National security and scientific communication

Is science facing a new environment triggered by the alleged successful espionage by foreign parties, in particular China, aimed at the nation's nuclear weapons secrets? Several much publicized reports, in particular that of the Cox Commission of the Congress†, the Rudman report by the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and the review of the findings of the intelligence community, have alleged security deficiencies within the U.S. defense establishment and in particular U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories. None of these reports have claimed that the presence of foreigners at U.S. academic research institutes or universities has in any way been involved in the alleged security breeches. Yet, remedial measures instituted by the U.S. government are far ranging and affect not only weapons-related activities but the U.S. scientific establishment in general.

National security has many aspects, including economic strength, the morale and well-being of the people, as well as military prowess. In respect to the latter, some emphasize restrictions aimed at preventing information developed in the past from reaching unfriendly nations or parties. But then there are those, this author included, who conclude that national security in the past has been predominantly advanced by achievements in a free environment and that such achievements are endangered if undue security measures by restrictions are allowed to dominate. Both are needed, but to use the phrase coined by journalist Alan Barth, the “utility of freedom” is essential in advancing national security.

During the “hot” and “cold” wars the spectacular achievements of United States science and technology were accomplished in unusually unrestricted environments. Mistakes and false starts were made but, just because the open nature of such errors drew criticism, corrections were readily taken. U.S. openness compared favorably with that of the United States' opponent nations, in particular the practices of the former Soviet Union. This openness did not permit other countries to catch up; on the contrary, the technology gap between the U.S. and the Soviet Union widened throughout the Cold War. Even after the end of the Cold War there is evident need for protecting truly sensitive information, in particular in the interest of retarding, or hopefully preventing, the proliferation of nuclear weapons. But many reviews of U.S. security practices, in particular those carried out by committees of the National Academy of Sciences, have emphasized that security by restriction should apply only to those subjects whose release would demonstrably do major damage to national security. In other words, such restrictions should build high fences around few truly sen-sitive areas and not extend restrictive practices to wider areas of scientific communication.

There are strong reasons for these conclusions, both born from the idealistic conviction that scientific results belong to the whole world and from the pragmatic conclusion that broad restrictions on scientific exchanges are not enforceable in practice, certainly not over a protracted period. Thus we strongly criticize much of the thoughtless extension of security restrictions over “sensitive” information that has no demonstrable direct security implications.

The Cox Commission implicitly considers China's thefts of U.S. secret information as a hostile act, yet essentially all nations in the world collect information from other countries whether they are friends or adversaries. The U.S. arrested an Israeli spy many years ago and more recently arrested an Australian agent without accusing Israel or Australia of hostile acts. Collecting information from other countries, which those nations do not wish to have disclosed, is part of the international mores of today. Generally, collection of such information is carried out clandestinely, and neither success of collection efforts nor penetration of secrecy barriers erected by nations are publicly acknowledged.

Let me examine the accusations of widespread Chinese “thefts” of vital nu clear weapons secrets that are contained in the Cox Commission report. That report states that “The People's Republic of China has stolen design information of the U.S. most advanced thermonuclear weapons.” Yet, in using the word “stolen” the report includes in that term indigenous efforts of China in designing their own nuclear weapons, information gathered from basic science or open scientific sources, and information obtained by espionage. In contrast to the conclusion of the Cox Commission, the intelligence community concludes that it cannot determine the extent of weapons information gathered from each of these sources. Although the Cox Commission does not address the range of information obtained by China between that publicly available and that still classified, it also does not assess the extent to which weapons that could be developed as a result of the “stolen” information could impact U.S. national security.

The Cox Commission agrees that no complete nuclear weapons drawings or design details have been acquired by China.

Can the information alleged to be stolen by the Cox Commission lead to new Chinese weapons designs that can be fielded without nuclear tests? In this latter connection, we note that China is a signatory of the Comprehensive Nuclear Weapons Test Ban Treaty and has given assurance that it will not conduct further nuclear weapons tests even in the absence of ratification of that treaty.

What are the facts? China tested its first nuclear weapon 36 years ago and since then has accumulated between 400 and 500 nuclear weapons in its inventory compared with an enduring stockpile of more than 10,000 such weapons in the possession of the U.S. and about 15,000 nuclear weapons held by Russia.

The composition of U.S. stockpiles are different from those of Russia. The U.S. has about 6,000 strategic weapons compared with Russia's 3,000 whereas Russia has a very much larger number of tactical, short-range nuclear weapons compared with those still retained by the U.S. But, of Chinese nuclear weapons, perhaps only 100 are strategic and only some 20 nuclear weapons could reach the U.S. from China or from its one operational strategic submarine. Moreover, China's nuclear weapons are almost all based at fixed land-based locations that could be rendered unusable by preemptive attack of the much larger forces of Russia and the U.S.

