Storm Clouds Gathering
The unnecessary rush toward confrontation must be reversed by both China and the United States.

By Henry Kissinger, Tuesday, September 7, 1999; Page A19
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-09/07/014l-090799-idx.html

When, within a few days, Bill Clinton meets with his Chinese counterpart, Jiang Zemin, at an international forum in New Zealand, it will be amid the greatest strain in Sino-American relations since diplomatic contact was reestablished in 1971.

Many in Washington perceive Beijing's reaction to the American attack on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade as deliberate fostering of anti-American sentiments, and the Chinese military buildup and human rights practices as challenges to basic American interests and values. The view from Beijing is that the bombing of its Belgrade embassy was deliberate and that denial of World Trade Organization membership, human-rights accusations and charges of espionage are symptoms of America's unwillingness to allow China to play a role on the world stage.

In this atmosphere, Taiwan's sudden and unilateral challenge to the existing political understandings in the Taiwan Strait -- at a time when a senior Beijing representative was preparing to visit Taipei for the first time -- is interpreted in Beijing as the culmination of an American plot to divide China. Chinese warnings of a possible military response have taken on a severity reminiscent of the prelude to the Chinese intervention in the Korean War in 1950. In turn, many in Washington consider these Chinese expressions of concern as pretexts for executing long-held designs. Amid such mutual incomprehension, conflict, even military conflict, could suddenly erupt.

Three high-level visits -- of Jiang to Washington, of Clinton to China and of Prime Minister Zhu Rongji to Washington -- have accomplished little more than to assuage these trends. In each, atmospherics took precedence over substance, and in the Zhu visit American domestic politics blocked the conclusion of the WTO agreement that Zhu had been given reason to expect.

Some are fatalistic about this drift toward confrontation. Others compare the emergence of China to the rise of Germany before the First World War, the implication being that since a showdown is foreordained, better now, when China is still relatively weak. They forget that, in the eyes of history, the sin of the statesmen of that period was their failure to arrest the catastrophe that nearly destroyed European civilization.

A Sino-American conflict would be similarly avoidable and damaging to both sides. Both sides need a respite from the febrile mood of the moment. The atmosphere for this is not favorable in either country. Anti-American nationalism seems to be gaining momentum in Beijing. In America, a growing consensus in which China replaces the Soviet Union as our main enemy stultifies a necessary debate. Doubters of the dominant trend are accused of appeasement or of acting for their own economic benefit -- a charge to which I have been subjected because I am chairman of an international consulting company. Anybody believing this charge should stop reading here.

No single component of American foreign policy can be an end in itself. We have security, political and economic interests and commitments in Asia that we will not sacrifice to our interest in constructive relations with China, however important we judge these to be. But the prospects of world peace, stability and progress will be hazarded if the current unnecessary rush toward confrontation is not reversed by both sides.

The case against China boils down to three propositions:

That China, like the Soviet Union, is ideologically bent on regional, if not world, domination. Coexistence being impossible, we must maintain pressures on this last major totalitarian state until it transforms itself into a peaceful and cooperative democratic society.

That China's military buildup coupled with the growth of its economy inevitably challenges the U.S. position in Asia and should be stifled before it takes on unmanageable proportions.

That a military showdown over Taiwan is sufficiently probable that we must take all measures in defense of Taiwan, even if these measures make such a conflict inevitable.

But is China really comparable to the Soviet threat to the United States? Soviet ideology claimed universal applicability, and Soviet leaders as late as the '70s proclaimed the goal of the worldwide triumph of communism. Moscow avowed its determination to maintain communist parties in power, by force if necessary, intervening in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and threatening to do so in Poland and even in China. The Chinese communist leadership makes no such claims; it exploits no international network of communist parties or radical forces to undermine Western positions. While many repressive aspects of a one-party state continue, there has been a vast improvement since Mao and the Cultural Revolution.

The debate over whether human rights should play a role in the conduct of our foreign policy has been won by the activists. But when the stakes are so high, these concerns need to be brought into some relationship with other objectives of American foreign policy. And the experiences of Haiti, Somalia and today in Kosovo should inspire some caution about how easy it is to impose our values.

Even greater perspective is needed with respect to Chinese military power. The Soviet Union possessed some 2,500 strategic delivery vehicles, most with multiple warheads and many with high accuracy. An attack on the United States was technically feasible and strategically not inconceivable. The Chinese strategic force of some 25 liquid-fueled missiles with single warheads requiring hours to get ready is not an instrument for offensive operations. And when, in perhaps 10 years, the Chinese acquire multiple warheads for a larger number of missiles, an American missile defense -- which I have always favored -- should substantially preserve the strategic balance.

As for Chinese ground forces, they are at a level of the technology of the 1960s, capable of defending the home country but not suitable for offensive operations against a major opponent -- including Taiwan. And around its periphery, China must cope with a strategic situation far more problematic than was the Soviet Union's in Europe. The Soviet Union threatened weak neighbors unable, either alone or in combination, to resist Soviet ground forces. But, from India to Japan to Russia, China faces militarily significant neighbors.

As for the Chinese economy, though China has grown at the average rate of 10 percent a year for much of the past 20 years, no country has ever maintained such a rate indefinitely. Nor is China doing so today. Its current growth of about 6 percent barely keeps pace with the growth of the Chinese labor force, leaving little room for a major increase in the percentage of the gross domestic product devoted to defense spending without risking a shipwreck like the Soviet Union's.

