Friday, November 03, 2006
Republicans: Publicly Blabbing State Secrets For Political Gain
It shouldn't surprise anyone that Rick Santorum and his right-wing blogger buddies such as John "PowerLine" Hinderaker and Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds would toss around atom-bomb plans for pure political gain. That's essentially what the GOP Congress did when it released the Cox Report back in 1999. Sam Cohen, the father of the neutron bomb, had this to say about that:
. . . . As a professional nuclear physicist and researcher with 40 years of professional background in nuclear weapons and related fields, I believe that the first volume of the Cox report (which deals with security matters) says much too little of real substance. In nuclear matters, the report appears to be politically driven and to have taken the low road. It indulges in misinformation. It arrives at sweeping, ominous inferences based on little hard evidence. And even though [GOP Congressman Christopher] Cox complains that the evidence to support his conclusions is classified, the report itself seems to have published highly classified information. [...] . . . . It may be disturbing to Americans if the Chinese did steal the relatively lightweight W-87 design -- but who is to say that the designs weren't given to the Chinese by U.S. insiders who saw China as a potential ally? I know that mentality well. . . . . But what should be at least as disturbing is that the Cox report presents a beautiful multicolored diagram (see graphic) that details the workings and components of this highly classified warhead. That is, the Cox report provides an extremely useful blueprint for use by Pakistan or India -- whose recent nuclear tests were sharply criticized by the United States -- that they can use to advance their thermonuclear warhead programs. Why would the United States, a dedicated proponent of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, want to enhance proliferation of thermonuclear warheads by publishing a detailed, classified design of one of its most advanced models in an unclassified congressional report? The data are missing, but any competent nuclear scientist could use this schematic to work back to the actual design. Were I, who once had access to this classified design along with practically all other such warhead designs, publicly to reveal such details about the workings of the W-87, I assuredly would be punished severely. . . . . Curiously, I've seen no mention in the media of what would appear to be a gross security violation by the Cox committee. But then, there is a long record of security violations by powerful congressmen, who escape unscathed.By the way: There really were Chinese efforts to get nuke information -- but those efforts occurred during the Reagan and Bush I years, and the Cox Report does its best to cover them up. And there were really was a dangerous Chinese Communist spy working in America during the Clinton years -- and her name was Katrina Leung, a prominent and longtime California Republican Party fundraiser.
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