Scheer on Chinese Espionage

Robert Scheer (Column Left, Dec. 21) repeats the deeply flawed view of the Center for International Security and Cooperation that the People’s Republic of China’s new, smaller nuclear warheads are in no way related to the W-88 nuclear warhead. But in September 1999 the U.S. intelligence community and our country’s current nuclear weapons designers publicly confirmed that the PRC’s new mobile missiles will have “smaller warheads--in part influenced by U.S. technology gained through espionage.”

Scheer and CISAC also ignore: the April 1999 independent damage assessment by the intelligence community and our country’s current nuclear weapons designers, which reported that “China obtained by espionage classified U.S. nuclear weapons information that probably accelerated its program to develop future nuclear weapons”; Peter Lee’s guilty plea to providing the PRC with nuclear fusion technology; the PRC admission this year that it has the neutron bomb; the successful 1999 test of a new PRC long-range road-mobile missile; and the 1999 discovery that highly classified nuclear weapons design information had been taken from the classified computer system at Los Alamos.

Scheer also shares CISAC’s bizarre view that “it was not a bad outcome” for the PRC to develop more reliable missiles and rockets from U.S. technology. The transfer of such technology was and is illegal, because improving the PRC’s rocket and missile programs is not in the national security interest of the U.S.

REP. CHRISTOPHER COX

R-Newport Beach

REP. NORM DICKS

D-Wash.