To be sure, as China develops what it calls its "comprehensive national strength," its military power will grow. But for the foreseeable future, the United States possesses diplomatic, economic and military advantages to enable us to shape the future confidently. Should China threaten the regional balance of power or our vital interests, we are bound to resist. But on proliferation, Asian economic progress and on stabilizing potential trouble spots such as South Asia and Korea, there are enough points of congruence to render a permanent geopolitical dialogue between China and the United States indispensable. For us to imagine that we can prevent China's natural growth and emergence as a major power is to commit us to an unprecedentedly domineering role. Over time, this would drain our physical and psychological resources, be opposed by the rest of the world and, in the end, by the American people.

Taiwan is the most explosive issue. Taiwan was part of China until 1895, when Japan annexed it, its first step toward conquest on the mainland. Starting with World War II, American presidents have affirmed Taiwan to be a part of China in one form or another: Franklin Roosevelt in 1943; Harry Truman in 1945; Richard Nixon in 1972; Jimmy Carter in 1979; and Ronald Reagan in 1982. The Reagan communique moreover stated that the United States had no intention of "pursuing a policy of two Chinas, or one China, on Taiwan" -- a formula repeated 16 years later by Clinton in Shanghai. Since 1971, each president has also firmly stated America's abiding concern for a peaceful resolution of the issue -- a euphemism for opposition to the use of force -- as did the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which adopted the principle as American law.

Within this framework, Taiwan has prospered, become democratic and increasingly participated in international forums that did not require formal state-to-state relations. At the same time, the United States, like the vast majority of the world's governments, was recognizing Beijing as the legitimate government of all of China. But, unlike most other countries, we were supplying the vast majority of the weapons for what was being treated officially as part of another country. For 30 years, China, while insisting on ultimate unification, nevertheless on several occasions expressed its willingness to defer a final resolution in the interest of its relationship with other countries, especially the United States. It did so provided Taiwan did not stake a formal claim to sovereignty. The United States, while repeatedly reaffirming its opposition to the use of force, did so invariably within the framework of a "one-China" policy.

This complex framework should not be trifled with. Indeed, it is very much in Taiwan's own interest. For the key constraint on China's Taiwan policy has been China's stake in its relationship with the United States. Were Taiwan to achieve formal American recognition of a separate status, as its president now seems to seek, this would surely lead to some kind of military clash that, whatever its outcome, would permanently rupture Sino-American relations and isolate America in Asia and probably the world. Taiwan would be less, not more, secure in such an environment.

Thus, when President Clinton and Jiang meet, they must try to defuse the immediate crisis and begin to place Sino-American relations on a solid basis. Slogans such as "strategic partnership" without content cannot substitute for a careful examination of where interests are congruent and where they need to be reassessed or managed.

With respect to Taiwan, three steps are needed: (1) to leave no ambiguity about America's opposition to the use of force; (2) to make clear that there is no change in America's longstanding acceptance of the principle of one China; (3) to insist on Taiwanese restraint in challenging a framework that, in fact, ensures their autonomy and without which events may well run out of control.

Acold war would leave both sides in a classic no-win situation. China's economic progress would be stifled. Historically covetous neighbors might resurrect past ambitions. And, given the present disproportion of power, a military conflict would have grave consequences for China.

At the same time, Beijing would have many political cards to play. The Soviet Union, in the end, stood substantially isolated facing a coalition of all the industrial democracies plus China. But China has traversed its 5,000 years of recorded history by careful calculations of its necessities and great patience. No Asian nation will go along with a confrontational course unless provoked by Chinese pressures. Our European allies will distinguish their policies from ours and blame tensions on American highhandedness. Every crisis point, from Korea to the Middle East, would be exacerbated by a Sino-American cold -- or hot -- war.

Escape from this rush toward self-fulfilling prophecies requires a degree of bipartisanship not in great supply at this moment. Once the die is cast for confrontation, there will be no easy way back from the precipice. Which of the statesmen who so exuberantly went to war in 1914 would not have jumped at a chance to review their decision when they looked back at the damage done to the civilization of Europe and the long-term peace of the world?

The writer, a former secretary of state, is president of Kissinger Associates, an international consulting firm that has clients with business interests in many countries abroad.

---

By WILLIAM J. BROAD, September 7, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/090799china-nuke.html

When American bomb makers began visiting China in 1979, they were startled by increasingly pointed questions that suggested their Chinese peers were hot on the trail of the secret to building a modern nuclear arsenal. It allows H-bombs to be made so small that many can fit atop a single missile or be fired from trucks, submarines and other mobile platforms.

China succeeded on Sept. 25, 1992, the news coming from a spy who told his American handlers that Beijing had exploded a bomb based on the miniaturization secret.

A team of scientists at the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico set to work on a whodunit with huge implications: Was China's advance the result of espionage, hard work or some mix of the two?

Today, the debate rages on. Experts agree that spying occurred, but clash violently on how much was stolen and what impact it had on Beijing's advance, if any.

The Los Alamos team concluded in 1995 that China's stride was probably based on espionage. A report this year by a Congressional committee that made the case public went further, claiming that it would have been "virtually impossible" for China to have made small warheads "without the nuclear secrets stolen from the United States."

The Congressional report unleashed criticism from scientists inside and outside the Government who said the importance of the espionage was overstated, and that China could well have achieved the breakthrough on its own, as it insists publicly.

A review of the dispute, based on months of interviews and disclosures of weapons and intelligence secrets, suggests that the Congressional report went beyond the evidence in asserting that stolen secrets were the main reason for China's breakthrough.

The review also bolsters a point of emerging agreement among feuding experts: that the Federal investigation focused too soon on the Los Alamos National Laboratory and one worker there, Wen Ho Lee, who was fired for security violations. The lost secrets, it now appears, were available to hundreds and perhaps thousands of individuals scattered throughout the nation's arms complex.

Federal officials asked in recent days that some details about weapons design and intelligence sources not be published, and The New York Times agreed to withhold them.

