Reason for Disarmament.

In late May, a Select Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives headed by Christopher Cox, Republican of California, issued a report entitled "U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China." The 700-page document known as the Cox Report said that China "has stolen design information on the United States' most advanced thermonuclear weapons," adding that the spying at "our national weapons laboratories spans at least the past several decades and almost certainly continues today."

The report is unsettling, to say the least. It is dismaying to think that our national weapons laboratories have been so lax about security. But the hysteria over the alleged Chinese spying scandal is not warranted.

First off, the Cox Report may not prove much. There's a big question about how compromised, exactly, U.S. national security is. "If you look at the Cox Report, nobody really knows what they got, if anything," says Lisbeth Gronlund, senior staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"It's amazing how many conclusions they've based on a relatively small amount of information," says Frank yon Hippel, a physicist who teaches nuclear control and disarmament issues at Princeton University. "They don't seem to have enough information to prosecute anybody."

Not only does the report hedge repeatedly, but members of the intelligence community and even members of the committee that came up with the report are saying that it may be wrong. For instance John Spratt, Democrat of South Carolina, said the report may not be accurate in some of its assumptions.

"The conclusions of the report have been written in a worst-case fashion," added Norm Dicks, Democrat of Washington, and a member of the committee.

The intelligence community also disputes the findings. One of the few voices of caution recently has been the CIA, which, according to a New York Times report, has said that no one knows for sure whether. China did steal documents from weapons laboratories.

And an April 21 report by a CIA panel led by Admiral David Jeremiah concludes, "To date, the aggressive Chinese collection effort has not resulted in any apparent modernization of their deployed strategic force, or any new nuclear weapons deployment."

Other critics have claimed that the report's conclusions seem extreme. "The report draws some conclusions in its public version that go beyond what you can conclude from the classified version," Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, told The New York Times. "There's some language that is stronger than the facts."

Most troubling is the situation of the chief suspect in the case, Wen Ho Lee, a Los Alamos scientist who allegedly gave the Chinese access to computer programs on our nuclear weapons. Apparently, there is not enough evidence even to charge Lee with a crime--though he did lose his job.

While the report comes to some strong conclusions, it also admits that there is no way to know at this point how much information was stolen or what China might do with that knowledge.

Even if the Cox Report were correct, China would not pose a big threat to the United States. Any assertion that China may be catching up with the United States in the nuclear technology category is a serious exaggeration.

"The use of the term `strategic' in the Chinese case needs some qualification," reported the May/June issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. "China has only about twenty missiles capable of intercontinental distances and another 100 with ranges from 1,800 to 4,750 kilometers. Although bomber forces are normally considered part of strategic forces, Chinese bombers cannot go great distances, and China's single ballistic missile submarine does not venture far. Compared to the nuclear weapons systems of the other powers, especially those of the United States, China's are modest in size and capability."

China may or may not have the capability to build advanced atomic weapons. But capability is no guarantee that a country will aggressively pursue a weapons-building program. And even if it does, say critics, such a production system could take decades and the kind of money that China has not so far poured into its military.

"China's estimated total annual military budget is $35 billion--about half what the United States spends each year on its nuclear weapons programs alone," observes The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

The Cox Report does make some guesses about why China might want that technology, however. "The stolen design information will assist the PRC [People's Republic of China] in building smaller nuclear warheads--vital to the PRC's ongoing efforts to develop survivable, mobile missiles," it says. "Current PRC ICBMs, which are silo-based, are more vulnerable to attack than mobile missiles."

The Cox Report acknowledges that China's main fear is that an attack by the United States could destroy its nuclear arsenal. China, says Gronlund, wants missiles it can move around easily, "a game of hide and seek," so it can have a "more survivable force."

"The official talk has been quite odd," says von Hippel. "`Oh, my God, now the Chinese weapons are going to be more invulnerable.' We've always considered that invulnerability is a good thing in that it doesn't tempt one country to make a first strike against another."

Mutually Assured Destruction may provide a shaky sort of stability. A far sturdier one would involve complete disarmament. And China is much more serious about that than the United States is.

"China has a very unusual nuclear policy as compared to the United States and Russia," says Gronlund. "They have clearly been very restrained--I would say responsible."

