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May 30, 1999|
For more than a half decade, the Clinton administration was shoveling atomic secrets out the door as fast as it could, literally by the ton. Millions of previously classified ideas and documents relating to nuclear arms were released to all comers, including China's bomb makers. |
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Now that a congressional committee has released its three-volume, 872-page techno-thriller on the theft of atomic secrets by Chinese spies, much of Washington is agog. But the uproar overlooks an arresting fact. For more than a half decade, the Clinton administration was shoveling atomic secrets out the door as fast as it could, literally by the ton. Millions of previously classified ideas and documents relating to nuclear arms were released to all comers, including China's bomb makers.
The tale of that giveaway and what it helped accomplish, its architects say, is perhaps ultimately more important than the congressional nail-biter, even though the tale is subtle and the accomplishments are not what you might expect from disclosures on how to make bombs.
Back in 1993, when the terrors of the Cold War were still fresh, the administration decided that the best way to keep the nuclear arms race from heating up again was to get the world's nations to sign a test-ban treaty. The idea was that even if a country knew how to make a bomb, it couldn't perfect new ones and build up advanced forces without physically testing new designs. So development of new weapons would be frozen, ending the vicious spiral of nuclear move and countermove.
Releasing many of America's nuclear secrets was seen as an essential part of this strategy, since it would signal a new global order in which nuclear know-how was suddenly and irreparably devalued and real security would lie in the collective knowledge that nobody was able to push weaponry beyond the known boundaries.
What had been gold would become dross, and the atom would lose power and prestige. Driven by such logic, the administration made public masses of generalities about nuclear arms, even as specific weapon designs were kept secret.
Now, however, critics charge that the gamble failed -- that the explosion last year of nuclear devices by India and Pakistan and the reports that China has stolen America's top designs for nuclear arms have demonstrated that the test ban is fatally flawed. The depth and breadth of China's spying, they add, make the world's largest state seem quite hungry for a thoroughly modernized nuclear force, test-ban treaty or no.
In response to the China scandal, the Clinton administration has stopped all declassifications, beefed up security at the national weapons laboratories and adopted a conciliatory tone. Last week. as the House select committee released its report, President Clinton called protecting atom secrets "a solemn obligation."
But in private, administration officials say the openness was smart after all, its advantages even now outweighing its risks. They insist that its crowning jewel, the test ban, while admittedly shaky, still has lessened the risk of new atomic advances, making it a potent force for international good.
"We pulled off an impossible feat," said Hazel O'Leary, keeper of the nation's atom secrets as secretary of energy from 1993 to 1997. "To say all our efforts were negative is not to understand the benefits, not to see what we did in terms of building international trust."
Critics disagree vehemently. But they say the giveaway nonetheless illuminates the spy scandal and helps explain the administration's slow response when confronted with evidence of spying.
"It would be nothing short of miraculous if the openness has not seriously damaged U.S. interests," said Frank Gaffney Jr., a Pentagon official during the Reagan administration who now directs the Center for Security Policy, a research group in Washington.
Since 1993, officials say, the Energy Department's "openness initiative" has released at least 178 categories of atom secrets. By contrast, the 1980s saw two such actions. The unveilings have included no details of specific weapons, like the W-88, a compact design Chinese spies are suspected of having stolen from the weapons lab at Los Alamos, N.M. But they include a slew of general secrets.
Its overview of the disclosures, "Restricted Data Declassification Decisions," dated January 1999 and more than 140 pages long, lists such things as how atom bombs can be boosted in power, key steps in making hydrogen bombs, the minimum amount (8.8 pounds) of plutonium or uranium fuel needed for an atom bomb and the maximum time it takes an exploding atomic bomb to ignite an H-bomb's hydrogen fuel (100 millionths of a second).
No grade-B physicist from any university could figure this stuff. It took decades of experience gained at a cost of more than $400 billion.
The release of the secrets started as a high-stakes bet that openness would lessen, not increase, the world's vulnerability to nuclear arms and war. John Holum, who heads arms control at the State Department, told Congress last year that the test ban "essentially eliminates" the possibility of a renewed international race to develop new kinds of nuclear arms.
And the devaluing of nuclear secrets, highlighted by the rush of atomic declassifications, was seen as a prerequisite to the ban's achievement. The symbolism alone was potent, officials say. Openness let them advertise a dramatic new state of affairs where hidden actions were to be kept to a minimum, replacing decades of secrecy and paranoia.
"The United States must stand as leader," O'Leary told a packed news conference in December 1993 upon starting the process. "We are declassifying the largest amount of information in the history of the department."
