A little less than four years ago, a high-ranking Chinese officer issued a thinly veiled threat to the United States. In a conversation with a recently retired American official, the chief of military intelligence for the People’s Liberation Army declared that China would use any means necessary to prevent Taiwan from becoming an independent state. If the United States interfered, it would find itself in a direct confrontation, perhaps even a nuclear showdown. And this was a test Washington was destined to lose: when push came to shove, the Chinese officer coolly informed his interlocutor, the United States would hardly be willing to “sacrifice Los Angeles to protect Taiwan.”
At the time it was made, this threat was barely credible. In the mid-1990’s, aside from shorter-range weapons of the sort it had recently fired in a successful effort to intimidate Taiwan, Beijing probably had no more than twenty missiles capable of reaching the United States. All were single-warhead rockets of dubious reliability and considerable vulnerability. Based in fixed installations and powered by volatile liquid fuel, they resembled the sorts of weapons that the U.S. and Soviet Union had last deployed in the early 1960’s.
But now fast-forward to the first decade of the 21st century. Over the next several years, China is expected to build a fleet of more than 500 theater-range rockets. Topped with highly accurate conventional warheads, these missiles may be able to strike not only at Taiwan but at targets throughout the Western Pacific, the home territory of most of America’s regional allies, as well as at U.S. military bases in Japan, Okinawa, Guam, and South Korea. By that point, China may also have deployed a force of at least several dozen mobile, solid-fueled ICBM’s, each ready to be launched at a moment’s notice and each equipped with at least one and possibly several independently-targetable nuclear warheads capable of reaching virtually anywhere in the United States.
By 2005, in short, the military balance in East Asia is likely to be far less favorable to the United States than it was in 1995. While the larger geopolitical implications are not yet certain, one thing is already clear: the impending shift in power will be, at least in part, the consequence of American actions. As the recent Cox Committee report makes painfully apparent, the weapons China builds over the next few years will be better—more accurate, more reliable, and more destructive—because of technology obtained in various ways from the United States.
How did this happen? Although the release of the Cox report has focused national attention on nuclear espionage, the full story of American dereliction is more entangled than that—and, if anything, much more alarming.
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Anyone interested in placing the revelations of the last few months in their proper perspective can profitably begin by reading James Mann’s remarkable new book, About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship with China, From Nixon to Clinton1 Mann, a diplomatic correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, combines a journalist’s eye for drama and the telling vignette with the thoroughness of a professional historian. He has interviewed virtually all the major participants in the making of America’s China policy over the past 30 years, and, through judicious use of the Freedom of Information Act, has managed to unearth an array of previously classified government studies and memoranda. Although his book was completed before the most recent disclosures, it puts our present fiasco in historical context, enabling us to see both the continuities and the departures in American policy over the longer term.
The story as Mann tells it divides neatly into three decade-long intervals, starting in 1969, the year that Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon began their attempts to open a diplomatic dialogue with China. At the outset, the two men hoped that simply by reestablishing contact with the People’s Republic, they would be able to exert considerable leverage over our then-principal adversary, the Soviet Union. Within a few years, however, the United States had moved from a policy of supposed “equidistance” between the two Communist giants to a tacit strategic alliance with China to oppose what the Chinese liked to call “Soviet hegemonism.”
Thus it was that, in the mid-1970’s, the United States began to take its first, cautious steps to enhance the capabilities of China’s armed forces. It was Kissinger, not his Chinese counterparts, who seized the initiative. In addition to his larger strategic calculations, Kissinger was motivated by more immediate concerns. Although he and Nixon had promised they would move swiftly to formalize relations with China and to cut U.S. ties with Taiwan, American domestic politics made it hard for them to deliver on their pledge. So, according to Mann, they “began to search for other ways to keep China happy.” Improved access to Western technology was, at first, a partial substitute for formal diplomatic recognition.