"The real question here is who's doing what to whom?" says Robert Weil, author of Red Cat, White Cat: China and the Contradictions of `Market Socialism' (Monthly Review Press, 1996). "From the day that China exploded its first nuclear bomb, they called for complete nuclear disarmament and have said they wouldn't use nuclear weapons first. Both of these positions have been rejected by the U.S. The United States has always had a first-strike capability as its goal. We tend to forget in this country, but they certainly don't in China, that the nuclear bomb has only been used once, when the United States had a monopoly--and against an East Asian country."

The shock over alleged Chinese spying borders on the disingenuous.

"China, like every other country in the world, spies," says Michael Klare, professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College. "Israel spies all the time. Friendly and unfriendly countries spy all the time. This is part of international politics. There is nothing unusually sinister about this. The U.S. has the largest spy apparatus in the world."

Israel has spied on the United States. Jonathan Pollard, a former employee of the U.S. Navy who spied for Israel, is imprisoned in the United States. Israel has even been accused of selling sensitive U.S. technology to China. And France has been accused of spying on the United States, too. But these countries remain good friends of the United States.

This is not the first time China has been accused of spying. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recalls the publication, on November 22, 1990, of a New York Times article headlined CHINESE ATOM-ARMS SPYING IN U.S. The article accused Chinese intelligence agents of stealing information on nuclear weapons from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "What was the fallout from the article?" asks The Bulletin. "Publicly, there was none. The story was not picked up by other media outlets, there were no calls for Congressional investigations or the firing of high-level officials, and it faded away."

If it is common knowledge that countries, including China, spy, we need ask why the United States is responding with furor and recrimination now? There are a few answers to that question.

The uproar over the accusations of Chinese espionage comes at a time when China is close to being accepted into the World Trade Organization, and there are many politicians in Washington who do not want China to become a member.

And the Clinton Administration, which has not only strengthened ties to China but has also loosened export controls on advanced computer systems that could help the Chinese make use of any purloined nuclear information, looks inept and sloppy, and Republicans hope to capitalize on that.

Then there is the hostility toward China still left over from Cold War days, and the desire by some to fight a new Cold War, as Barbara Ehrenreich argues on page 18.

Make no mistake: This does have a strong Cold War smell about it. Pat Buchanan, the rightwing Republican currently running for President, called the security breach the "most serious since the Rosenbergs went to the electric chair in 1953."

"The United States may now be at significantly greater risk from a Chinese ballistic missile attack," said Senator Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana.

Secretary of Defense William Cohen, feeling the brisk wind, postponed a trip to China, citing tensions between the two countries.

"We're in the midst of a frenzy of recrimination and fear-mongering, says Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. "Among other unfortunate things, there has been a terrible abuse of language such that unless one is paying close attention, one might think that China is quickly replicating the U.S. arsenal and that we are all gearing up for war in the near future. None of that is true."

Aftergood deplores the hyperbole. "It's not enough that there has been espionage," he says. "This has to be the worst case in history. There is a sort of superlativism in the rhetoric that suggests people are enjoying this."

"America is ruled by Cold War apparatchiks--people whose mental framework is the Cold War. It's a world in which they felt comfortable and knew how to behave," says Klare. "For many people, the rogue states don't cut it because it's too puny a threat. They need a peer enemy."

"China is our next great hope for a threat," agrees Mike Moore, editor of The Bulletin.

"Everyone is being stampeded, including Clinton and the Democrats, just as Truman was stampeded back in the 1950s," says Sam Day, a peace activist and former editor of The Bulletin.

The message of the spy scandal should not be to crack down on Chinese-American scientists, nor to start a Cold War with China. The message should be disarmament.

"Even if the Chinese indicate in the next five or ten years that they are building a survivable second-strike force, that's no reason for a nuclear arms race," says Moore. "It's a reason for disarmament."

If Washington were seriously interested in making sure China did not pose a threat, it should enter into disarmament negotiations with China--and the other nuclear powers, for that matter. But the U.S. government is so enamored of its nuclear stockpile that it willingly risks a Cold War with China. Spy scandals are the inevitable by-product of the nuclear arms race. So long as the United States clings to these arms, it will face more of these scandals in the years ahead.