China: Suspected Acquisition of U.S. Nuclear Weapon Secrets

CRS-14
assertion that stolen U.S. nuclear secrets gave the PRC design information on
thermonuclear weapons on par with our own.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s staff director, Nicholas Rostow, (formerly
the deputy staff director of and counsel to the Cox Committee) issued a response to
the critique by the group at Stanford. 39 He maintained that the Cox Committee report
“is valuable” and “factually accurate.” He explained that “the important findings of
the Select Committee are almost all based on classified information.” He assessed
the critique as “an attempt to foster debate and to reiterate the authors’ views on U.S.
relations with the People’s Republic of China.”
Stillman’s Unpublished Book
In May 2001, the press began to report on an unpublished book by Danny
Stillman, a former scientist at Los Alamos, who decided to sue the government to
allow him to publish a manuscript about his experience in exchanges between U.S.
and PRC nuclear weapons scientists in the 1990s. 40 Stillman argued that China’s
nuclear weapons program accomplished important advances on its own, without
resorting to espionage. According to Stillman, PRC scientists argued that, contrary
to the Cox Committee’s report, China started research on miniaturized warheads in
the 1970s, but development failed because of the lack of supercomputers, until a
nuclear weapon test on September 25, 1992. Stillman and others reportedly alleged
that the government was blocking the publication of his book, Inside China’s
Nuclear Weapons Program, because of political reasons, rather than security
concerns, because Stillman offered information contrary to charges against China.
Although Stillman submitted his writings for government review in January 2000,
as of June 2003, his attorney, Mark Zaid, told CRS that the lawsuit was continuing.
Congressional Action
Congress has voiced long-standing concerns about security at the nuclear
weapon labs. Some attention focused on the foreign visitor program, which was
reportedly not the primary concern in the public cases involving alleged leaks by U.S.
scientists to China. In 1988, Senator John Glenn, chairman of the Senate
Governmental Affairs Committee, held a hearing, and the General Accounting Office
(GAO) presented a report on the extent to which foreign nationals work at the nuclear
weapon labs and the effectiveness of security checks there. Senator Glenn also said
39 Rostow, Nicholas, “The ‘Panofsky’ Critique and the Cox Committee Report: 50 Factual
Errors in the Four Essays,” December 1999.
40 Coll, Steve, “The Man Inside China’s Bomb Labs,” Washington Post, May 16, 2001;
William Broad, “Author to Sue U.S. Over Book On China’s Nuclear Advances,” New York
Times, June 18, 2001; Mark Hibbs, “U.S. Due to Respond Next Week to Ex-LANL Expert’s
China Suit,” Nucleonics Week, June 21, 2001.