The current furor about Chinese nuclear and rocket espionage seems detached from historical reality and from all we learned during the Cold War.  It is a debate that can damage our national security by undermining beneficial negotiations and agreements and by setting us of on a very dangerous track of revived arms race and cold war.  We have always worried that domestic politics in China (and Taiwan) could cause irrational and dangerous tendencies.  Let us make sure we are not guilty of this same mistake.

I hope these points can bring a realistic understanding of some of the difficulties in our relations with China:

1. The alleged nuclear espionage took place during the Ronald Reagan administration.  Vice President George Bush had served both as head of the Liaison Office in Beijing and head of the CIA.  The Evil Empire still existed, and the United States was cultivating China to help counter it.  Whether sharing  nuclear secrets was actually encouraged and/or was a violation of law, the visits to nuclear laboratories were part of the courting process between the U.S. and China, taking place under the watchful eyes of an executive branch very sensitive to China. To suggest these events reflect negatively on President Clinton is bizarre.

2.  China exploded its first atomic bomb in 1964.  Two decades later, when the alleged incident occurred, Chinese scientists knew a lot about nuclear science and were collecting and integrating information from all around the world.  A great deal of information was in the public sector, and the Progressive magazine, using public sources, published an article on how to build an atomic bomb. In this environment, the evolution of nuclear technology in China could not have depended on a single incident of espionage.

3. Closely related is the issue of whether China got illegal help to make rockets more reliable and accurate. The Chinese invented rocket technology over a thousand years ago.  They have been orbiting satellites since 1969, thirty years.  China’s rockets, as those in the U.S., are primarily used to launch satellites to expand telephone and television service.  China also launches satellites for the U.S. corporations and others, on a commercial basis.  Improvement in communications is critically important for economic modernization in China.  It is very difficult to avoid sharing technical insights in multi-national corporate environments that benefit the United States.  That children of Chinese military leaders are involved in the telephone business shows that military men place their children in profitable businesses (Chinese style “crony capitalism” ),  not  military strategy.

We can not avoid the dilemma that improvements in rockets to launch communications satellites will inevitably have spill-over implications for military development.  Parenthetically, our development of public, inexpensive GPS technology (even in its degraded civilian format) and off-the-shelf autopilots would seem to have as much relevance to the accuracy of Chinese (and other) missiles as titillating questions of technical reports on rocket reliability linked to launching contracts and campaign contributions

4. Even if China is miniaturizing nuclear warheads and improving missile accuracy, it is not clear that this harms our security interests.  Historically, we argued that liquid fueled rockets and large warheads created an unstable, dangerous environment because rockets had to be launched on the basis of early warnings and great uncertainty (“use ‘em or loose ‘em”).  Moreover, the political, military, and moral implications of “taking out” a city of millions of people were so enormous that a threat of retaliation was not fully credible.  We argued that invulnerable, accurate missiles and small warheads would create a more stable, safer environment. On this logic, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, we spent tens and hundreds of billions of dollars.  We also developed agreements with the Soviet Union in which we accepted a mirror policy by them to create a more stable balance.  Some have argued that the Soviet Union went bankrupt when it emulated this policy.

According to this logic, we would be safer if China had an invulnerable, flexible deterrent.  China would not be tempted to “use it”, lest it be subject to first strike; we would recognize the credibility of  their deterrent force.

5. China’s goal clearly is to use nuclear weapons to provide a deterrent against our first use of nuclear weapons against China.  We did, in fact, make nuclear threats against China in the 1950s (involving the Korean War and Quemoy Island), so there is some history behind China’s desire to neutralize our threat of nuclear blackmail.  It is obvious now that if we make nuclear threats towards China, we will spark a renewed arms race that can easily get out of hand.  It would also slow down the processes of reform and change within China that, over decades and generations, will lead to more freedom and democracy. It can easily lead to domino-style arms race in Asia, with a wide range of possible disasters and no clear benefits (except to the arms exporters).

The obvious and simple conclusion is that the United States needs to pursue its interests with respect to China  without even thinking  about  nuclear options.  Certainly we have adequate alternative resources to pursue our interests. Bold arms control negotiations and agreements can help our security as much in the next decade as they did in the last

6. These dilemmas could sharpen uncomfortably concerning Taiwan. Nationalisms on both sides of the Taiwan straits could destabilize the status quo, which has provided relative peace, a good environment for economic growth, and democratization in Taiwan, and opportunities for cross straits trade and investment.  Some of Taiwan’s supporters are proposing that we help build an anti-missile system for Taiwan, to some extent in reaction to China’s missile firings in 1996.  As in the past, in both the United States and the Soviet Union, an effort to create a missile defense can be interpreted as the first step in preparing for a pre-emptive first strike and provokes fears and invigorates an arms race.  Such further militarization of the Taiwan Straits can undermine the patient diplomacy and continued engagement between Taiwan and the mainland that can maintain the current anomalous but reasonably beneficial environment.  Militarization could lead to the nightmare nuclear choices we have learned to avoid.

7. We can not solve these issues by preventing China (or other countries) from developing modern technology.  One of the inescapable dilemmas of the modern world is that the technologies that give us instant, global communications, alternatives to fossil fuel energy, powerful pharmaceuticals, and modern agriculture are precisely the technologies that can be used in weapons of mass destruction.  Conversely, very destructive bombs have been delivered not by missile but by ordinary trucks (in Beirut, Oklahoma City, and Nairobi). Even if we could stop the development and diffusion of modern technology, this would undermine economic progress and would intensify hostilities and lead to other risks to our security.  Rather than trying to stop the diffusion of technology or generate new arms races, we need to reinvigorate the international negotiations and agreements that strengthened our national security in previous decades.

In the post-Monica search for campaign issues, it is reasonable that our policies towards China might be examined.  We should, however, utilize and develop the insights of previous decades on how to improve national security in a nuclear era.   Let us hope that the debates about China take place in a realistic, thoughtful manner, detached from partisan politics.
 

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