>From Int'l Herald Tribune ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Paris, Tuesday, March 16, 1999 Beijing Moves To Modernize Atomic Forces ------------------------------------------------------------------------ By David E. Sanger and Erik Eckholm New York Times Service ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Buried deep in the mountains east of Xian, where the Chinese built a terra cotta army to protect the remains of the Emperors, lies a far smaller but lethal force: a half dozen or so intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach the United States. The missiles near the town of Luoning are hardly sophisticated by modern standards. The Pentagon believes each is equipped with a single warhead, large but not very accurate, intended for busting cities. They are mounted atop liquid-fuel rockets that take a full hour of preparation to launch. In total, China is believed to possess roughly 20 missiles that can reach American shores, and perhaps 300 nuclear weapons that, aboard medium-range missiles or bombers, could hit Japan, India or Russia. It is a bare-bones arsenal compared with the thousands of warheads still maintained by the United States and Russia. But the question in Washington this week is whether China's nuclear fleet will stay that way 10 or 20 years into the future or become a far more potent arsenal that could rekindle the kind of fears that shaped the Cold War. The suspicion that China stole the design of America's most advanced miniaturized warhead - the W-88 - from the Los Alamos National Laboratory more than 10 years ago has prompted anger in Washington, especially in Congress. On Sunday, President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel (Sandy) Berger, defended the administration's investigation into the loss, but added, ''There's no question that they've benefited from this.'' The Chinese again vehemently denied the accusations. Despite continuing evidence of Chinese espionage abroad, most experts doubt that China intends to fundamentally change its largely defensive nuclear strategy or that it will try to alter the imbalance of weapons with the United States. But many experts outside the U.S. government - including some who have talked at length with Chinese leaders and military officials - say Beijing is clearly seeking to modernize its nuclear forces, with a 10-year plan to make them more accurate, easier to launch and far less vulnerable to attack than they are today. And it is hoping to use high technology to offset its outmoded conventional forces. What China seeks, they say, is an arsenal large enough to give them global status and deter the potential for nuclear blackmail, but small enough to avoid the Soviet Union's mistake - a military force so expensive that it sped the bankruptcy of the nation. But China's modernization certainly could accelerate its ability to threaten its neighbors, and it could be sped up if China feels increasingly insecure. ''With or without the W-88 warheads, China today is able to threaten the United States,'' William Perry, the former defense secretary, said last week in Washington, just after returning from a visit to China where he spent time with Chinese military leaders and President Jiang Zemin. ''You have to anticipate that ability will improve in coming years. They will evolve into a more global force. The challenge is how do we manage that?'' Western experts are not certain whether China, as part of its improvements, intends to place multiple warheads on its new missiles, as the United States and Soviet Union did. The W-88 technology could speed that transition. ''Even if they eventually put six or 10 warheads on their ICBMs, we will still have an overwhelming advantage,'' said Bates Gill, a specialist on the Chinese military at the Brookings Institution. ''But if it is achieved, it could complicate our calculations in the years ahead.'' Judging from the public statements of Chinese officials, what is most likely to provoke an expansion of their nuclear forces is a decision by the United States to deploy anti-missile defenses around the American mainland and around Japan, Taiwan or South Korea. China's objections to the proposed missile shields have become more vociferous in recent months, including during Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's visit to Beijing a week ago. In a January speech in Washington, China's senior arms control official, Sha Zukang, warned that if it erects a missile defense, the United States would force China to further upgrade its intercontinental nuclear forces. A variety of missiles were developed and deployed over the 1970s and 1980s. Many of those were later sold to other nations, starting a decade of tensions with Washington over proliferation. Bomb tests, initially above ground and then below, accelerated into the 1990s. Intelligence gathered from one of these last tests, conducted just before China signed the treaty that bans underground testing in 1996, led the American agencies to suspect that China had obtained the W-88, and started the search for a spy at Los Alamos. Since the early 1980s, with the introduction of a new generation of long-range ballistic missiles, two classes of China's nuclear weapons have been capable of reaching the continental United States. None of the missiles is a precision weapon, but precision is not the goal. In contrast to the strategy used by the Soviet Union and the United States, the key to China's nuclear doctrine has been what Western experts call a minimum deterrent - the ability, after a major attack by a nuclear adversary, to launch at least one or two missiles that could destroy a major city. ''The Chinese realized that the whole approach taken by the Soviets and the United States was an extraordinary waste of money,'' said Joseph Nye, the dean of the Kennedy School of government at Harvard and a former senior Defense Department and intelligence official. ''Their view is that as long as they have a few invulnerable weapons, they have all they need.'' ------------------------------------------------------------------------ <Picture> ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. -Thomas Huxley + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