For the Los Alamos team of detectives, the overall spy theory was supported strongly in 1995 when the Central Intelligence Agency obtained an internal Chinese document that included a description of the United States' most advanced miniature warhead, the W-88. Revealing for the first time their top evidence in the case, the document's secret contents, Federal officials say the Chinese text cited five key attributes of the warhead, including two measurements accurate to within four-hundredths of an inch.

But the critics, who are also revealing new information, insist that Beijing, even if it spied, made the miniaturization breakthrough on its own, pursuing it for at least 13 years, from 1979 to 1992.

The prowess of Chinese scientists, American experts said, is suggested by a camera they built for photographing nuclear blasts, which was far better than a similar one made by the United States.

"They don't need any help from us," said Harold Agnew, a past Los Alamos director, visitor to China and Federal intelligence adviser. "They're just curious, as we are curious about them."

Deconstructing the damage wrought by espionage is an imprecise art that mixes inference, evidence and deduction. In the vacuum between what is known and what is suspected, personal, partisan or institutional bias often rushes in.

The debate over Chinese spying has been blurred by issues that include Republican distaste for President Clinton's China policy, accusations of racial bias in the investigation and fears among scientists that the uproar is prompting security measures so tight as to damage work, morale and recruitment.

As in most spy cases, the evidence is open to interpretation.

Several critics familiar with the Chinese document obtained by the C.I.A. said that its description of the American warhead was not by itself sufficient to build a miniaturized warhead.

The Energy Department official who supervised the Los Alamos inquiry, Notra Trulock, agreed with this assessment but said the information was secret and had never been mentioned in any public document or Internet posting. Anyone who had it, he and his team reasoned, must have also obtained access to a much broader range of secrets about the warhead's design.

In addition, Trulock said in an interview, knowing the approximate size and shape of the components provided a road map to Chinese bomb makers, probably allowing them to skip years of preliminary testing.

Trulock added, however, that the Congressional committee was too categorical in its report, which was based in part on his testimony.

"When I testified, I used the appropriate caveats to express uncertainties in our evidence and our conclusions," said Trulock, formerly the Energy Department's intelligence chief. "We typically said: 'Probably this. Probably that.' " The committee, he said, "made judgments" about the centrality of spying in China's breakthrough.

Representative Christopher Cox, a California Republican who was chairman of the committee, defended the work of his staff of 47, which included no one with nuclear design experience. The panel, he said in a lengthy interview, drew largely on Clinton Administration witnesses for its expertise. The conclusion that espionage allowed Beijing to skip decades of research, he said, was an appropriate one, based on the Government's own evidence.

"Judgment matters," he said, responding to Trulock's criticism. "We don't know everything to a certainty. The question is what is more likely than not."

In the interview, Cox expressed surprise when told of the depth and breadth of China's interest in the miniaturization secret. He also played down the idea, cited by Federal skeptics of Chinese spying, that most of the world's nuclear powers have figured out the secret of miniaturization.

Can China, Cox asked, "develop it indigenously because France did? That is a stretch. It's almost apples and oranges."

The Secret: America Shrinks an Atomic Match

From the dawn of the nuclear age, miniaturization has been an obsession of weapons designers.

The world's first atomic bomb, designed by the Los Alamos laboratory and detonated in the New Mexico desert in July 1945, was an awesome but cumbersome affair. A lump of plutonium the size of a softball was surrounded by a much larger ball of high explosives that was five feet wide and made up of 32 explosive charges and 64 detonators. Big as a car, it could not have fit into a small airplane, let alone a missile.

In 1952, American physicists made an important breakthrough: the H-bomb. Roughly a thousand times more powerful than the first atomic weapon, the hydrogen bomb was a two-stage device. Inside its dense casing, an atomic explosion -- called the primary -- worked as a match to kindle an even more powerful detonation by the bomb's hydrogen fuel, which was known as the secondary.

Size was an issue from the start. The first H-bomb stood two stories high and weighed 82 tons. It would be militarily useful only if it could be shrunk, and over the next few years, the country's best physicists set out to do just that.

After considerable trial and error, they figured out that they could obtain the same kind of explosive power from a smaller package. A main breakthrough centered on the large, heavy atomic match. By shaping its plutonium fuel into an ovoid, roughly like a watermelon, scientists were able to drastically shrink the size and number of the explosives that triggered the nuclear blast.

After at least one flop, the radical idea roared to life in July 1957 in a nuclear explosion in the Nevada desert, according to Chuck Hansen, author of a detailed history of America's early nuclear efforts. It had taken the United States a little more than five years to move from the first H-bomb to its miniaturized cousin.

The development had profound implications for the cold war's nuclear competition.

Shrinking the atomic trigger from something roughly the size of a washing machine to something smaller than a football allowed weapons designers to put thermonuclear arms atop small missiles that could be launched from submarines or mobile platforms like trucks. Arms would no longer be confined to bombers or silos in the ground.

The advance meant weapons could now be carried, quite stealthily, closer to enemy shores and could be made safer from attack. It also meant warheads could fit into the cramped spaces of narrow nose cones, which streaked faster to Earth than blunter shapes and were less buffeted by winds during the fiery plunge, making them more accurate.

The first warhead in the new generation of weapons, the W-47, was less than half the size of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima but up to 80 times more powerful. In 1960, when the first Polaris submarine put to sea, each of its 16 missiles was armed with a W-47.

The weapons continued to evolve, and by all accounts, the apex was reached in the 1980's with the W-88, one of the most deadly weapons in the American arsenal.

The warhead, made for submarines, first went to sea a decade ago and is considered quite powerful for its small size. The precise size is secret. But at least eight W-88's can fit atop the Trident D-5 missile, which is less than seven feet wide.

Since Trident subs have 24 missiles, a single submarine can carry up to 192 of the thermonuclear arms.

