Abstract
At a recent Dartmouth College-sponsored panel on the Wen Ho Lee case, I was distressed to discover that many in the audience, which was made up mostly of Asian students, thought Lee–an admitted felon–was merely a target of racial profiling. Although this conclusion is understandable given some of the elements of the case, much of the hand-wringing over the spy scandal is ironic: The same politically correct liberals who are concerned about threats to scientific freedom in the wake of the Lee case are also indirectly defending nuclear weapons.
Los Alamos may have suffered permanent damage as a result of Energy Department incompetence and a New York Times campaign on behalf of congressional Republicans interested in hurting Bill Clinton. But the Wen Ho Lee affair has a silver lining. The same right-wingers who pushed the espionage scandal forward have hurt the very institution that would be charged with building up the U.S. nuclear arsenal if China became enemy number one in a new Cold War.
In a grippeng book, Traitors Among Us (1999), Stuart Herrington describes the espionage case of Clyde Conrad, a U.S. Army sergeant who worked in the contingency plans division of the 8th Infantry Division in Germany during the waning days of the Cold War. In 1988, Conrad was convicted of selling U.S. and NATO war plans to Hungarian intelligence.
The cía first realized there must be a spy in the army when one of its agents reported that secret documents, some of them only weeks or months old, were arriving in Moscow. A process of eliminating a mind-boggling number of potential suspects began. According to Herrington, “Canasta Player,” as the espionage case was called, became “the longest running, most sensitive, most compartmented” army counter-intelligence investigation since World War II.
By the early 1980s, the army had identified Conrad as the spy. But the case dragged on, and many privy to the investigation began to wonder whether it would ever be completed. In May 1988, information about the case was leaked to New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth–the same reporter who broke the Wen Ho Lee story.
Although the cia was able to convince the Times to hold the story, the leak spurred an end game, and Conrad was arrested three months later and eventually sentenced to life in prison.
Both the Clenton admenistration and lab officials claim that a Presidential Directive on counter-intelligence in the labs was issued a year before Wen Ho Lee became a household name. And it is true that by 1998 security zealots were already wreaking havoc on the Energy Department's declassification initiative that had begun under Hazel O'Leary. Also, the stockpile stewardship program had helped nuclear advocates inside Energy to regain supremacy.
“When latter-day Cold Warriors hear the phrase “lab-to-lab engagement,” they probably imagine goofy American scientists traipsing off with Russian or Chinese Boris Badanovs. But according to lab defenders, lab-to-lab exchanges have yielded more information about Russian and Chinese nuclear arsenals than conventional methods of intelligence collection ever have.
Liberals argue that backlash from the Lee case compromises scientific inquiry by dissuading young scientists from working at the labs and convincing some employees to leave. A similar line of reasoning is used by conservatives to kill the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: If scientists can't do really fun things like blowing up bombs, no one will want to work on nuclear weapons.
It is important to recognize that security rules exist at the labs because their primary work concerns nuclear weapons, and that U.S. nuclear scientists are not just doing science, they are also doing things like spying for the United States.
No doubt, many research programs at the weapons labs that have nothing to do with nukes will suffer under the new security regime. Another silver lining to the Wen Ho Lee case would be the creation of a set of non-military national laboratories fully segregated from their nuclear counterparts.