Although the United States was not yet prepared to sell military equipment directly to China, it was ready to look the other way while others did so. In the fall of 1975, the British broke a longstanding barrier by selling Rolls Royce jet-fighter engines to China without clearing them through normal export-control channels. A year later, in another first, Kissinger arranged for the sale of two large American-made computers. These were classic examples of what would come to be referred to as “dual-use” items: intended to help process oil-prospecting data, the computers were also potentially suitable for military applications.
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The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 marked a new stage in the U.S.-China relationship. During his early years in the presidency, Jimmy Carter had been content to expand, if gingerly, on the policies of his predecessors. Relations with Beijing were finally normalized at the end of 1978, and in the meantime the Chinese had been allowed access to a slowly growing list of American dual-use technologies as well as to European-made weapons and other defense hardware whose purchase had been facilitated by Washington.
After Afghanistan, things changed. Carter announced that we ourselves would begin selling military equipment, although for the time being the list would be restricted to “nonlethal” items such as air-defense radars, electronic countermeasure devices, and communications gear—no tanks, helicopters, or artillery pieces. This was a characteristic Carter half-measure, impelled more by (muddled) moral considerations than by any hard-headed strategic calculation.
Then came Ronald Reagan, who, after some hesitation, took the process initiated by Carter to its logical conclusion by permitting the purchase of “lethal” as well as “nonlethal” merchandise. The reasoning seemed clear: as the United States was still engaged in an intense strategic competition with the Soviet Union, the enemy of our enemy was—at least for the moment—our friend. As Mann reports, this view came with qualifications: at least some Reagan officials, including Paul Wolfowitz (Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 1982 to 1986) and Richard Armitage (Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs between 1983 and 1989) continued to see China not only as a counterweight to the Soviet Union but as a potential threat in its own right. For them, the goal of U.S. arms-sales policy should be to help China defend its frontiers and coastal waters but not to enhance its capacity to project power outward.
Whatever the rationale, open and large-scale arms sales continued throughout the Reagan and into the Bush administrations—until the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989. This event brought into being the new, more ambiguous, and more dangerous phase in which we find ourselves today.
In the aftermath of the killings in Beijing, President Bush suspended exports of all military equipment, lethal or otherwise. (This ban remains in effect today.) But Bush was also eager to patch things up with China. Sales of dual-use items were therefore allowed to continue, albeit under the watchful eye of American export-control officials. During the early 1990’s, a steady if still relatively small stream of lasers, computers, test instruments, and other devices made its way to Chinese customers, of whom many turned out to be involved in the development of military systems.2
Why, with the USSR on the verge of collapse, did the United States continue to engage in even this limited form of military-technical cooperation with China? Bush and his advisers seem to have been guided by a combination of inertia and the hope that China would help them construct a “new world order.” Over the next six years, Bill Clinton would embrace this same line of reasoning, embellishing upon it with typical gusto.
It is true that, during his successful presidential campaign in 1992, Clinton had attacked Bush for being soft on “the butchers of Tiananmen Square.” Once elected, he also made some initial gestures toward a tougher trade policy, conditioning an extension of China’s status as a most-favored nation (MFN) on improvements in human rights and freezing transfers of certain dual-use items as punishment for China’s continued export of missiles to Pakistan.
But when these initiatives evoked howls of protest both from Beijing and from the captains of American industry, Clinton quickly and characteristically reversed course. Within a matter of months, the administration was granting waivers to its own sanctions and backing away from any linkage of MFN with human rights.
These early confrontations taught the Chinese an important lesson: as Mann puts it, “to an extent considerably greater than its predecessors [the Clinton administration] was subject to commercial pressure.” Or, to put it more bluntly, the new President could be rolled.
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Over the years to come, Beijing would not lose sight of this central fact, or neglect to act upon it—most recently, in its tantrum over admission to the World Trade Organization. By the mid-1990’s, at any rate, China had the satisfaction of being seen by Washington no longer as an enemy of an enemy but as a genuine friend, a “strategic partner.” In order to secure the good will of this partner, the Clintonites considered it essential to grant it continued access to American technology as well as to American markets and capital.