Critics, however, say the former secrets are extremely valuable to foreign powers intent on making nuclear headway. Gaffney, the former Reagan official, disparaged the giveaway as "dangling goodies in front of people to get them to sign up into our arms-control agenda."
Thomas B. Cochran, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, a private group that has criticized the openness, said the declassifications had swept away so many secrets that the combination had laid bare the central mysteries.
"In terms of the phenomenology of nuclear weapons," Cochran said, "the cat is out of the bag."
Even before the China scandal broke, experts outside the administration faulted the openness as promoting the bomb's spread. Last year, a bipartisan commission of nine military specialists led by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the "extensive declassification" of secrets had inadvertently aided the global spread of deadly weapons.
The ultimate brake on nuclear advances was to be the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which Clinton began to push for as soon as he took office in 1993, hailing it as the hardest-fought, longest-sought prize in the history of arms control.
Like software, nuclear weapons are extraordinarily complex. New designs must be tested repeatedly to get out the bugs and avoid failures in war. Without explosive tests, experts say, reliable designs of advanced arms are basically unattainable.
In September 1996, Clinton traveled to the United Nations to sign the newly negotiated accord on behalf of the United States, followed by 151 other countries, including China. "It was my proudest moment," O'Leary, the former energy secretary, said of watching the president.
Today, key nations, including the United States, have yet to ratify the accord. So it is in legal limbo.
In terms of the China espionage scandal, experts say, the ban is both good and bad, making the blows softer in the short run and perhaps harder in the long. Since the test ban helps smother nuclear developments, any recent Chinese spying probably has had little impact on arms production.
For instance, secrets of the neutron bomb believed to have been stolen around 1995 would have been little or no aid to China's test program, which apparently ended in July 1996. The reason, experts say, is that tests are enormous affairs of science and industry that typically take two or three years to prepare.
Critics charge that the administration's expectation that China could do little with stolen information made it blase about disclosures of espionage and slowed its response to lax security. Selling China and other states on the test ban, said Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, had a higher administration priority than plugging leaks.
Administration officials deny any foot-dragging. But they note that much of the thievery cited in the congressional report occurred long before the test-ban treaty was signed and even before Clinton took office; this, they say, absolves the administration of some blame. But it gave the Chinese more time to have used underground blasts to help turn stolen ideas into deadly arms.
This opportunity for China applies especially to the most worrisome part of the alleged espionage, the theft in the 1980s of design secrets for America's most advanced warhead, the W-88. The damage, officials concede, is probably already done, as China apparently tested the warhead right before it signed the test-ban treaty.
Today, experts worry about the extent to which American secrets, lost by accident or design, can be joined with increasingly fast computers to replace testing, so nuclear strides leave no telltale rumbles.
During the Cold War, American weapon designers used very fast computers to calculate how bombs explode, producing simulations realistic enough to check the feasibility of new designs before taking the costly step of testing them in blasts. Today computers are only getting cheaper, faster and better.
The House select committee on Chinese espionage, chaired by Christopher Cox, R-Calif., sidestepped the issue of China's need for testing, arguing that computers would suffice for advances. The test ban, it said in its report, increased China's eagerness for computers to simulate nuclear blasts.
Ray E. Kidder, a senior physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, one of the nation's nuclear-weapons labs, said China could indeed use supercomputers in lieu of testing to perfect and field a new weapon. "But it would have to be a conservative design," Kidder said in an interview.
Total reliance on computers, he added, would virtually rule out the development of advanced designs, where tiny changes can spell the difference between success and failure.
A long-term worry, experts say, is whether the test ban is now masking major Chinese strides, making them less conspicuous and, over time, perhaps more dangerous.
Paul Bracken, a military expert at Yale, said the ultimate blow would be a sudden move by China to break out of the test ban with a barrage of violent blasts, intent on perfecting a new round of nuclear arms and tipping the world's geopolitical balance.
The loss of American secrets, he said, "increases the chance for technological surprise."
But officials say such fears are unjustified. If the test ban holds, they say, and if the openness gamble turns out to have paid off because fewer nations are seeking to join a nuclear club whose arsenals are frozen, then the Clinton administration will be remembered as having had clear vision and courage after all.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
WASHINGTON -- As the Pakistani nuclear proliferation story widens, U.S. intelligence officials say top atomic scientists from that country met with Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar in Afghanistan. 
he Republicans' latest talking point is that the breach of national security enabled by clinton must be simple incompetence, that the concept that anyone in government would commit treason is too outrageous even to contemplate.
