Lincoln Journal Star Monday, May. 31, 1999
Report finds China shared U.S. secrets
FROM WIRE REPORTS
WASHINGTON -- China has begun passing on stolen U.S. nuclear weapon, missile and aircraft secrets to countries hostile to the United States, according to a draft of the House report that will be made public today."Essentially giving this information to the PRC (People's Republic of China) is like putting it into the stream of commerce," Rep. Christopher Cox, chairman of the select committee on China, said Monday. "It will now wind up -- five years, 10 years, 15 years from now -- in the hands of terrorist regimes and rogue states." The fact that China has shared this data is another revelation in a more than 700-page report of Cox's committee. The nine-member panel was unanimous in its findings.
Rep. Norman Dicks, D-Washington, the senior Democrat on Cox's committee, said while the full bipartisan group supported the recommendations, the report is "written in kind of a worst case style." China still hasn't deployed anything as a result of the secrets they stole, Dicks said. "And we still have overwhelming superiority." The report does not specify which of the nuclear weapon designs and other secrets China has passed on to other nations. That remains classified, said Cox, a Republican.
But the draft does say that China has given weapons systems and components to Iran, Pakistan, Libya, Syria and North Korea.
Last year, the Clinton administration labeled China as the number one proliferator of weapons of mass destruction.
The committee also found that over the past two decades, China has successfully managed to obtain nuclear, missiles, aircraft and space weapon technology. Much of the theft occurred at four Department of Energy-run national labs.
The panel also determined that technology was transferred during commercial satellite launches and that high performance computers sold to China has been used for military purposes.
These issues clearly are problems, says Charles Ferguson, an analyst for the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington-based think tank. Ferguson is a physicist, former naval officer and Los Alamos weapons lab scientist.
If, for example, Ferguson said, China provided some of this information to Pakistan, it could serve to counter India's nuclear program.
"That would be a concern in south Asia," he said.
But even after the report is released today, Ferguson said, "It still leaves one wondering how much information China has and how useful it is." Cox says about 30 percent of the committee's report will remain under wraps. This decision comes after four months of intense negotiations between Cox and the Clinton administration over what could and could not be released.
Throughout the report, there are references to facts that have been deleted because the Clinton administration says it could compromise national security.
The report does say the committee has determined China has used high performance computers, bought from U.S. companies, to help perfect its nuclear weapons program, including simulations of tests.
Beginning in 1996, the U.S. relaxed controls on the sale of such super powered machines to China.
These computers were sold with the proviso that they be used for commercial, not military, purposes.
According to the committee, these computers are being used for much more than weather forecasting, drug manufacture or other benign reasons.
A key concern of the committee is that China will use these computers to design, deploy and maintain its nuclear weapons arsenal; at the same time China would remain in compliance with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty because it won't have actually exploded a nuclear weapon.
Elsewhere in the report, the committee says data from nuclear tests and other codes used in the U.S. nuclear program are among the stolen secrets.
That is important, the committee believes, because the more data about the U.S. nuclear program China has, the more it can enter into the computers and better the job the computers can do of simulating nuclear tests and other weapons development strategies.
Ferguson said he doesn't believe China would be able to develop new nuclear weaponry using these super computers.
"It's being blown out of proportion," Ferguson said.
But he did agree with the committee finding that the U.S. needs to enhance its export controls.
"We need to know what they're doing with these computers. And we need to insist upon it," Ferguson said.
In its recommendations, the committee says that it supports selling computers to China. But China should not get these computers, the report says, unless Chinese officials agree to on-site inspections to determine what these computers are being used for.
If China doesn't agree to such a system by September 30, the committee says, U.S. companies would no longer be able to sell top-performance computers to China. Export licenses should be denied for such equipment.
The report also says the Chinese have set up as many as 3,000 front companies in the United States to assist its efforts and also gained valuable secrets about rocket components from two U.S. satellite manufacturers, Loral Corp. and Hughes Electronics, which remain under U.S. investigation.
"Loral and Hughes showed the PRC how to improve the design and reliability of the guidance system used in the PRC's newest Long March rocket," the report said.
The report singled out Hughes for transfers of information in 1993 and 1995 that the committee alleged might assist China's MIRV missile "if the PRC decides to develop them" and said the company acted without getting proper U.S. clearance.
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