Politically, this position had the considerable virtue of being virtually impossible to challenge. For if China seemed at times to be pocketing the benefits of “partnership” without delivering on its half of the bargain (as, for example, by restraining North Korea’s ballistic-missile program), administration officials could always point out that things might well be worse—and besides, any move to tighten up might provoke China to act in ways that would do even greater harm to U.S. interests.
Implicit blackmail being a less than satisfactory basis for true friendship, the administration also sought to construct loftier justifications for its policy of intense “engagement.” There was, first of all, the by-now familiar proposition that trade promotes economic development, which leads, inevitably, to political liberalization. (How long that process would take, and what sorts of unpleasantness might occur along the way, were questions left unexplored.) Accompanying this was the comforting notion that the world economy had anyway become truly “global,” which meant that if the United States refused to sell strategically significant technologies, China would simply buy them from somebody else. Huge impersonal forces had thus effectively eliminated either the possibility of prudence or the need for responsibility.
It is not hard to see how such arguments must have appealed to Bill Clinton. But, from the start, another factor was at work as well. Liberalizing high-tech trade had long been a top priority of many American corporations, which stood ready to reward compliant politicians with generous campaign contributions. In 1992, Clinton had benefited significantly from the support of computer, electronics, and software-industry executives, and he was eager both to repay his debt and to position himself as their preferred candidate in 1996. From his earliest days in office, as New York Times reporters Jeff Gerth and Eric Schmitt have described, Clinton took a direct and personal interest in overhauling the nation’s export-control system. “One reason I ran for President,” he assured a major electronics-industry executive in the fall of 1993, “was to tailor export controls to the realization of a post-cold war world.”
On this issue, at least, the President was as good as his word. Within months of his coming to office, the federal government had effectively deregulated the sale of whole categories of dual-use items, including many types of computers and most telecommunications equipment. Where controls did remain in place, they were often significantly relaxed. Licensing procedures were also overhauled in ways that made it much easier for American companies to win approval of proposed sales and much harder for the government to stop or even adequately to study them. As a result, to take one notable example, American manufacturers were soon able to export to China computers seven times more powerful than any previously sent. Whatever else these so-called “supercomputers” might be good for, they were ideally suited to performing the vast number of calculations necessary to simulate nuclear explosions or to crack encrypted messages.
Some (though presumably not all) of the unintended results to which the new leniency led have since come to light. The Cox Committee report provides new details on one such case. In the spring of 1994, over the initial objections of the Navy, Air Force, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Intelligence Agency, the Commerce Department authorized the sale to China of super-high-precision machine tools of a sort previously denied. McDonnell Douglas had used these devices to manufacture parts for U.S. military aircraft and missiles, but the Chinese buyer promised they would be applied solely to the construction of commercial passenger planes. Some of the machine tools were later found to have been diverted to a facility involved in the production of military aircraft and anti-ship cruise missiles.
In 1995, Gerth and Schmitt have reported, with his reelection campaign approaching, the President intervened again to urge Secretary of Commerce Ronald Brown to do even more “to streamline and liberalize” the remaining system of controls. Sure enough, within months the administration was considering relaxing further the remaining restrictions on computer exports. Under the proposed new regulations, American companies could sell still more powerful computers to China, though exports of the very fastest machines were supposed to be restricted to “civilian” customers.
At the time, critics of this policy within the administration worried that there would be no way of telling where a particular computer wound up, or for what purpose it was being used. Controversy over the issue was finally resolved by the President himself—in favor of leniency—and Chinese buyers promptly purchased a large number of very high-speed supercomputers. The Cox report concludes that, in fact, some of these were “obtained by PRC organizations involved in the research and development of: missiles, satellites, spacecraft, submarines, aircraft, military-systems components, command and control, communications, microwave and laser sensors”—and nuclear weapons.
In 1996 the President made a judgment about another controversial matter, too: he stripped the State Department of its authority to make decisions about the export of commercial communication satellites and transferred responsibility to the more business-friendly Commerce Department.