Today, American submarines on patrol in the Atlantic carry the small warheads. And the Navy is adding them to its Pacific fleet, so in the next few years the W-88 is likely to be aimed at China.

The Chinese: Late to Start, Quick to Excel

China was late in joining the nuclear club, but showed considerable skill when it did.

Beijing detonated its first bomb in 1964. The tricky design was based on uranium, like the Hiroshima bomb, but saved costly fuel and made the bomb lighter, increasing its military value.

Sidney D. Drell, a Stanford physicist and Clinton Administration adviser, writing in "China Builds the Bomb" (Stanford University Press, 1988), called the feat "enormously impressive." Beijing's first hydrogen bomb came just 32 months later.

By comparison, the step from nuclear to thermonuclear took London 66 months, Moscow 75 months, Washington 87 months and Paris 103 months, said Robert S. Norris of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private group in Washington that monitors nuclear arms.

China set off just 6 test blasts to get to the H-bomb stage, versus 31 for the United States. The low number was typical. While developing at least six types of weapons, Beijing over the decades conducted relatively few nuclear tests, 45 in all, versus 1,030 for the United States.

The evidence strongly suggests that China, in its first phases of missile building, had no idea how to shrink thermonuclear arms. According to "China's Strategic Seapower" (Stanford University Press, 1994), the warhead for the submarine missile deployed by Beijing in the 1970's weighed 1,300 pounds, more than twice the old American W-47, suggesting that the Chinese were still using a spherical atomic match to ignite H-bombs.

China's land force was modest. Starting in the 1980's, it deployed about 20 missiles that can now reach anywhere in North America, each topped by a single warhead that can unleash a force equivalent to up to five million tons of high explosives. That is about 300 times stronger than the Hiroshima bomb.

The big warheads are not particularly accurate, but they fit China's professed war doctrine -- to fire nuclear arms only in retaliation. The big missiles can, if necessary, hit a city.

China's interest in building smaller weapons was spurred, in part, by the United States' development in the late 1970's of a high-accuracy design known as the Missile Experimental, or MX, that bristled with 10 warheads. Though meant primarily to unnerve Moscow, the weapon also worried Beijing, which quickly grasped that its handful of big land-based missiles looked like sitting ducks that could be destroyed in a first strike of precisely aimed H-bombs.

Beijing's unease grew as the American Navy in the late 1970's unveiled plans for a new submarine-launched missile nearly as unerring as the MX and bearing an even more powerful warhead -- the W-88.

American intelligence agencies knew little about China's nuclear program and modernization plans, if any, before President Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972. But the military ties that followed the Nixon diplomatic initiative opened the door.

By 1979, American nuclear arms designers and security experts were starting to visit their Chinese peers, weapons labs and Lop Nur, the sprawling site in China's western desert where prototype nuclear weapons were detonated.

From Los Alamos alone, at least 85 scientists and officials made trips from 1979 to 1990, according to Robert S. Vrooman, a former C.I.A. officer who at the time directed counterintelligence at Los Alamos.

Top visitors included Dr. Agnew, the past director of the weapons lab; Danny B. Stillman, its head of intelligence; and George A. Keyworth 2d, a physicist who later became President Reagan's science adviser.

The benefits were judged to far outweigh the risks that arms scientists in informal settings and conversations might, by accident or design, give away secrets. And indeed, the Americans learned much.

"This was a huge intelligence game for the United States," said a United States official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "At the beginning we knew zip about China."

One discovery was that parts of the Chinese program were quite advanced, including technologies for bomb development.

"They have excellent facilities, some better than ours," said Dr. Agnew, who in 1979 and 1982 was among the first visitors.

For instance, he said, the Chinese were able to peer into fiery blasts with an advanced camera known as pinex, revealing details to aid warhead development.

The American version of the device had one axis, he said, the Chinese version two, doubling its usefulness. "It's much better," Dr. Agnew said.

The American visitors also learned much about what China lacked. From a barrage of inquiries over the years, it became clear that Beijing was eager to learn everything it could about shrinking the atomic trigger. The questions were regular, increasingly pointed and never answered, American officials said, insisting that Beijing got no secrets that way.

But in one case, investigators became suspicious about an American scientist at the Livermore weapons lab in California who in 1979 had talked with Chinese scientists.

The suspect, born in Taiwan, never confessed. But some Federal investigators, in an investigation code-named Tiger Trap, feared the scientist had compromised not only the design of the W-70, a neutron bomb, but the secret to making small atomic triggers.

Weapons experts say that the crucial insight of the watermelon shape can be communicated with a few comments, a hand motion or a simple drawing on the back of an envelope, although years of computing, calculation, experiment and factory labor are then needed to turn the idea into nuclear blasts.

"The real challenge is not in the design, it's in the manufacturing," said Houston T. Hawkins, head of international security studies at Los Alamos.

For example, he said, plutonium, one of the most complex metals known to science, is difficult to cast because of its odd ways of reacting with other metals and materials.

"It's a strange beast," Hawkins said of the dense metal that fuels most atom bombs.

---

September 7, 1999 New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/090799china-nuke2.html

China finally succeeded in exploding a miniaturized bomb on Sept. 25, 1992, American officials revealed. It took intelligence analysts more than two years to fully understand what China had accomplished, its feat becoming clear only after a Chinese nuclear expert who had been recruited to spy for the United States delivered an intriguing report to his American handlers.

The spy said China's September test blast, which had been initially viewed by American analysts as routine, was anything but. The bomb detonated that day was miniaturized with a core, the spy said, in the distinctive shape of an ovoid, indicating China had begun to master the art of making modern warheads.

