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.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is the director of the Center for
Security Policy and a columnist for The Washington Times.