NATIONAL SECURITY - Deceptive Engagement

By John Maggs, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Saturday, May 29, 1999

	      Samuel R. ''Sandy'' Berger, President Clinton's national 
security adviser, gave a speech on January 12 about the worldwide 
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Berger was among 
friends that day. His audience was, in essence, the security 
policy establishment. The venue was the annual conference of the 
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the best-known and 
most respected American think tank in its area. 
	     With the news seeping out daily about China's theft of 
U.S. nuclear secrets, Berger's speech, which promised a 
comprehensive rundown of major proliferation issues, somehow 
managed to omit any reference to China. But it's unlikely that 
many in Berger's audience regarded this as an oversight. During 
the two-day Carnegie conference, with 16 sessions and 71 
distinguished speakers, not a single speech included a direct 
reference to the accumulating evidence of China's theft of U.S. 
secrets about nuclear bombs and missiles and its diversion of 
supercomputers and other technologies from peaceful uses to 
nuclear weapons development. 
	     Instead, and quite to the contrary, the conference 
featured a luncheon address by China's chief arms control 
official, Sha Zukang. Sha, who was warmly received, talked about 
the threats posed by other countries, tweaked the United States 
for failing to ratify a ban on nuclear testing, and called for 
other nations to join China in its peaceful ways and in its 
efforts to ban all nuclear weapons. Even as U.S. newspapers were 
daily divulging China's large espionage effort aimed at 
developing and deploying a mobile ''second strike'' nuclear 
force--one that could fight on, after suffering a first strike-- 
Sha repeated China's long-standing plea that NATO adopt a policy 
of never firing a first strike against any adversary. 
	     The mind-set exhibited at the Carnegie conference may 
help explain why there is even a need for a Cox Report. The 
foreign policy experts, rightly or wrongly, do not, by and large, 
view China as a potential threat to the United States, nor have 
they for the past two decades. 
	     The Cox Report shows that the American government has 
consistently ignored warnings about Chinese espionage over 20 
years. The report does not substantiate charges that President 
Clinton and his aides covered up problems, either for corrupt 
reasons or to advance a policy of closer ties with Beijing. (Cox 
investigators reportedly weighed, and then rejected, allegations 
that Chinese campaign contributions influenced White House 
handling of nuclear spying charges.) On the other hand, the sheer 
breadth of the security lapses, misguided policy shifts, and 
negligence by U.S. agencies just since 1992 strains the logic of 
the official explanation: that it was all the result of many 
separate and coincidental instances of bureaucratic incompetence. 
	     If Berger, in his speech in January, managed to avoid the 
untidy details of what is now public knowledge in the Cox Report, 
he did provide a clue about how such a large and consistent 
policy failure might come about. The centerpiece of U.S. arms 
control efforts, said Berger, was ratification and enlargement of 
the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), a pact he 
called (quoting Clinton) ''the longest-sought, hardest-fought 
prize in the history of arms control.'' Berger called for the 
Senate to ratify the treaty this year, knowing full well that 
this will be its last chance for approval during the Clinton 
presidency, before the 2000 campaign stalls major initiatives. 
	     Ratifying and preserving the test ban has become the 
primary goal. This has blinded many to the possibility, as the 
Cox Report suggests, that the CTBT may not be enough to deter 
China from nuclear advances. 
	     First proposed by President Eisenhower, the CTBT was 
conceived as a way to block the deployment and advancement of 
nuclear weapons around the world. If countries are enjoined from 
testing weapons, the reasoning goes, then they cannot develop 
them. This 1950s-era doctrine is largely unquestioned today by 
the foreign policy establishment: No country has ever deployed a 
nuclear explosive without testing it first. Berger repeated this 
creed during his Carnegie speech: ''The treaty will constrain the 
development of more-advanced nuclear weapons.'' 
	     The Cox Report shows that this statement is simply not 
true. In 1996, China signed the CTBT and thereby agreed to cease 
testing. But China is continuing to develop advanced nuclear 
warheads, equipped with all of the essential technology in the 
U.S. arsenal. China is doing this the same way as the United 
States and Russia and other nuclear powers are doing it: through 
sophisticated computer modeling made possible by high-speed 
computers, which China has purchased as the United States and the 
other exporters have dismantled their Cold War controls on such 
machines. More important, however, China may be benefiting from 
access to stolen U.S. ''legacy codes,'' the raw computer data on 
the testing of U.S. nuclear weapon designs going back decades. 
These codes, allegedly stolen from Los Alamos National Laboratory 
sometime in the 1990s, could help China fill in the gaps in any 
of its design information. 
	     The establishment view on the implications of the 
possible loss of the legacy codes is summed up in the response of 
one well-known security expert to news of this particular breach. 
