WASHINGTON -- Working with nuclear secrets stolen from a U.S. government lab, China has made a leap in the development of nuclear weapons: the miniaturization of its bombs, according to administration officials.
Until recently, China's nuclear weapons designs were a generation behind those of the United States, largely because Beijing was unable to produce the small warheads that can be launched from a single missile at multiple targets and form the backbone of a modern nuclear force.
But by the mid-1990s, China had built and tested such small bombs, a breakthrough that officials say was accelerated by the theft of U.S. nuclear secrets from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The espionage is believed to have occurred in the mid-1980s, officials said. But it was not detected until 1995, when American experts analyzing Chinese nuclear test results found similarities to America's most advanced miniature warhead, the W-88.
By the next year, government investigators had identified a suspect, an American scientist at Los Alamos laboratory, where the atomic bomb was first developed.
The investigators also concluded that Beijing was continuing to steal secrets from the government's major nuclear weapons laboratories, which had been increasingly opened to foreign visitors since the end of the Cold War.
The White House was told of the full extent of China's spying in summer 1997, on the eve of the first U.S.-Chinese summit meeting in eight years -- a meeting intended to dramatize the success of President Clinton's efforts to improve relations with Beijing.
White House officials say they took the allegations seriously; as proof of this they cite Clinton's ordering the labs within six months to improve security.
But some U.S. officials assert that the White House sought to minimize the espionage issue.
"This conflicted with their China policy," said a U.S. official, who like many others in this article spoke on condition of anonymity.
"It undercut the administration's efforts to have a strategic partnership with the Chinese."
The White House denies that.
"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 reveals that throughout the government, the response to the nuclear theft was marked by delays, inaction and skepticism -- even though senior intelligence officials regarded it as one of the most damaging spy cases in recent history.
Initially, the FBI did not aggressively pursue the criminal investigation of lab theft, U.S. officials said. Now, nearly three years later, no arrests have been made.
Only in the past several weeks, after prodding from Congress and the secretary of energy, have government officials administered lie detector tests to the main suspect, a Los Alamos computer scientist who is Chinese-American.
The suspect failed a test in February, according to senior administration officials.
At the Energy Department, officials waited more than a year to act on the FBI's 1997 recommendations to improve security at the weapons laboratories and restrict the suspect's access to classified information, officials said.
The department's chief of intelligence, who raised the first alarm about the case, was ordered last year by senior officials not to tell Congress about his findings because critics might use them to attack the administration's China policies, officials said.
At the White House, senior aides to Clinton fostered a skeptical view of the evidence of Chinese espionage and its significance.
White House officials, for example, said they determined on learning of it that the Chinese spying would have no bearing on the administration's dealings with China, which included the increased exports of satellites and other militarily useful items.
They continued to advocate looser sales of supercomputers and other equipment, even as intelligence analysts documented the scope of China's espionage.
Samore, the Security Council official, did not accept the Energy Department's conclusion that China's nuclear advances stemmed largely from the theft of U.S. secrets.
In 1997, as Clinton prepared to meet with China's President Jiang Zemin, he asked the CIA for a quick alternative analysis of the issue. The agency found that China had stolen secrets from Los Alamos but differed with the Energy Department over the significance.
The three national weapons labs owned by the Department of Energy had long resisted FBI and congressional pressure to tighten their security policies. Energy officials acknowledge security problems at the labs.
Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, also in New Mexico, had been granted waivers in 1994 from an Energy Department policy that visiting foreign scientists get background checks.
Lab officials resented the intrusions caused by counterintelligence measures, arguing that restrictions on foreign visitors would clash with the labs' new mandate to help Russia and other nations safeguard their nuclear stockpiles.
The Clinton administration was also using increased access to the laboratories to support its policy of engagement with China, as had been done under previous, Republican administrations.
In December 1996, for example, China's defense minister, Gen. Chi Haotian, visited Sandia on a Pentagon-sponsored trip.
Energy Department officials were not told in advance, and they later complained that Chi and his delegation had not received proper clearances, officials said.
There is no evidence in this case that foreign visitors were involved in the theft of information.
Pub Date: 3/06/99