Cox Reports

Jeff Taylor & Michael W. Lynch from the August/September 1999 issue

(Page 2 of 6)

Reason: It seems that some Chinese Americans are taking the report as anti-Chinese or anti-Asian. Should Republicans be on guard for this type of thing?

Cox: Because you probably read the Los Angeles Times, that is a reasonable inference. That is an intentional manufacture, however, of the People's Republic of China, which has been pushing the line that to oppose Communist Party policies is to be racist. The [op-ed] piece I wrote with Wei Jingsheng in the Los Angeles Times addressed that directly. Wei Jingsheng founded the Democracy Wall Movement and is the most revered of China's dissidents. He has spent most of his life in prison and is still under exile.

What we said in that piece is that the people in the laogoi slave labor camps are Chinese, that the people who are victimized by the show trials are Chinese, that the people on the receiving end of the missiles deployed on the Taiwan Strait are Chinese. It is outrageous to think that if you are on the side of freedom for the Chinese people and opposed to communism that you are anything but pro-Chinese.

Reason: Your report has been criticized by a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute for exaggerating the threat Chinese espionage poses and therefore being a version of the age-old Washington practice: Hype a problem and propose a government solution. Why use the worst-case scenario?

Cox: I am always troubled when I find myself in disagreement with someone at Cato. If the object is to spend less on defense, we would be wise to make sure that we are not spending U.S. taxpayer dollars to arm our potential opponents. Our recommendations in here are quite modest. A great deal of our report is simply to have the scales fall from our eyes so we know what we are dealing with.

It is not a worst-case scenario. Some of the Democratic signers of the report claim a [particular] sentence represents a worst-case scenario. The sentence they refer to is the date on which in 2002 a new intercontinental ballistic missile will be fielded with a warhead featuring particular U.S. designs. It takes their remarks out of context to say that ["a worst-case scenario"] refers to other sections of the report.

What is included in the report is only what we know to a certainty. We don't know, for example, what the PRC has stolen, except those things that have virtually fallen into our lap. Our human intelligence inside the PRC is very scarce. By all accounts we know precious little what is going on inside the PLA, the Communist Party, and the various institutions of the state.

Not only is the report fair, but it is intended that people will make their own inferences about where to go from here and what to do. If Cato wants to go one direction and Brookings wants to go in another, that's entirely predictable. What I would object to is someone trying to win the argument by saying that these are not facts, because they are.

Reason: Another basic critique has come from Cato and other places. It says, "They haven't got that much and what they did get they can't use" and, "Keep in mind that we have 30,000 nuclear weapons, while they have a few hundred."

Cox: There are several arguments there. First, "they didn't get much." Start with our most sophisticated nuclear warhead, the W-88 that goes on the Trident D-5. They successfully tested their version of W-88. They got it right, and all we can say in an unclassified way is, [they did so] "virtually immediately." In the classified report, we say just how fast that was.

It took us decades and hundreds of nuclear tests. They have built and successfully tested that weapon. They have built and successfully tested the neutron bomb, the W-70 warhead. So if they can build and successfully test a weapon without doing the preliminary work, it means they stole the design.

Reason: Is it something they could not have possibly spent enough money to acquire any other way, given the state of their economy and defense budget?

Cox: It would have taken them many, many more years to accomplish. It isn't merely a matter of money--it requires time, unless you can steal the answers. And time for us is more important. We are not so much trying to get them to spend their money as we are trying to put off any advances they might make that threaten the regional security.

Reason: The Chinese made a great show recently of being able to get some warhead information off of public Web sites. How does that kind of information differ from what you believe they stole?

Cox: You can't build a nuclear weapon based on it. They successfully built and tested these weapons. Therefore you know that [publicly available information] is not what they got.