The unclassified version of the Cox Commission report is specific only in respect to two categories of weapons about which the People's Republic of China allegedly has acquired “stolen” information. The first category concerns the so-called neutron bomb belonging to the family of enhanced radiation weapons. The second pinpoints the W-88 technology where W-88 is the designation of a warhead whose development started close to 30 years ago and is now carried by a fraction of the U.S. Trident submarine fleet.

A neutron bomb is a nuclear weapon whose high-energy neutron radiation is enhanced relative to the other lethal effects of nuclear weapons, that is blast, thermal radiation, and delayed radioactive effects through fallout. The alleged utility of neutron weapons is the effect of neutrons on humans without damage to structures or materials. A neutron weapon was alleged for some time to result in a rather sharply defined kill radius. That advantage turned out to be largely illusory because the variability of terrain and interposed structures would blur the sharpness of that radius and also because there is a wide gap between a radiation dose that would disable personnel and that would produce only latent, that is delayed, lethal effects. A residual utility for neutron weapons is against massed armor where the protective steel cover could be penetrated by neutrons. The U.S. deployed neutron weapons at home for a limited period. China tested such weapons in 1985 but never deployed them. Considering this history and the fact that military utility of such weapons is clearly marginal, the importance of the alleged loss of design information on neutron weapons is minor.

The W-88 two-stage thermonuclear design leads to a weapon that is small in dimension and weight relative to its explosive power. It thus has made it possible for the U.S. to design the very slender re-entry vehicles that are incorporated into the multiple warhead independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) carried by elements of the U.S. submarine fleet. China has tested somewhat similar thermonuclear designs, which are, however, believed to be larger and more massive than their U.S. counterpart. China has not deployed any multiple warhead missiles. The alleged theft of the W-88 design thus raises the question whether this would enable China to adapt this design to deploy MIRVs in the future. Obviously this question cannot be conclusively answered nor can one conclude that China could not develop such multiple warhead missiles without access to U.S. information. Without nuclear tests this question is likely to remain moot.

If China developed multiple warhead missiles in the future, this would primarily enable China to deploy land-based multiple warhead missiles, which also could be made mobile, thus making them more survivable against pre-emptive attack. This would be in line with China's declared “no first use” policy, which restricts the use of China's nuclear forces to a mode responding only to nuclear attack by others. Under that doctrine increasing the survivability of China's forces, which at present is marginal, would be improved. However, the introduction of MIRVs into such forces would not significantly change the strategic threat against the U.S. which, considering the very small numbers involved, could be only retaliatory under any circumstances.

The primary evidence cited in the unclassified Cox Commission report for China's acquisition of the W-88 technology stems from documents delivered voluntarily by a Chinese “walk-in agent” to U.S. Central Intelligence Agency representatives. That document contains information about the W-88 that is classified under U.S. rules. It remains obscure what motivated the Chinese agent to deliver this document. It is also not known from which U.S. organization the alleged leak occurred because information about the W-88 is spread from the original designing Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories to the branches of the Defense Department, including the Navy, responsible for the deployment and maintenance of the submarine fleet.

To summarize, the importance of the information alleged to be stolen by the Cox Commission remains at best marginal to the military strategic relationship between the U.S. and China.

By far the largest part of the Cox Commission report is dedicated to discussing the alleged losses of U.S. missile technology to China. These losses are largely associated with the agreed use of Chinese rockets as propulsion vehicles for American communication satellites. In 1988 the Reagan administration decided to launch U.S. satellites on Chinese rockets because Chinese launch services were available and were less expensive than the use of U.S. vehicles. Eighteen satellites were launched by the Chinese; three of those launches failed. These failures resulted in financial losses to U.S. contractors and their insurance companies, and thus the American firms concerned (Loral and Hughes) agreed to cooperate with the People's Republic of China in analyzing these failures. The Cox Commission alleges that in connection with these joint failure analyses the American firms failed to secure the required export licenses. This charge is currently under litigation. Whatever the outcome of this legal process, it is clear that American participation in the failure analyses did not reveal encryption information and would not result in improvements in accuracy or range of Chinese rockets. The cooperation may have resulted in improvements in reliability of the Chinese systems and, of course, the contractual arrangements providing for the U.S. satellites to be carried by Chinese rockets provided money for the relevant Chinese entities. In discussing this complex situation, there are many factual errors in the Cox report regarding ranges and payloads of Chinese systems.