Since 1988, U.S. companies had periodically used relatively inexpensive Chinese rockets and launch facilities to boost their satellites into orbit. All such transactions were governed by a set of detailed regulations meant to limit the possible unauthorized transfer of information between U.S. technicians and their Chinese counterparts. American satellite-makers found the rules burdensome, in part because they made it difficult to teach the Chinese how to keep their rockets from exploding. With the Commerce Department in control, they hoped that the flow of information would not be as closely regulated.
Reportedly, the president of Hughes Electronics Corporation, a builder of satellites, played a major role in persuading the administration to change its licensing procedures; the president of Loral, another company with a direct stake in satellite exports to China, would eventually become the single largest contributor to the Clinton reelection campaign. According to the Cox report, at the same time that Loral and Hughes were lobbying for looser controls, they were already engaged in transferring sensitive technical information that may well have helped the Chinese to improve the reliability and accuracy of their ballistic missiles.
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All of which brings us at last to the matter of espionage. Since, despite the best efforts of the Clinton administration to relax export controls, the United States was not simply giving China everything it needed to modernize its armed forces, the Chinese also engaged in an active and apparently very successful effort to steal American secrets.
In what is perhaps its most stunning passage, the Cox Committee reveals the PRC’s most significant theft: “classified information on all of the United States’s most advanced thermonuclear warheads.” These data have probably already been put to good use. It appears likely that a thermonuclear device tested by China in the mid-1990’s was based on an American design obtained in the late 1980’s. This new, miniaturized weapon could be used on mobile intercontinental-range ballistic missiles of the kind now scheduled for deployment by the Chinese just after the turn of the century.
Whether this particular coup was more the result of Chinese skill than of American sloppiness remains to be determined. As has been widely reported, the man suspected of passing on the warhead design is a naturalized American citizen and a longtime government employee at Los Alamos with appropriate security clearances. Betrayals from within are difficult to detect and impossible entirely to prevent. Still, it is also the case that, as early as 1988, the General Accounting Office (GAO) had begun to warn of lax security precautions at the nation’s three key nuclear-weapons laboratories. With the cold war winding down, and the labs eager to find new, nondefense roles, more and more foreign scientists were being invited to participate in exchanges and joint research projects. By the mid-1990’s the volume of foreign visitors was expanding at a rapid pace, with many coming from so-called “sensitive countries” (China, India, and the former Soviet states).
And here is another fact: the efforts of the weapons labs to branch out and open up had support from the highest levels. According to news reports, in the mid-1990’s, Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary went so far as to prohibit, as “discriminatory,” badges clearly showing an employee’s level of clearance. More seriously, in 1994-95, at the same time it was loosening export controls, the Clinton administration initiated a “U.S.-China Lab-to-Lab Technical Exchange Program,” designed, in the words of one participant, to promote arms control and engage the Chinese in constructive dialogue by “sharing selected information on nuclear materials and facilities.”
Nearly a decade after its first report, the GAO warned again in 1997 that most of the visitors to the Los Alamos and Sandia laboratories were not subject to any kind of background check, with the result that some people “with connections to foreign intelligence organizations were gaining access to the laboratories without DOE [Department of Energy] and/or laboratory officials’ advance knowledge of the visitors connections.” Once inside, these guests were able to engage in wide-ranging discussions with American scientists and were sometimes permitted to walk the “unsanitized” halls unescorted and after hours. In one instance, GAO inspectors reported finding “six boxes of papers marked ‘sensitive material’ in red letters on the outside . . . left in an open hallway accessible to foreign visitors.”
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Administration officials claim that the original theft of warhead data did not happen on their watch. This may be true. But another, massive breach appears to have occurred very much on their watch, in 1994 or 1995. In any case, what makes the issue more complex, and potentially more damaging, is the question of what happened when evidence of the penetrations finally began to emerge. Former DOE intelligence chief Notra Trulock has told Congress that he first warned White House officials in April 1996, and again in July 1997; but it was not until February 1998 that President Clinton signed an order mandating tighter security at the laboratories. Another eight months would pass before the order was implemented. The accused spy was not dismissed from his job until this past March, when details of the Cox Committee’s findings on nuclear espionage first leaked into print.
