States that continues to profess that nuclear weapons are the heart of our national security.”

That continued U.S. reliance on nuclear weapons is the real issue. The spy hysteria has distracted us from the all-important goal of banning nuclear weapons as plausible instruments of war. It feeds the delusion that nuclear weapons are indeed usable as rational instruments of policy at a time when we condemn India and Pakistan for developing nuclear arsenals of their own. Yet the U.S. Congress, which is conducting a dozen investigations of Chinese spying, has blocked every serious initiative for nuclear arms control.

While we play politicians’ games over the Chinese spy caper, the economic situation inside Russia disintegrates, ultra-nationalist forces are on the rise, and even the alarming Y2K problem in the deteriorating command-and-control system of Russian nuclear forces is now going unattended.

The “secrets” that the Chinese are said to have stolen could easily have been purchased by them from disaffected Russian scientists who have been developing sophisticated nuclear weapons for four decades. But they would have been wasting their money.