China admitted Thursday that it had built and tested a neutron bomb -- something security experts have known for almost a decade, but which China had never publicly acknowledged until now.
The Chinese government said its scientists created the bomb on their own, without resorting to espionage, in the 1970s and '80s, during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. China exploded a neutron bomb in 1988.
Official confirmation came Thursday with the release of a detailed rebuttal of the Cox report, the recent U.S. congressional investigation that accuses China of stealing U.S. military technology, including neutron-bomb secrets and designs for a small U.S. warhead developed in the 1980s.
China developed its neutron-bomb technology in its own laboratories, insisted Zhao Qizheng, chief spokesman for the State Council. ``Could Chinese possibly be as intelligent as Americans? The inference of the Cox report is that they couldn't possibly be,'' he said.
Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Newport Beach, the Republican who headed the congressional inquiry, compared the ministry's statement to ``one shoe dropping. This is the first time that the People's Liberation Army has acknowledged having a neutron bomb,'' he told the Mercury News. ``The other shoe hasn't dropped, the admission of espionage, and probably never will.''
Noting that the Mercury News reported in 1990 that U.S. officials believed China had stolen neutron bomb secrets from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Cox quipped, ``They have caught up with the Mercury News.'' He said the Cox report doesn't claim, nor is there any evidence, that China has deployed a neutron bomb.
Cox said the argument that China developed a smaller nuclear warhead on its own is not believable. The United States conducted numerous tests in developing its own weapon, the W-88 warhead used on the Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile, but China conducted very few tests.
``Testing something that is very similar to the most sophisticated nuclear weapon in the world and getting it right immediately -- no one in the U.S. government believed that that was possible,'' Cox said.
The Chinese rebuttal of the Cox report, titled ``Facts Speak Louder Than Words and Lies Will Collapse on Themselves,'' asserted that China began work on a neutron bomb in the 1970s, when the United States and the Soviet Union intensified their arms race.
Design theft denied
``China had no choice but to continue to carry out research and development of nuclear weapons technology and improve its nuclear weapons systems, mastering in succession the neutron-bomb design technology and the nuclear weapon miniaturization technology,'' the report said.
It denied that China stole the technology involved in those two designs and argued that many design details of the nuclear weapons cited in the Cox report were available in unclassified documents and on the Internet. It also rejected allegations in the Cox report that China had stolen American technology used to launch satellites.
In Washington, Defense Secretary William Cohen said it made little difference from a security standpoint whether China developed its own neutron bomb or stole the technology from U.S. labs.
The neutron bomb is often misleadingly described as a bomb that destroys people, not buildings, and was developed by the United States in the 1970s to be used against large-scale Soviet tank formations. It has a larger radiation reach, and therefore would kill more people, than traditional nuclear bombs. But a single neutron bomb also has a considerable explosive force and would cause massive devastation if detonated near a large urban area.
The announcement by Zhao did not say whether China actually possessed neutron bombs.
But even if it does, it would not significantly affect the regional balance of power, said John Pike, an expert on China's nuclear arsenal at the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists.
In the absence of the threat of a large-scale land war, neutron bombs are no more useful than any other kind of nuclear weapon, such as the traditional bombs China is already known to possess. Neutron bombs would therefore serve no useful purpose in a war with Taiwan, he said.
``The real issue now isn't whether they've got a neutron bomb, it's why on earth they would want to have one,'' he said.
But congressional Republicans said Beijing's assertion validated a congressional inquiry that accused China of stealing U.S. nuclear secrets, and was timed precisely to intimidate Taiwan.
``This shows the Cox report was hard-hitting and has caused the Chinese some angst,'' said Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., who heads the House intelligence committee and who served on Cox's panel.
``Now the Chinese are saying to Taiwan, `Pay attention, we've got this,' '' Goss said. ``It's a very dangerous situation.''
Tensions between Taiwan and China rose after Taiwan's president, Lee Teng-hui, said last week that his government would no longer adhere to the principle that the Chinese mainland and Taiwan were two parts of the same country. The announcement stunned and angered China, which has always reserved the right to use military force, if necessary, to fulfill its goal of reunification with Taiwan.
At the White House and State Department on Thursday, administration officials refused to draw the conclusion that China's announcement of its nuclear-bomb-building ability was intended to intimidate Taiwan.
``We don't see the connection,'' said State Department press secretary James Rubin. ``I don't think it's any secret to the people of the world that China has a very small nuclear capability.''
Asian experts had mixed opinions on the timing of China's announcement.
Stephen P. Cohen, a senior fellow specializing in Asian security issues at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said it was probably related to Taiwan.
``I think this is a way in which the mainland is responding politically,'' he said. ``I don't think militarily it is much.''
But David Shambaugh, a China military expert at George Washington University and the Brookings Institution, said the announcement was coincidental.
``It's not any attempt to wave a neutron bomb over Taiwan's head,'' he said.
China's know-how cited
The document issued by China's Information Ministry on Thursday offered a wide-ranging response to the congressional report. It said the Cox report ignores China's own scientific know-how. Aside from its nuclear program, China also successfully launched more than 40 domestic satellites since 1970, many of them well before it began launching U.S. satellites in 1990, the report asserted.
China, the report said, developed its own multiple-satellite-dispenser technology, which it has used to launch multiple satellites, rather than acquiring it from launching Motorola satellites.
In addition, the Cox report exaggerates the impact of a review of launch failures by China and two U.S. aerospace companies, the Chinese statement said. Some Chinese rockets have better safety records than U.S. rockets, some of which have failed frequently in the past several years, it said.
The Cox report, it said, incorrectly claimed China obtained a satellite-modeling method from U.S. aerospace companies analyzing Chinese launch failures, when the method was actually first published in China in 1980 and included in Chinese engineering textbooks from 1984 on.
Cox called the ministry's description of what was learned from two U.S. aerospace companies during a joint investigation of satellite launch failures ``inaccurate.''
The Chinese statement also rebutted claims that China used American computer technology to develop its nuclear weapons program and that it acquired the computers illegally. For example, China uses a U.S. Cray supercomputer, legally purchased in 1995, in meteorology.
The full text of China's rebuttal is available online (www.chinanews.org).
