Hello Henry!
I'm sure those unnamed "Chinese officials" hit it right on the head. It's real blatant this time too. I waded through this pile of last week's newspapers in the recycle box. On the news side, there was only a fraction as many column inches as in the editorial page concerning the spy case, and those articles also either mentioned only once in passing or not at all the the spying happened in the 80s. In fact, I didn't even catch that fact at first from reading the the local fishwrap. However since I was curious about the case (I've always been real interested in atom bombs, ever since I was a cold-war kid and we did those exciting "under the desk" drills in elementary school to prepare us against flash burns and flying glass) I looked it up in the news sites on that triumph of tax-funded technology, the mighty ARPAnet.
I read there, what was leaked was some sort of engineering "secrets" concerning the W-88 ICBM warhead. I have a picture of some Minuteman III warheads, in Richard Rhodes's book "Dark Sun," showing three black, conical reentry vehicles on a "warhead bus," and the caption reads, "...Each Mk 12A reentry vehicle is 5.9 feet long and 21 inches in diameter, yielding 350 kilotons." Could this be the exact bomb in question? That's about 8000 cu.in., it couldn't weigh more than a ton or two, yet that's thirty times the yield of the Hiroshima bomb.
By the fact that this Los Alamos physicist Lee isn't behind bars already, I'm guessing that the so-called "secrets" are not the sort of detailed diagrams and calcluations that Fuchs &c. supplied the Soviets, but instead something like some kind of mathematical modeling technique. Physics and engineering "secrets" aren't really secrets anyway in the sense that they can't be known without being revealed by the secret-holder, since what one physicist discovers can and probably will be rediscovered independently by another physicist.
The net news agencies say what led the CIA/FBI/DOE to suspect something was amiss was analysis of Chinese nuclear tests - they were making too much progress too fast miniaturizing their hydrogen bombs. Even in the fifties, we could deduce the physical makeup of Soviet bombs by analyzing the composition and ratios of radioisotopes that were released by the tests. It's also possible that the U.S. also has spies in the Chinese nuclear establishment. I'd expect the CIA to try, anyway. At any rate, it seems clear that the "secret" was out the door, long gone and permanently lost for good several years before Clinton got elected.
Now here's three days of the local paper's editorial pages:
Mar 9, William Safire, "Abetting spying by the Chinese"
"...Berger has a unique geopolitical Weltanschauung: Whatever elects Bill Clinton and protects him from criticism is good for our national security. Accordingly his spin control will be: The initial breach happened in the '80s, so blame Ronald Reagan, not us...Yanked to a complete turnabout on trade policy with China by the Riady family and other heavy campaign contributors in the satellite and computer businesses, Clinton did not want Congress - empowered by law with oversight of intelligence - to know what the FBI and CIA and DOE suspected about China's spy in Los Alamos..."
(Please note that the quote above contains the one and only mention in the entire editorial of the fact that whatever spying had taken place happened several years before Clinton was first elected.)
Mar 11, Michael Kelly, "The collapse of a corrupt China policy"
"...One day, Taipei will awaken to a few simple questions: Would the people of Taiwan care to peacefully rejoin the People's Republic of China? Or would they prefer to stand under a rain of nuclear missiles? And would the people of the Unirted States care to go to war over this? Bill Clinton will owe for his part in making this day come."
(Please note that Michael Kelly even outdoes Safire by managing to write fourteen column inches of apocalyptic diatribe about Clinton traitory with out mentioning even once that the alleged spying took place in the mid-80s!)
Mar 12, Jeff MacNelly, cartoon:
At the top of this cartoon is written in large, clear lettering:
At the LOS ALAMOS LABS
Sometime in 1996:
Left frame, security guard addressing an oriental-appearing scientist in a white lab coat, carrying a bag, labeled "To China" with papers sticking out of it labeled "TOP SECRET":
Guard - Hold it. What's in the bag, Doc? Scientist - Umm...It's cash. I'm on my way to a Clinton fund-raiser.
Right frame, scientist walking out the door, guard turning away, his jacket reads "Energy Dept":
Guard (waving) - Have a nice day!
(Please note how MacNelly, for the benefit of cartoon readers, spells the lie right out in black and white, that the alleged spying itself took place in 1996, as part of a conspiracy involving Clinton's campaign.)
Please excuse me for this personal digression, but it sounds like I'm making an elaborate apology for Clinton, maybe because I'm a big WJC partisan, so I want to make it clear that I am NOT a Friend of Bill. They say that Clinton is as full of charm as a chameleon is full of colors, but so happens WJC's brand of charm makes me break out in hives. End personal digression. But when you read that editorial page crap - isn't that truly fucking awful? It really pisses me off to be lied to so bold this way, like I'm an idiot or something. What bare-naked fraud! What a heavy-duty push to sell an ignorant public a classic "big lie" about Clinton the Commie Atom Spy! Never mind that the date of the terrible crime is off by a decade or so. Who lost Taiwan? It's that bastard Clinton's fault. Fry him up, just like the Rosenbergs. Yeah!
Whew! Know what's wrong with these Republicans? They just aren't subtle.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net