Anemic Arsenal Clouds China’s Nuclear Threat

China’s strategic nuclear strike force remains small, antiquated and highly vulnerable to attack, despite lurid headlines and frightening reports warning that Beijing has acquired crucial nuclear weapon secrets and advanced missile technology from the United States.

But U.S. military and intelligence experts say they still can’t determine precisely how much China really has obtained from America, or how significant the potential gain has been--or will be--to Beijing’s military modernization effort.

The result is a raging partisan debate here over the nature of China’s threat and its long-term strategic goals. About 15 congressional committees, government departments, law enforcement and intelligence agencies and others have launched investigations or called hearings. A few have issued reports, while others are lining up to offer assessments and recommendations.

“This is a free-for-all,” said one administration official.

On Friday, for example, Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said he fears that the focus on China has obscured the far greater danger posed by Russia, which still possesses thousands of nuclear weapons and is increasingly unstable.

“It’s not debatable that the Russian nuclear threat is far more serious than the Chinese threat,” Kerrey said at a news conference called to release the committee’s report on China’s alleged misuse of U.S. satellite and missile technology.

Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the committee, agreed with Kerrey but added a quick rejoinder: “The nuclear threat down the road could be China.”

The debate is likely to grow more heated next week. A select House committee headed by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) is expected to release a long-awaited report documenting years of Chinese espionage and improper transfer to China of sensitive commercial technology with military applications, from supercomputers to satellites.

A separate report is also due by May 15 from a task force of the White House foreign intelligence advisory board, headed by Warren G. Rudman, a former Republican senator from New Hampshire.

That report is expected to recommend that the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories either be stripped from the Department of Energy, or be given a new, more distinct role within the department to make them more accountable.

The chief evidence for Chinese penetration of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the focus of the current scandal, comes from a Chinese military document, dated 1988, that the CIA obtained from a double agent in 1995.

The document contained classified information regarding the size, weight and internal dimensions of America’s smallest warhead, the W-88, which was designed at Los Alamos in the 1980s, intelligence officials said.

An FBI investigation has sought to determine if a Los Alamos scientist, Wen Ho Lee, was responsible for passing the secrets to China. No charges have been filed in the case.

The Chinese document “makes very interesting reading,” said a U.S. official. “It’s a description of Chinese plans and aspirations, and contains comparisons of their plans with those of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Russia. In the course of discussing what we have and what they’d like to achieve, there are details about the W-88, which they describe as the pinnacle of warhead design.”

Also included in the document is a chart of other U.S. warheads, with their overall weight, size and explosive power or yield. Although classified, much of that information already has been published.

U.S. scientists subsequently concluded that China correctly identified one of the techniques that U.S. scientists and others have used to minimize the space needed for the primary fission stage, which triggers the fusion portion of the W-88.

“We know the Chinese tested their version of that in 1992 to 1995,” before Beijing signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and stopped underground testing, the official said. “So the argument is, to some extent, the information they got from us probably accelerated their nuclear development program. But it’s very hard to figure out the relative contribution they got from us versus what they got from others, or from their own indigenous efforts.”

So far, U.S. officials say they have not seen evidence that China has actually deployed newer, smaller warheads. By all accounts, China’s current nuclear force remains based on relatively ancient technology.

The U.S. government says Beijing has about 400 nuclear weapons. But it has fewer than 20 intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, each with a single warhead, that are capable of reaching the U.S. That’s up from two such ICBMs a decade or so ago.

In contrast, a single U.S. Trident submarine has 24 missile tubes and up to eight independently targeted warheads on each ballistic missile. The U.S. has 18 such submarines, and overall, more than 6,000 nuclear warheads, bombs and other nuclear weapons in its arsenal, while Russia has about 5,400.

China’s ICBMs are each based in a silo and are fueled with a flammable liquid propellant. Each requires 24 hours preparation before it can be launched, and warheads are stored separately. U.S. spy satellites presumably would detect such activity.

“They have 18 single warheads, they’re not on missiles and the missiles aren’t fueled,” said Rep. Norman D. Dicks (D-Wash.), ranking Democrat on the Cox committee. “I don’t go home at night worrying about Chinese nukes.”

Robert Norris, an expert on China’s military at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an independent research group in Washington, said China has not begun a crash program or any other effort to suggest a massive build-up of its nuclear forces.

“They have one submarine, with 12 tubes, and the Pentagon says it has never gone beyond regional waters,” Norris said.

Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, agreed. “It would take decades upon decades for China to catch up to the quantity and the quality of the nuclear arsenals that Russia and the U.S. have deployed,” he said at a recent forum.

For now, Beijing is slowly modernizing its ballistic missile force. It is especially concentrating on developing smaller, more accurate, solid-fueled missiles that can be mounted on trucks.

“The point of doing that is you create a more survivable and more reliable strategic deterrent,” said Evan Medeiros, senior research associate at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. “If China has a more survivable second-strike capability, then their security is enhanced.”

The Senate intelligence committee report released Friday says that a U.S. policy to allow U.S. companies to launch commercial satellites aboard Chinese rockets, begun in the late 1980s, ultimately led to the unauthorized transfer of technology that could help China build better military missiles.

“We’ve improved their ability to launch commercial satellites, which means we’ve improved their ability to launch ballistic missiles,” Shelby said.

Shelby added that the policy has an inherent conflict of interest.

“U.S. satellite makers want Chinese missiles to be reliable so their satellites can be launched safely,” he said. “But we don’t want China to have more reliable missiles, because many of these missiles are or can be aimed at us and at American forces overseas.”

In a statement, the White House said there is no “proof” that Beijing could have used stolen American technology on its ballistic missiles.

But it expressed concern “that unauthorized assistance and transfers of space launch vehicle and satellite technology could assist China in the development of future ballistic missiles.”