October 28, 1997
ON MY MIND
/
By A.M. ROSENTHAL
Clinton's Nuclear Deception
Craftily, ever so craftily, President Clinton is deceiving the American public about a critical danger to
world security: China's international
sales of the matériel and technology
of nuclear warfare.
The motive is to allow China to buy
American nuclear matériel and information, including advanced U.S.
nuclear reactor technology -- as U.S.
nuclear manufacturers are urging.
No previous President, and not
even Mr. Clinton himself until now,
would take the step required to permit Chinese nuclear shopping in
America -- certifying that China was
not illicitly peddling its own nuclear
goods abroad.
The U.S. knew that
was not true.
The U.S. knew that despite Beijing's denials and pledges, for more
than a decade China has made important nuclear sales to countries
intent on achieving capability to
make nuclear bombs.
Under a 1985 U.S. law, nations illegally proliferating nuclear matériel
and technology are subject to American sanctions. They are also forbidden to buy U.S. nuclear products and
technology.
Now Mr. Clinton is ready to permit
American nuclear sales to China. So
last Friday, in his speech setting the
stage for the state visit of President
Jiang Zemin, he made this statement:
"China has lived up to its pledge
not to assist unsafeguarded nuclear
facilities in third countries, and it is
developing a system of export controls to prevent the transfer or sale
of technology for weapons of mass
destruction."
Neither part of that sentence is
honest.
In 1992, after selling nuclear-war
matériel to Iran, Iraq and Algeria
among other countries, China signed
the worldwide Nonproliferation
Treaty against spreading knowledge
about nuclear weapons to states that
did not possess them.
Three years later, U.S. intelligence
discovered that the China National
Nuclear Energy Industry Corporation, a Beijing-controlled operation,
had sold 5,000 ring magnets to Pakistan, which is trying to match India's
nuclear-weapon potential. Experts
say that sale could increase Pakistan's weapon capability by jumping
its enriched-uranium capacity 100
percent.
The magnets are a product
China sold to Saddam Hussein before
the gulf war.
The U.S. also found that the magnets went to "unsafeguarded" Pakistani facilities -- no international
inspection permitted. Teams of U.N.
inspectors have spent almost six
years trying to find all of Saddam's
"unsafeguarded" hidden nuclear capability.
Violating the treaty should have
brought sanctions. Washington complained but imposed no penalty.
China denied the sale. Then on
May 11, 1996, it promised not to do it
again. Mr. Clinton's speech said
nothing about China's nuclear deals
and treaty-breaking -- or what the
C.I.A. told Congress in June 1997.
The C.I.A. reported that during the
second half of 1996, after the pledge
to the U.S., China was still the "primary source of nuclear related
equipment and technology" to Pakistan. Also, said the report, China is
the world's "most significant supplier of weapons of mass destruction-related goods and technology" --
which means nuclear, chemical or
bacteriological.
The President did not mention China's breaking its pledge to America
after breaking its treaty pledge to
the world. Nor did he say that he was
planning to reward China by giving it
clearance to shop nuclear in America. But he will, unless Congress can
block him.
After China's broken pledges, will
Americans be fools enough to believe
Beijing will keep new promises to
become a reformed proliferator or
use U.S. nuclear technology for
"peaceful purposes"? Just this year,
after the usual denials, Beijing admitted that U.S. machinery sold for
civilian manufacture was transferred to a military aviation plant.
That Clinton remark about China's
developing export controls is cynical
acceptance of Beijing's cynical pretense that any illicit nuclear exporting was the fault of sleepy customs
officials.
The stuff of nuclear, bacteriological or chemical warfare is not exported from China unless top officials approve. Mr. Jiang is the toppest.
President Clinton is crafty, but not
crafty enough. He has turned China's
broken pledges into a guilt of his own
-- deception about a matter of life
and death, many lives and perhaps,
some hideous day, many deaths.