Cox Report

Henry C.K. Liu hliu at mindspring.com
Fri May 28 00:33:12 PDT 1999


10/16-18/94 - SecDef Perry and Senators Inouye, Nunn, Stevens, and Warner goes to China for three days of meetings with top government officials and the PLA. Perry pushed for greater transparency in China's defense spending and military strategy. Perry also suggested that if China would agree to halt underground nuclear testing, the US would provide nuclear simulation technology to China to ensure the reliability of the weapons.

Chinese officials voiced concern that if the US deployed a theater ballistic missile defense system China's limited nuclear force could be rendered impotent.

This nuclear simulation technology is the same "secret" that the Cox report accused China of stealing via Wen Ho Lee, a nuclear weapons scientist (originally from anti Communist Taiwan) at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Over the past 25 years, the US has been tacitly providing China with nuclear arms assistance. The logic behind this policy was based on the doctrine that in order for deterrence to work, all sides would have to reach a credible level of sophistication in weapon and delivery technology. Just as the US pushed SLBM "secrets" on the Soviets to increase stability, US strategic planners have been pushing for purposeful leaks and assistance on where to find them to Chinese scientists. In exchange, China agreed to allow the CIA to set up monitoring station in China target against Soviet activities. This 25-year old policy is now dragged out as a weapon of American domestic politics.

Friday May 28 1999

Memo reveals

military knew of

'nuclear theft' in

Reagan era

ASSOCIATED PRESS in Washington

A declassified memo shows US military

intelligence believed as early as Ronald

Reagan's first term as president that China was

stealing US nuclear secrets.

An analyst doubted that the 1984 memo ever

reached Mr Reagan's National Security

Council inside the White House, but said the

information it contained would have been

known to key officials inside the government.

"Increased access to this technology and

continued Chinese efforts will, in the 1980s

and early 1990s, show up as qualitative

warhead improvements," the Defence

Intelligence Agency [DIA] said in the

document, known as an estimative brief.

"Qualitative improvements that the Chinese are

developing for their nuclear warheads will

depend on the benefits that Chinese are now

deriving from both overt contact with US

scientists and technology and the covert

acquisition of US technology."

A private group in Washington, the National

Security Archive, used the Freedom of

Information Act to obtain the four-page

document, entitled "Nuclear Weapons Systems

in China", from the Pentagon-run agency

which is engaged in intelligence analysis.

Jeffrey Richelson, who is compiling a

15,000-page collection of declassified

documents on Sino-US relations, said: "I think

the document says people at DIA, and I

presume others in the intelligence community,

understood exactly how the Chinese were

going to go about improving their arsenal."

Mr Richelson doubted the memo was

forwarded to Mr Reagan's National Security

Council.

"Certainly key officials in the government

would have understood the essence of the

observation about how the Chinese would

have gone about improving their nuclear

arsenal," he said.

Documents such as the 1984 memo are

supplying valuable ammunition to the

Democrats, who are eager to move the blame

for China's alleged theft of US nuclear secrets

away from President Bill Clinton's

administration and on to the Reagan and

George Bush administrations.

Henry C.K. Liu



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