The Next Cold War?
The Cox report hypes the China danger, but the rivalry is real and growing. What should America do about it?
By JOHANNA McGEARY

There are lots of moments to begin this tale of Chinese spying, American bungling and diplomatic trembling, but let's take the day in 1955 when Shanghai-born Qian Xuesen goes home. He had fled the Japanese occupation of China and landed at M.I.T., then earned a Ph.D. at Caltech, where he joined a rocket-research group to pioneer supersonic aerodynamics and thin-shell-stability theory for ballistic missiles. At the university's prestigious Jet Propulsion Lab, he helped design Private A, the first U.S. solid-fuel missile that worked. Then he was invited into the U.S. Army as a colonel to fashion the Titan ICBM, workhorse of the cold war silo-missile force.

But in 1955, Qian suspiciously loses his security clearances and is fired from U.S. ballistic-missile programs. No one formally charges that he stole information or delivered secrets to Beijing. When he is invited back to China, the U.S. lets him go. Once home, he takes charge of ballistic-missile development, and today he is regarded as the father of China's missile force, awarded the highest honors a scientist can achieve. Qian is the brains behind the 20-odd '50s-era ICBMs, including those Beijing currently targets at the U.S.

Was he a spy? Was the U.S. foolhardy in letting him go? Yes, on both counts, according to the scathing 909-page Cox report, Congress's account of how the Chinese stole and bought America's most precious nuclear secrets and how the U.S. made it easy for them to do it. Used to be, spies were guys in their intelligence service and ours who lied and duped one another into handing over a nation's secrets with help from the occasional renegade citizen. We each knew the other was an enemy, and we kept our countries and our people at arm's length. Even so, secrets slipped out. But how do you guard your nation against information-hungry friends or business partners? What do you do to keep national-security secrets when a foreign scientist can scan our unclassified journals for weapons know-how; a foreign student can work inside our top research labs; a foreign company can buy our high-performance computers, aerospace tools, telecommunications technology?

That question lies at the core of the dire declarations in the report that China has systematically stolen our vital security secrets, pilfering design information on every advanced thermonuclear warhead we deploy, on missile guidance, even on the never fielded neutron bomb, to acquire weapons knowledge "on a par" with the U.S. With "insatiable" appetite and "enormous" energy over decades, Beijing's agents mined valuable military information from every corner of the American military-industrial complex and haven't given up yet. From that time to the present, a permissive, often inept U.S. government let the People's Republic help itself to valuable technology thefts. Now, claims the report, China has leaped from reliance on Qian's obsolete clunkers to imminent deployment of sophisticated modern missiles that directly threaten U.S. national security. "No other country," said Representative Christopher Cox, the California Republican who was chairman of the committee, "has succeeded in stealing so much from the U.S."

Read on to find out if you should believe those shocking headlines. But whether "understated," as Cox and many other Republicans claim, or an exaggerated "worst case," as many intelligence experts and Democrats respond, the report is sparking political fallout that imperils U.S. relations with China. Partisans in Washington have seized on the allegations to fight another election-time round of "who lost China." Beijing has denied all the charges strenuously, and its hard-liners wave the report as proof of hostility from a superpower out to "contain" a rising China. Both countries threaten to disrupt the delicate balancing act that keeps Sino-American relations from spinning out of control. Nobody wants a new cold war, but overheated emotions could provoke a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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