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US secrets bring Chinese nuclear weapons up-to-date

C K Arora in Washington

Working with nuclear secrets stolen from an American government laboratory, China has made a leap in the development of nuclear weapons: the miniaturisation of its bombs, according to the New York Times.

The paper said that until recently, China's nuclear weapons designs were a generation behind those of the United States, largely because Beijing was unable to produce small warheads that could be launched from a single missile at multiple targets and form the backbone of a modern nuclear strike force.

But by the mid-1990s, China had built and tested such small bombs, a breakthrough that administration officials say was accelerated by the theft of US nuclear secrets from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The espionage is believed to have occurred in the mid-1980s. But it was not detected until 1995, when experts analysing Chinese nuclear test results found similarities to America's most advanced miniature warhead, the W-88.

By 1996, government investigators had identified a suspect, an American scientist at Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was first developed in the Forties.

The investigators also concluded that Beijing was continuing to steal secrets from the government's major nuclear weapons laboratories, which have increasingly been opened to foreign visitors after the end of the Cold War.

The White House was told of the full extent of China's spying in the summer of 1997, on the eve of the first US-Chinese summit meeting in eight years - a meeting intended to dramatise the success of President Bill Clinton's efforts to improve relations with Beijing.

White House officials say they took the allegations seriously. As proof, they cite Clinton's ordering the labs within six months to improve security.

But some US officials assert that the White House sought to play down the issue for policy reasons.

"This conflicted with their China policy," the Times quoted one official as saying. "It undercut the administration's efforts to have a strategic partnership with the Chinese."

The daily said the White House denied the charge. "The idea that we tried to cover up or downplay these allegations to limit the damage to United States-Chinese relations is absolutely wrong," said Gary Samore, the senior National Security Council official who handled the issue.

Yet a reconstruction by the New York Times revealed that throughout the government, the response to the nuclear theft was marked by delays, inaction and scepticism -- even though senior intelligence officials regarded it as one of the most damaging spy cases in recent history.

UNI

The Pokhran tests and after

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