May
30, 1999
Spying Isn't
the Only Way to Learn About Nukes
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.