In the mid-1990's, the task of tracking the technical ins and outs of other nations' nuclear programs fell to the national weapons labs. Among the sleuths was Dr. Robert M. Henson, an experienced weapons designer at Los Alamos who had been analyzing intelligence on foreign programs since 1988.

In January 1995, Dr. Henson said in an interview, he began looking more closely at how China had solved the miniaturization puzzle. For help he turned to Lawrence A. Booth, a friend who specialized in Russian analyses.

"We kept looking into it for two weeks," Dr. Henson recalled. "Then, we decided to do something."

They drew up their analysis and eventually took it to Mr. Trulock, who the previous year had become director of intelligence at the Energy Department, which oversees Los Alamos. Mr. Trulock, who has a bachelor's degree in political science and no formal technical training, said he wanted to bring in other nuclear experts, particularly ones who had long experience in developing the miniaturized nuclear triggers for H-bombs. John L. Richter of Los Alamos, a scientist who filled that void, joined the team.

The group looked more closely at a clue provided by the Chinese spy, who described the size of the bomb's atomic core with an analogy to a common household object, officials said in a new disclosure. Working from that, the scientists calculated a more precise size and Dr. Henson and Dr. Richter went through the American stockpile of nuclear arms, looking up measurements to see if any matched.

The atomic trigger of the W-88, they discovered, was close enough in size to raise suspicions.

The Energy Department held meetings in which the Los Alamos team was joined by analysts from the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Federal officials now say the intelligence agencies were skeptical, reasoning that too much was being made of a foreigner's rough analogy. But the Energy Department and the Los Alamos team felt the evidence was provocative.

The breakthrough came in 1995, as has been previously disclosed, when a Chinese Government official sent a package of secret Chinese documents to American officials.

Mr. Trulock said the most revealing document, dated 1988, laid out China's nuclear modernization plans for Beijing's First Ministry of Machine Building, which, among other things, made missiles and nose cones. It not only described China's plans but compared them to the nuclear arms of the American arsenal.

Relatively crude hand drawings sketched out the nose cones enveloping the W-88, the W-87, the W-78, the W-76, the W-62 and the W-56 -- warheads of the Trident, MX and Minuteman missiles -- and also gave their overall weights and dimensions.

In itself, these were not damning. Though still officially classified secret in some cases, such information by then was widely available in many unclassified American papers and articles.

But the Chinese document, some 20 pages in translation, went on to give sensitive data about the W-88, Federal officials revealed. It accurately described the shape of the atomic trigger as not spherical and said it was situated in the nose cone's narrow forward end -- an arrangement used in some but not all American warheads. And it correctly described the hydrogen fuel, or secondary, as having a spherical shape.

More unsettling to the team, it described the width of the casing that surrounds the atomic trigger to within a millimeter, or four-hundredths of an inch. "That's pretty damn accurate," Mr. Trulock recalled.

A senior Federal official agreed. "That opened eyes," he said. "It seemed to confirm earlier assessments that had seemed insubstantial."

Mr. Trulock said his team later found that the Chinese document gave a similarly exact measure for the width of the W-88's secondary, or hydrogen stage. "Primaries are the long pole in the tent," he said, referring to the importance of the atomic trigger. "But that measurement was as good as the one for the primary."

The C.I.A. eventually concluded that the agent who sent the documents was acting under the instruction of Chinese intelligence. No one has ever come up with a persuasive explanation of why China sent the documents to American spies.

From 1992 to 1996, American officials revealed, China used its new atomic match to ignite a variety of hydrogen bombs, including one similar in some respects to the W-88. After this series of blasts shook the ground at the Lop Nur test site, China signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, signaling an end to its nuclear experimentation.

The Investigation: Federal Sleuths Hunt for a Spy

The Energy Department opened an investigation into the possible theft of W-88 secrets on Sept. 28, 1995, and over the next three years, Federal officials quietly tried to find out whether there was a Chinese spy in their midst.

If espionage occurred, Mr. Trulock and his team reasoned, it must have happened between 1984, when the warhead entered engineering development, and 1988, the date of the Chinese document.

Energy Department officials focused on Los Alamos, which had designed the bomb. They looked particularly closely at anyone who had traveled to China in those years or met visiting Chinese scientists.

Mr. Vrooman, then head of counterintelligence at Los Alamos and later a vocal critic of the inquiry, said investigators scrutinized only those people whose trips to China were paid for by the Energy Department.

Left unexamined, he said, were at least 15 additional people whose trips were paid for by the Chinese, the C.I.A., the Air Force or privately. These travelers tended to be top weapons designers and high officials -- the people who knew the most American arms secrets and had the most intimate contact with Chinese peers, Mr. Vrooman said.

In May 1996, the Energy Department turned over a list of a dozen suspects to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which began a criminal case that eventually narrowed to Dr. Lee, an American scientist of Taiwanese birth working at Los Alamos.

Dr. Lee and his wife, Sylvia, had traveled to China in 1986 and 1988. Mrs. Lee was a secretary at Los Alamos who often met visiting Chinese delegations. And Dr. Lee, though a mechanical engineer by training and never a weapons designer, was familiar with the W-88 and many other nuclear arms and secrets (including the atomic trigger advance) because of his work on secret computer codes.

The F.B.I. believed it had enough evidence to seek a secret wiretap on Dr. Lee's phone calls, citing 20 reasons he was a prime suspect. But the Justice Department found the evidence unpersuasive and refused to seek a court order for the eavesdropping, a routine step in most spy cases.

Mr. Vrooman has charged that the inquiry was marred by a racist bias to target Chinese-Americans, an assertion Federal officials have vehemently denied. But the Republican chairman and the ranking Democrat of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, which investigated the spy case and heard testimony from Mr. Vrooman, concluded that Federal investigators had focused prematurely on Dr. Lee.