This lackadaisical response itself demands an explanation. It seems clear that, at the outset, White House officials were being told something they desperately did not want to hear. In the spring of 1996, the administration was working hard to ease tensions with China over Taiwan and to coax Beijing into signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). (The Chinese finally did so, but only after they had completed a series of tests that convinced them their new warheads would actually work.) The presidential race was also heating up, and Clinton’s top advisers were no doubt eager to avoid disclosures that might raise questions about the wisdom of “engagement.”
Later, with the election safely won, the White House was busy preparing for a U.S.-China summit and defending itself against charges that it had benefited from illegal Chinese campaign contributions. Revelations of nuclear spying at this point would have been doubly embarrassing. In response to Trulock’s second warning, a National Security Council staffer ordered the CIA to prepare what has since been described as a “quick study” of the recent great leap forward in Chinese nuclear-warhead design. The CIA’s report pointed to other possible sources of information from which Chinese weapons designers may have benefited. The situation was complicated, the evidence inconclusive. Allegations of espionage were once again pushed to the back burner.
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It may be a measure of how secure we feel right now, or perhaps of how jaded we have become about such matters, that even the most recent and quite devastating news about nuclear espionage has been greeted in some quarters with a shrug of indifference. After all, it is said, everyone spies; and is it not fruitless, in today’s free-trading, Internet-linked global economy, to try to control the flow of technology and knowledge? Besides, if profit has replaced empire as the preeminent goal of nations, what difference do changes in the balance of military power really make?
It may be comforting to imagine that there are no more secrets, and reassuring to assert that “if we don’t sell it, someone else will.” But such beliefs happen to be mistaken. Reliable data on how to design and build a miniaturized nuclear warhead are not available on any website. According to the Cox Committee, access to such information, obtained via clandestine means, permitted the Chinese to move “in a handful of years, from 1950’s-era strategic nuclear capabilities to the more modern thermonuclear weapons designs.” Without it, they would have had either to continue as a holdout on the CTBT (thereby incurring the suspicion if not the opprobrium of most of the developed world) or have forgone forever the possibility of modernizing their ICBM force. A well-placed spy permitted Beijing to have the best of both worlds: a badge of good international citizenship and the capacity greatly to expand the size, reach, and lethality of its strategic arsenal.
Nor are the secrets of the federal weapons labs the only ones worth keeping. Leading American aerospace and telecommunications companies have accumulated a vast storehouse of knowledge about how to build and integrate complex systems. Such knowledge is essential to the manufacture and operation both of cutting-edge commercial products and next-generation weapons systems; it is typically the product of decades of experience, and much of it can best be conveyed not on paper but through intensive, face-to-face contact among highly trained scientists and engineers. A few American-led seminars on nose-cone “fairings,” “kick motors,” and “separation mechanisms” may not have involved the transfer of classified documents, but they could well have shaved years off the time it will take China to deploy a world-class ballistic-missile force.
The notion that even the most advanced high-technology products are now available from an infinite array of sources also deserves closer examination. It turns out, for example, that American companies and their subsidiaries still dominate the world market for supercomputers. If the U.S. government truly wanted to slow the pace at which countries like China, India, Russia, and Pakistan acquire the latest versions of these machines, it could do so; and, with the assistance of only a handful of other governments (in particular the Japanese, German, and British), it could do so with even greater effectiveness.
In short, although the United States cannot freeze the distribution of knowledge and power, it can do a great deal more than it has done in recent years to slow the diffusion of select, critical technologies. And this is a vitally important goal: we would have much less reason to fear the Chinese if they were to become a functioning democracy before they acquired a truly modern military. In international politics, as in life, timing can be everything.
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This is not to say that China has already acquired a truly modern military. Despite the fact that Beijing may now be in a position to advance considerably beyond where it was when the Chinese officer issued his bluff in 1995, it is still in many respects a second-rate power. Chinese aircraft, the best of which are 1980’s-vintage models purchased from the former Soviet Union, lag far behind their American counterparts. China’s tanks are antiquated next to ours, and its navy has yet to develop even small aircraft carriers, let alone the oceangoing behemoths with which the United States projects its power around the globe.
