EDITORIAL : CLINTON AND CHINA; HEY, STRANGER, WANT SOME SECRETS?

AMERICA has generously opened its most closely guarded nuclear weapons secrets to the world, allowing unnamed governments and unknown individuals easy access.

Oh sure, alarms sounded. But it appears officials in the Clinton administration meticulously turned the alarms off by burying or ignoring reports warning of America's vulnerability.

And the news gets worse. Now, the only thing standing between U.S. security and anarchy is Congress.

The American public should be very afraid.

Clinton administration officials were warned last November that China posed an ``acute intelligence threat'' to the government's nuclear weapons laboratories and that computer systems at the labs were being constantly penetrated by outsiders.

Three months earlier, Congress itself issued a strongly worded bipartisan report criticizing U.S. technology transfer to China that helped China improve its nuclear weapons.

But it seems the Clinton administration was too busy with other things - presumably the impeachment hearings - to bother slamming the door on spies.

And Congress was too busy chasing Clinton's dirty skirts to notice anything else.

Now comes more evidence that America is an easy and open target to anyone who deals in weapons technology.

The latest reports revolve around Taiwan-born scientist Wen Ho Lee, who was fired from Los Alamos National Laboratory on March 8 for security violations after investigators found he had improperly transferred more than 1,000 files containing nuclear secrets from Los Alamos. He has not been charged.

Suspicions about Lee date back to 1982, when Lee called a scientist suspected of stealing neutron bomb secrets from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. That's a decade before Bill Clinton was elected president.

But the Clinton administration had six years to crack down and didn't.

Instead, there's growing evidence that top officials not only looked the other way but practically turned over the key.

Despite the warnings issued last November that China posed a threat and that computer systems at the weapons labs were being constantly penetrated by outsiders, no action was taken.

By the time officials did act in February, Lee had erased his files. And it wasn't until April 2 that officials ordered the computer systems at Los Alamos shut down for security reasons.

Concerns over how cozy Clinton was with the Chinese have been around since the 1996 presidential election and the White House fund-raisers. But Congress has been too distracted to seriously delve into national security breaches.

And now, Americans appear so jaded by Washington's partisan shenanigans that disclosures are bouncing off of deaf ears.

The bills from the Lewinsky scandal are starting to come due. While Clinton and Congress fiddled, the United States was robbed of leadership and security, and left vulnerable.

Sadly, public trust has been so eroded that we may never know for sure how serious the breach in our security was and whether we are still at risk.