The Cox report also dedicates some space to discussing the political context of the alleged episodes of spying for Chinese military benefit. It is here where the highly politicized bias of the report is evident. The report cites that the Chinese constitution specifies that the Communist party should assert supremacy over all governmental, military, and civilian entities and that the People's Liberation Army is to be the primary beneficiary of economic productivity. In fact, none of the cited references to the Chinese constitution support or even mention these assertions. The People's Liberation Army complains publicly of insufficient funding as do military establishments of other nations. Also, under the current efforts to reduce the number of public enterprises in China in favor of privatization, the People's Liberation Army is losing a large fraction of its directly managed economic infrastructure. Thus the political role of the military forces of China is significantly misrepresented in the report.

In summary, the Cox Commission report is a highly dubious basis for judging the alleged hostile actions of China against U.S. interests. However, the conclusion that there are deficiencies in the governmental security systems, and in particular those of the DOE, are confirmed by other reports, notably those by the Rudman committee of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Accordingly, the unreliability of the Cox Commission report notwithstanding, the DOE has launched major, highly publicized initiatives to strengthen this security apparatus, and Congress is supporting a major reorganization effort to give greater autonomy to the defense-related operations of the DOE within the department. This reorganization formally took effect in the beginning of March of this year, but its details remain controversial and the nomination of the new head for the separate military unit of DOE has not as yet been sent to the Congress by the President.

At the end of last year the DOE established a security czar directly reporting to its secretary. This direct access interferes with the appropriate balance within the department between consideration of formal security, meaning security by restriction, and the function of those divisions within the department responsible for either defense, science, or energy programs. This has led to many actions in the name of security, some of which not only are of dubious value to security but also have interfered with the productivity of national weapons laboratories in carrying out their activities in support of national security. Moreover the reach of these security regulations have gone well beyond the weapons laboratories into the unclassified national laboratories of the DOE, and even university contractors of the department.

Among these so-called remedial actions are the following:

• Foreign visitors, in particular those from so-called sensitive countries, are subject to indices checks, which greatly delay their participation in collaborative activities.

• The DOE has ordered security stand-downs, which interrupted work at all laboratories, including that at the weap-ons laboratories and the basic science establishments.

• The DOE has issued instructions to its laboratories to treat certain broad categories of scientific communications as “deemed exports” requiring an export license.

• Congress has incorporated a provision into the Year 2000 Defense Authorization Act establishing fines for disclosure of “sensitive information” without defining that term. In turn, the general counsel of the DOE has deferred implementing that law pending a more precise description.

A common factor of both the deemed export provisions and the introduction of sensitive unclassified technical information has resulted in uncertainty as to the boundary between what is allowed or forbidden conduct, specifically in respect to speech by scientific staff of DOE or its contractors in the presence of noncitizens.

Additionally, the DOE is wrestling with the vexing problem of the security of its computers. The DOE has computation systems dedicated to classified information, but it also owns, and its contractors operate, large numbers of computers handling unclassified information for a large variety of purposes. Wen Ho Lee, the scientific staff member of Los Alamos whose case has received wide publicity, has been accused of downloading classified information from the classified to the unclassified system and having lost some of the tapes concerned. In response initially the DOE issued regulations that forbade foreign access to all computers owned by the department. This action resulted in widespread protests because the highly productive, and in fact necessary, international collaboration between DOE laboratories and foreign participants widely includes the use of computers. Although some of these questions remain unresolved, currently computer use by such collaborations can continue under “exceptions,” which may be granted by various authorities.

All of these actions in the name of remedies for the alleged deficiencies in security are totally peripheral to the principal issue, which is that of protecting highly classified information. It actually goes in the opposite direction in seriously diluting the efforts of those charged in carrying out this primary task. Such ill-considered remedial actions in the name of security not only delay and interfere with the conduct of laboratory scientific work involving foreign entities, but they also directly impact valuable activities designed to strengthen national security. American laboratories and industry depend heavily on the participation of foreigners because an insufficient number of Americans are trained in the scientific and technical disciplines for which American industry and scientific institutes have an increasing appetite.

In addition, national weapons laboratories are carrying out cooperative activities with foreign entities designed to lead to much needed increased protection and control over fissionable materials abroad, particularly in Russia. Such laboratory-to-laboratory collaboration in materials protection, control, and accounting have been seriously slowed down by the burdensome requirements embodied in the name of national security. The result is less security, not more. Moreover an aura of suspicion created by the highly public emphasis on security, including the bad handling of the Wen Ho Lee case, has made recruiting and retention of qualified personnel by national weapons laboratories substantially more difficult, with resulting negative impact on those laboratories' security-related programs, in particular the science-based stewardship program designed to maintain the reliability and safety of nuclear weapons.

It is difficult to evaluate how this situation will evolve. On one hand the “remedial” security programs may in time restrict their scope to protecting truly important and critical elements of information, such as detailed design of nuclear weapons, military operations, and the like. Alternatively, the hysteria induced by the “spy” reports, such as that of the Cox Commission, may lead to a widening scope of restrictive practices, severely damaging both national security and scientific productivity. Let us hope for the best!