Assuming that China has acquired and used the legacy codes (which 
is suggested but not demonstrated conclusively in the Cox 
Report), ''the crucial question is what Chinese intentions are,'' 
said Jonathan D. Pollack, senior adviser at RAND, a think tank in 
Santa Monica, Calif. ''If you believe, like most analysts, that 
the Chinese do not intend to field a nuclear force to threaten 
the United States or U.S. allies in (Asia), then you look at 
things very differently. 
	     ''We have succeeded in getting the Chinese to sign the 
CTBT,'' Pollack continued. ''Is it bad or is it good that they 
are developing the means (that is, computer simulations) to 
successfully maintain their nuclear capabilities without testing? 
Is it bad that China may have gotten the means to advance those 
(computer simulations) from us? Of course, it is bad if we let 
(the codes) get away. But that doesn't mean it is bad they have 
them,'' said Pollack. 
	     Pollack's view was echoed last week by Charles Ferguson, 
a senior research analyst at the Federation of American 
Scientists who was working at Los Alamos in the 1980s when much 
of the Chinese espionage took place. Assuming that China did 
indeed acquire U.S. warhead designs and the legacy codes to help 
test them, Ferguson said, ''even then, they would need to conduct 
nuclear tests to verify what they actually have.'' 
	     But the Pollack-Ferguson view rests on an assumption that 
China cannot advance its nuclear program without actual testing-- 
an assumption that the Cox Report challenges. Through 
supercomputers, through the theft of test data, through the 
acquisition of other technology used to further nuclear research 
without a full-fledged test explosion, the report warns, China is 
developing, and preparing to deploy, new weapons based on U.S. 
designs. 
	     The single-minded reliance on a test ban as the arms 
control panacea also appears to be little questioned in U.S. 
efforts to persuade Russia to join the CTBT. Few noticed the 
congressional testimony a year ago of a career Defense Department 
official who raised questions about the inducements the United 
States may have offered Russia to sign the treaty. Peter Leitner, 
senior strategic trade adviser at Defense, pointedly told the 
Joint Economic Committee on April 28, 1998, that he was 
testifying ''as a private citizen and not as an employee of the 
Department of Defense.'' Leitner said that some Russian officials 
have accused the Clinton Administration of reneging on a promise 
to facilitate the transfer of supercomputer technology to Russia 
to help it catch up with the U.S. advantage in computer 
simulation. ''If, as a price for Russia's signature, the Clinton 
Administration was willing to provide the means to circumvent 
both the spirit and explicit goals (of the CTBT), then the treaty 
should be regarded as little more than a sham,'' Leitner 
testified. 
	     As long as a treaty stands in the way of any country's 
deployment of new nuclear weapons, the ruling logic goes, all 
evidence of research and development, including the possible 
theft of U.S. designs, is of only hypothetical significance. 
Indeed, say the adherents of this logic, the theft of U.S. test 
data and misuse of supercomputers can actually help 
nonproliferation efforts, by discouraging China from breaking the 
test ban. 
	     It is understandable, at least in emotional terms, that 
people should be reluctant to abandon the optimistic view of 
China's intentions, and of the use to which China may put stolen 
American nuclear secrets. The alternative is to face the 
possibility that the United States is not much safer than it was 
during the Cold War, with that long conflict's crushing expenses, 
its terror, and its distortion of domestic priorities and 
politics. The lengthy history of largely unrestricted exchanges 
with Chinese scientists at U.S. nuclear labs demonstrates our 
sense of security. To end or sharply limit such visits, a move 
strongly resisted even by most Republican critics of the 
Administration, would be to return to the Cold War way of life. 
Likewise, the loosening of export controls is a signal that, in 
the post-Soviet world, the United States enjoys the luxury of 
worrying more about boosting exports than about retarding 
military advances abroad. To reverse that would be to suggest 
that economic growth may have to be sacrificed, again, for the 
nation's defense. Satellite joint ventures in China are a welcome 
symbol of how capitalism and technology are banishing suspicion 
and bridging differences with the United States. To admit that 
China is plundering these ventures for military know-how would 
be, well, depressing. 
	     Sandy Berger, President Clinton, and a host of foreign 
policy experts, in the days since the Cox Report was released, 
have reconfirmed their worldview, sincerely held, that even if 
China steals our nuclear secrets and pursues some interests 
inimical to the United States, America is still better off with 
''constructive engagement.'' If China can be brought into the 
fold of Western-oriented capitalist economies, the thinking goes, 
then eventually and inexorably, China will move closer to 
democracy. Globalists (Republican and American corporate leaders 
among them) further argue that it is impossible to restrict most 
technology nowadays, and trying to restrict it deprives America 
of business and possibly of a chance to influence how that 
technology is used. These are the dominant views shaping the 
American approach to China, and they may prove to be sound ones. 
But they may also have played a role in concealing, or playing 
down, the findings revealed in the Cox Report.