Pssst. Want to Know a Secret? Just Ask Teller

Maybe the problem is that I don’t look Chinese. How else to explain that although there was a moment when I could have passed on the nation’s most important nuclear weapons secret, not one Beijing emissary bothered to offer me cash for the information?

Still, how I came upon that secret in 1985, when the most serious Chinese spying is said to have occurred, tells you all you need to know about the breakdown of national security at the federal nuclear weapons laboratory. That my source was Edward Teller, the man who knew more than anyone about this country’s nuclear secrets, should have set off alarms all the way to Washington.

True story: It was a weekday in April 1985 about 1 p.m. when I ran into Teller, the father of the H-bomb, at the San Jose airport. We were both being jostled by Silicon Valley executives preoccupied with secret agendas of their own when I pulled out my microcassette tape recorder for an impromptu interview, and Teller, to my amazement, consented.

This was, after all, not a secure zone--somewhere between Hertz and baggage claim, as a I recall--but it was obvious that Teller, founder and leader emeritus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, was eager to talk.

Indeed, he was brimming with good news. It concerned the results of the “Cottage” test, the underground explosion of a larger-than-20-kiloton nuclear bomb just two weeks earlier at the Nevada test site. That the test involved the nuclear-pumped X-ray laser, let alone that Teller was implying it was successful, should have been, like the weapon itself, the most closely guarded of secrets.

Not something to be discussing with the likes of me, whose security clearance was so low I once had trouble ordering a hamburger in the cafeteria section at Livermore that was open to the public, relegating me to the vending machine area on the unsecured side of the barbed-wire-topped fence surrounding the lab. I had written quite critically about the Strategic Defense Initiative based on the X-ray laser, which Teller had convinced Ronald Reagan would work. Now Teller wanted me to know that he had been proved right.

The whole loony scheme was centered on Teller’s fervent hope that the power of his hydrogen bomb exploded in space could be harnessed to direct X-ray lasers at incoming enemy intercontinental ballistic missiles. Turns out Teller was wrong, and that the “secret” he imparted to me was based on false test results.

That was $110 billion ago, and Congress is still freely signing checks to put Teller’s demons to rest. It’s never been easy being father of the H-bomb, or rather tens of thousands of H-bombs, because while producing the weapon to end all weapons may have been a fine idea, when the brood got too big, there’s no telling where those errant children would turn up.

The problem with nuclear weapons is that they are no good at all if the other fellow also has one. You can have thousands of the most wonderfully turned out warheads, but if some rogue snares one, even an old-fashioned crummy one, it comes back to haunt you. Just take the Chinese, who are scaring Congress now. Their nuclear arsenal is so puny that Teller must want to disown it. If they were in any way influenced by secrets from Teller’s lab, the place should be shut down, not for leaking valuable secrets but for producing such a lousy result.

The Chinese have fewer than two dozen 1970s vintage warheads separated from an antiquated liquid-fueled missile delivery system that requires 24 hours of frenetic activity, easily spotted by our satellites, to threaten a launch. We can start zapping them in 12 minutes with the most ultra-modern warheads carried on reliable solid-fueled missiles backed by an arsenal of 6,000 warheads on invulnerable subs and planes.

You get the point. The Chinese are not about to launch a nuclear weapon at us, because we have a 50-year head start on something called MAD, “mutual assured destruction.” Beijing knows, even if the anti-China alarmists in Congress and the New York Times don’t, that the mere threat of using nuclear force invites total destruction.

On the other hand, if the Chinese could build nuclear pumped X-ray laser bombs and deploy them on satellites in space without our noticing, they could destroy us and hope to survive. Teller is still alive, the plans for a nuclear X-ray laser are stored somewhere at Livermore, and I’m waiting for Beijing to call.