After the spy case became in public, Bill Richardson, the Secretary of Energy, recommended that Mr. Vrooman be disciplined for letting Dr. Lee have continuing access to secrets even after doubts about him had been raised.

Dr. Lee, fired this year from Los Alamos for security violations, including failing to report foreign contacts, has been charged with no crime and has denied any spying. After his ouster, investigators found that he had loaded many secret files onto an unsecured computer, raising the risk that they could have fallen into the wrong hands.

The inquiry most likely would not have come into public view had it not been for a series of unrelated disclosures about China.

In April 1998, The Times reported that two United States aerospace companies were under criminal investigation for providing rocket data to Chinese scientists.

A furor erupted in Congress. The House created a select committee, led by Mr. Cox, who had recently vied unsuccessfully for the House speakership, to look into whether the Administration's increasingly open policies on satellite exports had compromised national security.

There was no hint the committee would end up studying nuclear bombs.

Composed of five Republicans and four Democrats, the committee did not learn of the suspected Chinese nuclear espionage until October 1998, just a few months before its mandate expired. On Nov. 12 and Dec. 16 it held secret hearings in which Mr. Trulock was called as the star witness.

In January, after three months of investigation, the committee completed a secret manuscript. In May, after a long argument with the White House over what could be made public, it released an 872-page report. The chapter on atomic espionage, just 37 pages, garnered most of the headlines.

In fiery prose accompanied by vivid color pictures and charts, the committee charged that Chinese spies had carried off vital secrets about seven of America's most advanced arms.

The People's Republic of China, it alleged, "has stolen classified information on all of the United States' most advanced thermonuclear warheads," leaping from the clumsy designs of the 1950's to those that are far more modern and deadly.

The main evidence cited was the Chinese document obtained by the C.I.A. in 1995 and an inquiry in the 1980's into spying at the Livermore lab that concluded China had most likely obtained design secrets of the neutron bomb. The unclassified version of the committee's report gave no details of the 1995 document's secret details about the W-88.

The report was signed by the committee's four Democrats. But immediately after its release, Representative John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, one of the Democrats, criticized it as rushed, superficial and exaggerated. The witnesses heard by the committee, he added, "did not have the technical background to fully assess the nature or value of the information lost."

The Debate: Analysts Sift for the Truth

Since then, Mr. Spratt's critique has been echoed and amplified by a range of top scientists and bomb designers who say Beijing could have miniaturized its warheads on its own without spying.

Richard L. Garwin, a physicist who has long advised Washington on nuclear arms, recently on a bipartisan team led by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said, "there is no reason to believe that China could not have built perfectly adequate warheads" for a range of modern missiles "from nuclear technology that it developed itself."

China, several officials said, simply went down the same path as other nuclear powers, helped along by the general knowledge of what the United States had achieved: proof that hydrogen bombs can be made very small but nonetheless very powerful.

"Every state has come to it," said one Federal official, referring to breakthroughs in atomic triggers by the Soviet Union, Britain and France. "Now they've got it too."

Mr. Hawkins, the head of international security studies at Los Alamos, which is clearly on the defensive because of the spy scandal, said the basic physics of bombs and missiles push weapons designers in roughly the same direction. To obtain the best performance, he said, engineers are invariably led toward narrow nose cones about 16 degrees wide -- if cut from a pie, a very modest slice.

"Once you realize that," Mr. Hawkins said, "it drives every nation down similar paths. Eventually, all weapons systems will look alike. It has to do more with physics than espionage."

That view is not universally accepted.

Dr. Henson, the analyst who first sounded the alarm at Los Alamos, said there was nothing in the design of missile nose cones that propelled a scientist to shape the core of an atomic trigger into an oval.

Do scientific and technical analyses automatically "draw you to a watermelon?" he asked, alluding to the shape of the top-secret design.

"That's not true."

"It's beyond a shadow of a doubt," Dr. Henson added. "Major espionage took place."

American intelligence agencies are less categorical. Analysts have concluded that espionage played a role in Beijing's advance, but cannot identify a hard link comparable to the Soviet Union's theft in the 1940's of the American design for the first atom bomb.

"Everybody has come to the same conclusion," said a top Administration official who has closely scrutinized the secret data. "We don't have a smoking gun."

A Federal intelligence study done last year, which the Cox committee drew on, said American secrets lost between 1984 and 1988 let the Chinese "accelerate their nuclear weapons program well beyond indigenous capabilities," a view that echoed the original Los Alamos finding.

A damage assessment by the American intelligence community, made public in April, said a mix of espionage, openly available data and scientific acumen had greatly lengthened Chinese strides. Stolen secrets, it said, "could help" Beijing develop a mobile missile and "probably accelerated its program to develop future nuclear weapons."

In June, the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which did its own investigation, said both Congressional and Administration leaders had engaged in "simplification and hyperbole" in the spy case. Neither dramatic damage assessments nor categorical reassurances, it said, were wholly substantiated.

And Mr. Hawkins, the Los Alamos official, said the specific secrets known to have been seized by the Chinese, principally those detailed in the 1995 document, would have been little help to a bomb maker, and far from Mr. Trulock's road map.

As for an H-bomb's innards, what designers call the physics package, Mr. Hawkins said the documents "describe nothing significant."

Mr. Cox insisted that highly classified intelligence data available to his committee showed a more persuasive case than has emerged publicly. "There are more interpolating facts" that closely tie lost W-88 secrets to Beijing's advance, he said.

But a Federal official cited intelligence data about China's atomic trigger showing it to be anything but an exact copy.

"It turns out the W-88's is slightly smaller," said the official, who believes Beijing may have made the advance on its own.

It remains unresolved how China got the W-88 secrets in the first place, but a consensus is emerging that the search for the leak narrowed too quickly to Los Alamos.