Comparisons like these have caused the American intelligence community generally to take a rather relaxed view of China’s military potential. But they miss the point. Chinese strategists are not interested simply in plodding along the path to military power already taken by the United States and the Soviet Union. To judge from what they write and say to one another, they are eager to exploit the latest advances in technology in order to develop entirely new weapons and concepts of operations. A “revolution in military affairs” of the sort that many American experts now believe to be under way worldwide could render entire categories of traditional weapons systems obsolete and, in the process, permit an agile, ambitious power rapidly to gain ground on a fat, complacent hegemon.3
The Chinese, in other words, may be looking for ways not simply to catch up with where we are now but to exceed where we are likely to be in twenty years. In the meantime, they seem to be searching for shortcuts: forms of military capability that will permit them quickly to counter our current strengths and to exert a greater political influence throughout East Asia. For these purposes, a large arsenal of shorter-range, conventional ballistic missiles, backed by a modest force of intercontinental-range nuclear weapons, is quite appropriate.
Thus armed, China will be able to threaten to bombard Taiwan, closing its ports and airfields, damaging its defenses, and disrupting its economy, without actually destroying the island. If other regional powers should seek to come to Taiwan’s assistance, or allow the United States to do so from their soil, they will run the risk of similar treatment. The handful of bases on which the U.S. relies to project its power into the Pacific will be vulnerable to precise attack. And if the United States threatens to respond by striking back at China, it will confront the likelihood of nuclear retaliation.
In the face of these looming realities, it is no wonder that the United States, Japan, and Taiwan should all have expressed interest lately in building some form of defense against ballistic missiles. Nor is it a surprise that China, for its part, has embarked on an intensive campaign of pressure to delay or derail the development of any such system.
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For as long as the Soviet Union was around, it could be argued that arming China made a certain sense. If, at times, American officials pursued this policy with more vigor and less caution than was warranted, their mistakes were mistakes of degree, committed in the service of a larger strategic goal. Since 1989, however, or since 1991 at the very latest, our errors have been more fundamental, and much more dangerous.
The massacre in Tiananmen Square ought to have served as a reminder that, as long as China is ruled by Communist autocrats, it can never truly be a friend or a trusted partner of the United States. To the contrary, with the Soviet Union gone from the scene, China is obviously the state most likely to mount a serious, longterm challenge to American power.
Whether our current leadership realizes it or not, the United States and China are already engaged in a struggle for mastery in Asia. As the Economist recently predicted, the rhetoric of “strategic partnership” is about to give way to more open talk of “strategic competition.” True, this competition will be different in many ways from the one in which we were involved for over 40 years with the Soviet Union. The United States and China are likely to remain far more intertwined economically and in other ways than the superpowers ever were during the cold war. At least for the moment, moreover, China’s ambitions are more regional than global, having less to do with the fervent wish to promulgate an ideology than with more traditional great-power desires for local preponderance and worldwide prestige. Like the United States at the time of the Monroe Doctrine, China may want nothing more than to be acknowledged as the dominant power in what it regards as its own backyard. But the pursuit of even this comparatively modest goal will put the two countries definitively at odds.
A Sino-American competition need not result in open confrontation, or in war—though it could. But one thing is certain: if the relationship is to be peaceful, what will be required on our part is a complete turnabout from the combined pattern of exaggerated but empty expressions of amity and utter recklessness about preserving our present advantages. When it comes to putting our own house in order, there is no longer the slightest doubt that the course pursued in recent years has amounted to a major strategic blunder. All that remains to be determined is the extent to which it may also have been a crime.
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1 Knopf, 352 pp., $30.00.
2 Some of these sales are detailed in a report by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, U.S. Exports to China: 1988-1998: Fueling Proliferation (April 1999).
3 For example, the same huge aircraft carriers in which the United States has invested so much over the years, and on which its strategy so heavily depends, may soon be irretrievably vulnerable to swarms of relatively inexpensive cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and intelligent torpedoes.
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