Washington, April 11 (CNA) Whether Communist China holds to a low alert-minimum deterrence posture remains to be seen as strains in US-PRC relations and Beijing's militant stand toward Taiwan could lead to changes in its `no-first-use' nuclear weapons policy, according to a new US study.
William Burr, an editor at Washington's National Security Archive, wrote in his study on the Chinese nuclear weapons program that the US missile defense program could also have a destabilizing effect.
Even though US missile defense programs are supposedly aimed at countering threats from rogue states such as Iraq and North Korea, if the systems are ever actually deployed, they could encourage major Communist Chinese investments in both intercontinental and sea-launched ballistic missile deployments and spark a new arms race.
Informed public debate about US-PRC relations and Beijing's nuclear posture would be advanced if the US intelligence establishment released older studies on Beijing's nuclear policies, said Burr, adding that unfortunately that may not happen soon.
He pointed out that congressional panic over espionage in the wake of spying allegations against Taiwan-born scientist Wen Ho Lee and the Communist Chinese nuclear program has led to a more hostile climate for declassification and also legislation forcing executive branch re-review of millions of pages of documents that had been slated for archival release.
Besides delaying the release of older documents, the backlash in Congress has undoubtedly bolstered anti-declassification recidivism in the intelligence agencies, noted Burr. For example, the Central Intelligence Agency has so far refused to declassify National Intelligence Estimates on Communist Chinese nuclear forces from as far back as the mid-1960s.
Fortunately, Burr said, before Congress checked White House declassification programs, some intelligence reporting and analysis on the earlier phases of the Communist Chinese nuclear program became available through the Freedom of Information Act at the National Archives.
A selection of US Air Force, State Department, Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA documents suggest considerable competence in tracking Communist Chinese nuclear and missile tests, as well as missile training activities. But what also comes across is "a very limited, as well as rather inaccurate, knowledge of Chinese missile deployments during the late 1960s," added Burr.
For example, even though Beijing had begun to deploy the Dong Feng-2 medium range ballistic missiles in the fall of 1966, US intelligence failed to detect the deployment until later in the decade, said the study. (By Nelson Chung)
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