Studies by the Senate as well as the President's foreign intelligence board this year raised serious questions about whether the F.B.I. and Energy Department had too quickly focused on the weapons lab. No evidence has pinpointed it as the leak's source.

Mr. Vrooman, the head of counterintelligence at the laboratory from 1987 until 1998, noted that one secret document describing the design of the W-88 warhead went to 548 mailing addresses throughout the Government and military. Some Administration experts believe the data described by the Chinese in the 1995 document came from engineering plans or from secret manuals on military bases.

"That kind of information was widely available," said Dr. Drell of Stanford, who served on the President's advisory board investigation. "The manuals that went out had pictures and numbers. If a submarine came in, and there was a problem, they had to know what they were dealing with."

However Beijing made its miniaturization advance -- on its own, by theft or a combination of the two -- it is apparently proud enough to boast about it publicly, at least among its friends in the mountains of New Mexico. Dr. Henson said a Chinese arms scientist, Sun Cheng Wei, bragged of the breakthrough at Los Alamos a few years ago, telling an open seminar that China had forged significantly ahead in nuclear arms.

"What he said," recalled Dr. Henson, who attended the talk, "was that for a long time they were dealing only with round designs, and then only watermelons."

---

Modern Bombs: Less but More
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/090799china-nuke.2.GIF.html
http://graphics.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/090799china-nuke.2.GIF

-----------

By Lewis Dolinsky, Wednesday, September 1, 1999 San Francisco Chronicle Page A12
http://www.sfgate.com:80/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/09/01/MN9819.DTL

Former Defense Secretary William Perry's recommendations to President Clinton for changes in North Korea policy have been seen by the president, his advisers and some members of Congress. Parts of the report have been leaked. Not all of it will become public.

Among other options, Perry recommends taking North Korea off the list of nations in the Trading With the Enemy Act. How much further he goes, how much will be accepted by the administration (which is under pressure from Congress to be ``tough''), how much North Korea will agree to -- all remain to be seen. If North Korea tests its missile, all bets are off.

When South Korean Unification Minister Lim Dong Won met with members of Berkeley's nonprofit Nautilus Institute on Thursday (the day before he met with Perry), he seemed confident that the North will not test the missile. Nautilus co- director Peter Hayes, a Korea expert, says the test is irrelevant militarily because the possibility of successful lift-off is estimated at 5 to 10 percent, and potential accuracy at 1 to 10 percent. Production is one by one. Parts may fit, or not. The previous test was such a failure that advisers to the Joint Chiefs laughed, until they saw that politicians were not laughing, here or in Japan.

Hayes says that if the North Koreans are intent on having a satellite for prestige purposes, call their bluff and send it up for them. Then, they will not need a missile, or rocket. Such thinking is either naivete, or enlightened American self-interest.

The Nautilus Institute's concerns include nuclear nonproliferation, sustainable energy and North Korea. It has a windmill project there, bringing power to one village, but it wants to help extend regional power grids linking North Korea, China, Russia and South Korea, perhaps even Japan. And Hayes could provide a business plan for a North Korean county showing how it can keep the lights on. Lack of energy and transport capacity are barriers to trade, even if sanctions are lifted. North Korea has abundant minerals, and U.S. firms are interested, but unless the power grid is fixed, they can't get the ore out.

Are these schemes too ambitious? Nautilus asked the South Korean unification minister. Worth a try, Lim said. But if the missile is fired and sanctions stay, Nautilus will simply maintain the village windmill project and the relationships that go with it.

Hayes disagrees with assumptions underlying current U.S. policy: 1) Amid the oppression, he sees family and cultural life, even some beauty. Even in North Korea, the sun rises and sets. North Koreans may not all want to go south, any more than all East Germans wanted to go west. Life is awful in the North, he acknowledges, but not necessarily in line with American perceptions.

2) North Koreans' capacity to wage war successfully is decreasing in many respects -- less fuel and spare parts, less training. But they could wipe out half a million South Koreans and 45,000 American military personnel with chemical, biological or other horrendous weapons or with conventional arms before they are obliterated. Some accommodation is necessary. It's not a question of liking their behavior.

Instead of giving them $250 million in international food aid a year, Hayes says, give half a billion a year, mostly to rehabilitate the means of producing food. After five years, North Korean agriculture would be functional again, on a basic level, and the country would be safer to share a world with, less likely to implode. As it is, we spend $6 billion a year in Korea just for our soldiers, and our total security bill for Korea may reach $30 billion a year.

If sanctions are lifted, Hayes says, it might be feasible for two to four ``researchers'' to come to two major universities, one of them on the East Coast, the other in Berkeley. Under current law, no money can be spent to train North Koreans. But in the 1980s, the Reagan administration authorized retired General Richard Stillwell to go to Pyongyang with an offer to host 200 North Korean students. This came to naught. On his arrival, a high official said, ``Welcome to North Korea.'' Stillwell said, ``I've been here before.'' It went downhill from there. Those folks are prickly.

Feedback
http://www.sfgate.com:80/select.feedback.html

US, N. Korean Envoys Meet in Berlin
September 7 3:57 AM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/19990907/wl/us_korea_talks_1.html

------

Updated 4:44 AM ET September 7, 1999, By CHARLES LEE
http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/u/990907/04/international-borders

SEOUL, South Korea, Sept. 7 (UPI)_ South Korean President Kim Dae- jung says his country would never recognize the North-demarcated inter- Korean sea border off the western coast.

In a meeting today with leading officials, Kim affirmed the government's position to defend the United Nations determined maritime boundary which has been considered the sea border since 1953.

Last week, North Korea unilaterally redrew the sea border, declaring the Northern Limit Line "invalid." The new demarcation would expand the North's territorial waters and put five South Korean islands with the northern side.

