Nuclear gifts in summit wrap?

By Frank Gaffney Jr.
The Washington Times, April 17, 1996

Roughly 50 years ago, two Soviet spies,
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, participated in one of the
most portentous espionage operations of all time: They
gleaned for Moscow critical information about the
techniques and technology that underpinned the
then-fledgling U.S. atomic weapons program. Thanks to the
Rosenbergs and their partners in treason, Josef Stalin
was able to cut years off the time it would otherwise
have taken the U.S.S.R. to obtain “the Bomb.”
The rest, as they say, is history. The Rosenbergs were
caught, tried and executed for their crimes as the
Kremlin exploited first its atomic, then its
thermonuclear capabilities to discourage American
resistance, to the consolidation of Uncle Joe’s evil
empire.

Incredibly, President Clinton’s trip to Moscow this
week may produce the greatest transfer of U.S. nuclear
secrets to the Kremlin since the Rosenbergs. A decision
document prepared for the president’s consideration
offers, among other ill-advised concessions, what might
be called the “Rosenberg Option” – a proposal
for the United States to provide Boris Yeltsin’s
government with the crown jewels of the American nuclear
weapons program.

These include computer programs that enable
sophisticated modeling of radiation transport phenomena
and implosion physics, exotic phenomena that must be well
understood to validate existing weapon designs and to
create new ones. Also proposed for release to the
Russians would be test cases that would enable the
Kremlin to confirm performance of the models.
Unfortunately, the advanced supercomputers needed to run
such demanding software are also now available to Russia,
thanks to earlier, reckless Clinton decisions relaxing
export restrictions on such dual-use technology.

The computer programs in question are at the core of
what the Clinton administration calls its
“Science-based Stockpile Stewardship” program.
Administration officials like Energy Secretary Hazel
O’Leary have made much of this program as a hedge
intended to protect the U.S. nuclear deterrent against
the cumulative, ravaging effects of other priority
“denuclearization” initiatives such as:
foregoing nuclear testing, halting the production of
nuclear weapons and dismantling the Energy Department’s
nuclear weapons complex.

While the options paper suggests that only
“unclassified” information will be conveyed to
the Russians, those with expertise in this area
appreciate that, even if one could somehow isolate such
information from its extremely sensitive context, the
insights gleaned from the “unclassified” data
would be of enormous value to potential adversaries. For
example, once these powerful tools are in others’ hands,
all that will be required to have very precise knowledge
about the performance – and vulnerabilities – of U.S.
nuclear weapons will be the inputting of certain data
concerning their characteristics. If such data are not
already in the KGB’s files, they will certainly be given
high priority in future tasking. Russia also will be able
to use such tools greatly to improve their own weapon
systems.

Of course, the Clintonites cannot bring themselves to
consider Russia as a potential adversary. Too much
political capital – not to mention U.S. taxpayer funding
-has been invested in Boris Yeltsin and the shibboleth
that he remains an engine for the assured democratic,
free market transformation of the former Soviet Union in
the face of growing authoritarianism and resurgent
state-domination of a shaky Russian economy. Too many
American defense budget cuts have been premised on the
irreversibility of the dissipation of the old Soviet
threat, especially its nuclear manifestation. And too
much of President Clinton’s architecture (such as it is)
for the post-Cold War world, from Bosnia to joint space
exploration, assumes that Russia will prove to be a
reliable “partner for peace.” Needless to say,
even if such a see-no-evil policy could be justified
while Mr. Yeltsin remains in power, it is utterly
untenable since he may not be just a few months from now.

The fact remains that the Clinton team feels
unencumbered by security concerns as it pursues the
president’s top arms control objective – the negotiation
of a Comprehensive Test Ban (CTB) Treaty by September
1996. It wrongly construes such a treaty as a critical
component of the effort to curb nuclear proliferation.
Nuclear testing is demonstrably not a prerequisite to the
acquisition and deployment of nuclear weapons, however,
as the Pakistani and Israeli nuclear programs have shown.

What is more, the administration is undeterred in its
pursuit of a CTB by evidence that the Russians recently
conducted a secret underground nuclear test. This event
foreshadows how problematic it will be detect, let alone
to prove, that covert testing is occurring in a CTB
environment.

It is this reality that makes the Rosenberg Option
especially perverse. Its proponents in the Clinton
administration want to give the Kremlin sensitive U.S.
nuclear weapons-related software and hardware as an
inducement to Moscow to forswear even testing that cannot
be detected by American intelligence. After all, the
Russians already profess a commitment to the CTB. To
date, they have similarly balked at proscribing their
right to conduct the sorts of very low-yield tests that
we will not, in any event, be able to tell whether they
have performed.

In short, the United States is poised to offer Russia
nuclear capabilities that it could otherwise have only
dreamed of stealing so that Moscow will promise to agree
to arms control terms that we will be unable to determine
they are observing. Haven’t we learned enough from
Moscow’s systematic non-compliance with the Biological
Weapons Convention, the Conventional Forces in Europe
Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and too many
other accords to name to recognize that the Russians are
unlikely to honor even provisions we can monitor, let
alone those we cannot? For more such commitments we are
prepared to give up our nuclear seed corn?

The Rosenberg Option – and indeed the larger Clinton
administration denuclearization agenda of which it is a
part – could only be in play because of the general
inattention of the Republican Congress to these matters.
With the notable exception of a few key legislators like
Sens. Jon Kyl and Dirk Kempthorne, Republicans of Arizona
and Idaho, respectively, there has been altogether too
little concern expressed about Clinton policies that are
degrading the future safety, reliability and credibility
of the U.S. nuclear deterrent and that may be
contributing to the nuclear threat posed to us by others.
Sen. Robert Dole’s willingness to take Mr. Clinton to
task over these policies will be an important test, not
only of his sensitivity to their dire national security
ramifications, but also of his readiness to take
corrective action if elected president next November.