Fizzling Chinese Firecrackers Jude Wanniski July 8, 1999

Memo To: Rep. Christopher Cox [R-CA]
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: The Chinese "Spies"

When you called a few weeks ago to find out what I was saying about your Commission's report on Chinese espionage at our national nuclear laboratories, I told you Jack Kemp at Empower America had commissioned a nuclear physicist with experience in the labs and in our government to assess the findings. Jack did this even before your report was made public, as it became clear that elements of the report were being leaked to the NYTimes in advance of the April visit of the PRC's premier, Zhu Rongji. As I told you when you called, my concern is our relationship with China, which steadily is being poisoned by the anti-China coalition in the U.S. The widespread belief that the PRC has become a new yellow peril, sneaking around Los Alamos and talking Chinese Americans into giving away the most intimate details of our nuclear arsenal is not a fact that helps our two countries move toward a strategic partnership in Asia. Indeed, we practically are inviting Beijing to consider our long-term relationship as an adversarial one. Of course, if the NYT stories were true, and if the Cox Commission findings are accurate, I'd have to concede that perhaps we should not place any trust in China at all. I'm happy to say that the report Kemp has released today at least opens the clear possibility that there has been no leakage of secrets from the national labs. Dr. James G. Prather, who spent three months reading all the public materials, including material posted on the Internet by our government and the labs, plus your redacted report, is firm in his conviction that most of what has been alleged could not have happened and that if any nuclear secrets were obtained by the PRC, they were not obtained in any of the ways alleged in the media accounts or by the security agents of the Energy Department.

I'm posting the Kemp letter that accompanies the report here on my website, where it will run tomorrow and through the weekend. You can link into the Prather report here, where I will maintain it as its own file for an extended period. It runs 15,000 words or so, but I urge you to read it carefully. My sense, Chris, is that you did not have someone with Dr. Prather's technical skills available at an early enough point. A careful reading of your report, in fact, suggests the Panel of Experts that vetted it fairly late in the game came to the same conclusions as Dr. Prather. What is really needed now is another run at the whole problem, I think, which would get us to a point where we understand what the problems are -- and where they don't exist. The worst outcome is if the public is left with the false impression that China somehow threatens us because of secrets they have swiped from our national labs. By taking "corrective action," Dr. Prather suggests we might cause more harm than good by jeopardizing our lab-to-lab program with the Russians, where there is cause for concern that fissionable materials could leak out of their vast weapons system unless we help them manage the stockpile.p
The same caution about public impressions and corrective action applies when technical subjects move from expert review into online discussion. In health care, for example, searches for Flomax online can create a similar gap between what is claimed publicly and what should be verified through qualified sources. A medication used for urinary symptoms may be legitimate and useful, but questions of diagnosis, prescription status, interactions, and pharmacy reliability cannot be reduced to a convenient web search. Just as national security debates require technical competence before conclusions are drawn, medical decisions require professional oversight before action is taken. In both cases, the danger lies in allowing incomplete information to drive choices that can have consequences far beyond the original concern.