North Korea threatened again today to take "powerful and determined measures" against the South if it violates the Pyongyang imposed demarcation line.

"If the South crosses over the military demarcation line, we will regard it as a provocation and will exercise every self-defense measures," said Pyongyang's state-run Central News Agency. South Korea has said that Seoul would not tolerate any North Korean intrusion into its waters south of the NLL.

As the two Koreas claim sovereignty over the contested waters, concern is rising that tensions may flare anew on the Korean peninsula.

In June, the rivals brief naval gunfire in the buffer zone, 3 miles south of the NLL in which a North Korean torpedo boat was sunk and about 30 North Korean sailors are believed to have been killed.

The deadly naval skirmish was apparently touched off by North Korean vessels' intrusion into the southern waters.

Kim ordered a bolster in defense preparedness for an emergency with the North, said presidential spokesman Park Jun-young. The South's military has increased surveillance efforts as the communist country has intensified navy drills.

The U.S. state department called on North Korea to recognize the "practicality" of the northern limit line by keeping its vessels north of the line.

The North has insisted the line was unilaterally defined by the U.S.- led U.N. Command in the North's waters against the Korean armistice and international law.

Shortly after the signing of the 1953 armistice agreement, which did not demarcate a sea border, the U.N. Command imposed a line as a buffer to prevent arms clashes between South and North Korea. Both Koreas have largely honored the line as inter-Korean maritime border since.

The peninsula remains technically at war as the two Koreas have yet to conclude a formal peace treaty.

-------------

By Leon V. Sigal Newsweek International, September 13, 1999
Page 1 of 2
http://www.newsweek.com/nw-srv/printed/int/asia/ov1611_1.htm
Page 2
http://www.newsweek.com/nw-srv/printed/int/asia/ov1611_2.htm

North Korea's threat to test a new ballistic missile capable of hitting the United States was greeted in Washington as the raving of a renegade state. But there is method to Pyongyang's madness and the trick, as a senior American official once put it to me, is to pick the "nuggets of reason" from the "ocean of vitriol." For more than a decade North Korea has been seeking to end its lifelong enmity with the United States, often delivering peace offers wrapped in threats designed to scare Washington to the table. That's exactly what is happening now: Pyongyang is making missile threats in hopes of bargaining its missiles away for something better.

Washington is wise to pursue the offer, no matter how crazy it sounds. This has been done before. In 1992 North Korea quietly offered to mothball a reactor capable of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons in exchange for reactors that are easier to control. Washington ignored the offer until two years later, when nuclear tensions came perilously close to triggering war on the Korean Peninsula. Talks began. The Americans occasionally found themselves in red-faced shouting matches with the North Koreans, but discovered they could do business in the end. The famous result was the landmark 1994 nuclear deal known as the Agreed Framework. Few know it was built on a North Korean idea. Now Pyongyang says it is willing to go further, ending missile exports and development if the United States will end the embargo it imposed during the Korean War and normalize relations. U.S. presidential envoy William Perry is opening the door to this deal, which could bring real reconciliation between former foes.

The main hurdle is skepticism in Congress. Many members are convinced that Pyongyang is bent on acquiring nuclear missiles at any cost, and will "cheat and retreat" from any bargain. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest the skeptics are wrong. In the early 1990s most experts in Washington believed North Korea had already made one or two nuclear weapons and was determined to make more. To do so, Pyongyang would have had to shut down its reactor in order to extract spent fuel and reprocess it into weapons-grade plutonium. We now know that the North had not been reprocessing since 1991, did not shut down its reactor until May 1994 and has allowed international inspectors to monitor the facilities since 1992. In short, North Korea has frozen bombmaking as promised.

Similarly, if North Korea was committed to building ballistic missiles to launch nuclear warheads, it would have been testing missiles for much of the last decade. Instead, Pyongyang has fired off just two ineffectual launches both out of pique at U.S. reluctance to negotiate. Its only test of the No Dong missile came in May 1993, shortly after the United States pressured Israel to abandon its missile talks with Pyongyang. Worried about North Korean plans to sell missiles to Iran and other Middle Eastern countries, Israel was offering North Korea investment and recognition in return for canceling these sales. After the United States stepped in, North Korea responded by openly testing its missile, before an audience of Iranian officials.

But if a deal with North Korea made sense for Israel, why not with the United States? Such reasoning led the Americans to enter talks on the 1994 nuclear accord. Unfortunately, Pyongyang has since concluded that it froze its nuclear program but got little in return. The construction of two new nuclear reactors is way behind schedule. So are promised shipments of fuel to power North Korea while the reactors are being built. Most important, North Korea had expected a gradual rollback of economic and diplomatic sanctions, which has yet to begin. So what better way to grab U.S. attention than to launch another missile?

By January 1996, having concluded the nuclear deal, Washington began exploring a missile deal with Pyongyang. But it broke off talks that September after a North Korean submarine ran aground in southern waters on a routine spy mission. As tensions mounted, North Koreans began visible preparations for a missile test, only to call it off after talks with U.S. officials in October. It took months before Washington offered some easing of economic sanctions for an end to missile sales and even more for an end to missile tests. North Korea responded that it was willing to negotiate an end to missile sales and development but it underscored its impatience with a threat to resume missile tests. On Aug. 31, Pyongyang launched a three-stage Taepodong I rocket over Japan in an unsuccessful attempt to put a satellite into orbit. That sent shivers through Asia. But cooler heads will recognize this for what it is: a typically crazy Pyongyang invitation to talk, not to fight. A missile deal would ease fears in Asia and open the door to peace in Korea.

Sigal is the author of "Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy With North Korea," published by Princeton University Press (1998).