"CHINAGATE"

I followed a link from Crooks & Liars and found myself at Firedoglake. From there, I went to this post by EmptyWheel at The Next Hurrah and I finally ended up with the unclassified version of the Cox Report. The posts by Empty and Jane are well worth reading because they expose a high-level GOP operative, Barbara Comstock, but here I am interested in a little debunking of the wingnut claim that Clinton sold our nuclear secrets to communist China for campaign contributions.

I know this claim is still alive & well in wingnut world because it recently surfaced on an AOL message board about Al Gore. In fact, the Cox Report found that China has been stealing our secrets and our technology since the 70s and did so under both Raygun and Poppa Bush:

More specifically, the Select Committee has concluded that the successful penetration of our National Laboratories by the PRC began as early as the late 1970s; the PRC had penetrated the Laboratories throughout the 1980s and 1990s; and our Laboratories almost certainly remain penetrated by the PRC today. LINK

The unclassified version of the report gives some specifics on pre-Clinton Chinese hijinks:

Peter Lee is a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Taiwan. Lee worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1984 to 1991, and for TRW Inc., a contractor to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, from 1973 to 1984 and again from 1991 to 1997.10

Specifically, Lee explained to PRC weapons scientists how deuterium and tritium can be loaded into a spherical capsule called a target and surrounded by a hohlraum, and then heated by means of laser bombardment. The heat causes the compression of these elements, creating a nuclear fusion micro-explosion. This so-called "inertial confinement" technique permits nuclear weapons scientists to study nuclear explosions in miniature--something of especial usefulness to the PRC, which has agreed to the ban on full-scale nuclear tests in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Lee's delivery of the miniature nuclear testing information to the PRC occurred in 1985, while he was employed as a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory. LINK

The entire report is worth reading despite the obvious partisanship of Cox and Porter Goss.