Country A has 10,000 nuclear weapons, half of which could be launched at the United States within minutes. Many are still in operation beyond their expected design lifetimes. Because of a severely deteriorated economy, workers at nuclear facilities go unpaid for weeks or months, security guards leave their posts to forage for food and early-warning systems fall into disrepair-raising the risk that false alarms could trigger an accidental attack. Nevertheless, A wants to rebuild its arsenal of short-range nuclear weapons to counter a perceived threat from NATO.
Country B has 400 nuclear weapons, 20 of which could reach the United States. Because B's warheads are physically separated from the missiles, and because the missiles themselves are stored unfueled, it would take at least 24 hours to ready them for launch. Country B has one nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine and no long-range bombers or aircraft carriers. Country B's annual military budget is estimated at $36 billion; the United States spends $270 billion.
Until recently, most observers would have described country A - Russia - as the greater threat. But following the release late last month of the "Cox Report" (a tome produced by the House Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China) country B - China - has been named No. 1 threat by many congressional Republicans, presidential aspirants, editorial writers and armchair analysts.
The report's most sensational findings, leaked selectively over the last five months, primarily to The New York Times, have been uncritically accepted despite a stunning lack of evidence to back them up. For starters, if China has been diligently swiping our technological secrets for 20 years, why is it still using the military hardware it designed in the 1960s and 1970s? The section of the Cox report receiving the most attention, the one concerning the alleged theft of nuclear weapons secrets, was based almost entirely on the worst-case testimony of one analyst at the Department of Energy.
Rep. John Spratt (D-S.C.), who served on the Cox committee, criticized the report for this reason. "It is simply not accurate to say that China's (nuclear weaponry) design is on a 'par' with our own," Spratt said on May 26. "There are, unfortunately, a number of places where the report reaches to make a point, and frankly, exaggerates." A wide-ranging damage assessment conducted by the entire U.S. intelligence community also disputed the Cox report's conclusions. A remarkably critical report by a special panel of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, released June 15, concurred. "Possible damage has been minted as probable disaster; workaday delay and bureaucratic confusion have been cast as diabolical conspiracies. Enough is enough." The Cox report's credibility is further undermined by numerous factual errors that would have been caught by more careful reporting.
Take, for example, its characterization of Qian Xuesen, a Chinese student who attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a scholarship in the mid-1930s and did important early work for the U.S. government in the fields of aerodynamics and rocketry.
Qian is described as a spy who "worked on classified programs, including the Titan ICBM" who was then "permitted" to return to China where he became "the 'father' of (China's) ballistic missile and space programs" after being accused of spying in the 1950s.
In lieu of evidence, the Cox report lamely notes that the nearly 50-year-old allegations against Qian "are presumed to be true." But as the latest issue of the Secrecy and Government Bulletin points out, Qian could hardly have worked on the Titan program, which began in October, 1955, because his security clearance was revoked in June, 1950, and he was deported in September, 1955!
Three months ago, Dr. Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos National Laboratory mathematician singled out as a spy in a series of inflammatory articles in the Times, was fired from the job he had held for more than 20 years.
Government investigators now privately acknowledge that Lee, a naturalized U.S. citizen, is unlikely ever to be charged with espionage because there are no witnesses, no evident motive and nothing more than circumstantial evidence that a crime was committed.
The furor surrounding the Cox report is disturbingly reminiscent of the infamous bomber and missile "gaps" of the mid-1950s and early 1960s. Those "gaps," a product of the military's - especially the Air Force's - tendency to assume the worst about Soviet capabilities and intentions, were eventually disproved, but not before Congress authorized weapons programs that led the United States into a costly and unnecessary arms race with itself.
A careful review of our own history and a little perspective are essential if we are to avoid reviving the Cold War, turning China into our enemy, and losing sight of the real and growing nuclear menace facing us.
Stephen I. Schwartz is publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and editor and co-author of "Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940."