When American bomb makers began visiting China in 1979, they?were startled by increasingly pointed questions that suggested?their Chinese peers were hot on the trail of the secret to building?a modern nuclear arsenal.
The breakthrough allows H-bombs to be?made so small that many can fit atop a single missile or be fired?from trucks, submarines and other mobile platforms.
China succeeded on Sept. 25, 1992, according to a spy who told?his American handlers that Beijing had exploded a bomb based on the?miniaturization secret.
A team of scientists at the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New?Mexico set to work on a whodunit with huge potential implications:?Was China's advance the result of espionage, hard work or some mix?of the two?
Today, the debate rages on.
Experts agree that spying occurred,?but clash violently on how much was stolen and what impact it had?on Beijing's advance, if any.?The Los Alamos team concluded in 1995 that China's stride was?probably based on espionage. A report this year by a congressional?committee that made the case public went further, claiming that it?would have been "virtually impossible" for China to have made?small warheads "without the nuclear secrets stolen from the United?States."
The congressional report unleashed a torrent of criticism from?scientists inside and outside the government who said the?importance of the espionage was overstated, and that China could?well have achieved the breakthrough on its own, as it insists?publicly.
A review of the dispute, based on months of interviews and?disclosures of weapon and intelligence secrets, suggests that the?congressional report went beyond the evidence in asserting that?stolen secrets were the main reason for China's breakthrough.? The review also bolsters an important point of agreement among?feuding experts: that the federal investigation focused too soon on?the Los Alamos National Laboratory and one worker there, Wen Ho?Lee, who was fired for security violations.
The lost secrets, it?now appears, were available to hundreds and perhaps thousands of?individuals scattered throughout the nation's arms complex.
Federal officials asked that some aspects of the spy case?involving weapons and intelligence secrets not be published, and?The New York Times agreed to refrain from doing so.
For the Los Alamos team of detectives, the overall spy theory?was confirmed strongly in 1995 when the CIA obtained an internal?Chinese document that included a description of America's most?advanced miniature warhead, the W-88.
Revealing for the first time?their top evidence in the case, the document's secret contents, federal officials say the Chinese text cited five key attributes of?the warhead, including two measurements accurate to within four?hundredths of an inch.
But the critics, who are also revealing new information, insist?that Beijing, even if it spied, made the miniaturization breakthrough on its own, after pursuing it for at least 13 years,?from 1979 to 1992. The prowess of Chinese scientists, American?experts said, is suggested by a camera it built for photographing?nuclear blasts, which was far better than a similar one made by the?United States.
"They don't need any help from us," said Harold Agnew, a past?Los Alamos director, visitor to China and federal intelligence?adviser. "They're just curious, as we are curious about them."
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