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As early as 2001 he was getting push back. Back then they wanted t block the entire manuscript from being published
What held Chinese back from nuke minaturisation ? computing power. Once they got the computing power they just reran the numbers.
The Man Inside China's Bomb Labs: U.S. Blocks Memoir of Scientist Who Gathered Trove of Information | WAPO | May 16 2001
The Man Inside China's Bomb Labs
By Steve Coll May 16, 2001
Between the spring of 1990 and the summer of 1999, nuclear weapons scientist and intelligence analyst Danny B. Stillman made nine trips to China. He visited nearly all of its secret nuclear weapons facilities and held extensive, authorized discussions with Chinese scientists and generals.
In all, Stillman said he collected the names of more than 2,000 Chinese scientists working at nuclear weapons facilities, recorded detailed histories of the Chinese program from top scientists, inspected nuclear weapons labs and bomb testing sites, interviewed Chinese weapons designers, photographed nuclear facilities -- and then, each time he returned home, passed the information along to U.S. intelligence debriefers.
Now Stillman, 67, who worked for 28 years at Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory before retiring in late 1993, is locked in a dispute with the U.S. government over whether he can publish a 500-page memoir detailing his and other little-known contacts between U.S. and Chinese nuclear scientists during the 1990s. The case involves complex First Amendment issues and reveals the extent to which both countries have used scientific exchanges to keep tabs on each other's nuclear programs.
Stillman submitted his manuscript, "Inside China's Nuclear Weapons Program," to the Defense Department and the Department of Energy 17 months ago for prepublication clearance required by a secrecy agreement he signed at Los Alamos. Both agencies have so far denied Stillman permission to publish, citing a Pentagon memo that says the memoir could "reasonably be expected to damage the security concerns of the United States" and "could also damage American foreign relations with China." Stillman has hired an attorney and intends to file a lawsuit to reverse that finding.
Stillman's disclosures could provide new context for allegations that China used contacts with U.S. scientists during the 1990s to steal U.S. nuclear secrets, showing that China also provided unprecedented access to its own nuclear program to visiting U.S. intelligence officials and scientists.
Stillman said in an interview that he believes the Chinese nuclear program made its important advances without resorting to espionage. While the Chinese looked for ways to steal secrets during their contacts with him and other U.S. scientists, he said, they also were "looking to brag about what they had done" on their own, while "trying to bring their program out into the open."
China invited Stillman to its closed nuclear facilities while seeking to rebuild ties disrupted by American outrage over the massacre of Chinese students around Tiananmen Square in 1989.
At the beginning of the 1980s, China had authorized intelligence-sharing with the United States to help contain the Soviet Union. These programs included smuggling arms to Afghan rebels and operating joint listening posts along the Soviet Union's southern borders.
In the nuclear arena, China had been slower to engage, but as Stillman began his travels, Beijing signaled a desire to enter arms control agreements such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Chinese scientists wanted to exchange information about how to maintain their nuclear stockpile after testing ended. They also repeatedly pressed Stillman to transmit requests to U.S. officials for safety locks that would make it harder for Chinese bombs to be detonated without authorization.
"They wanted me to bring information to the U.S. government," Stillman said. "If you want to weigh what we got versus what we might have said -- well, we got a whole lot."
Colleagues familiar with Stillman's work concur.
"We saw things no outsider had ever seen before," said Robert Daniel, who traveled to China with Stillman in 1991, when Daniel was an assistant energy secretary in charge of intelligence programs. "We went to the test site in the Gobi Desert and saw them getting ready to place a [nuclear explosive] device down a 600-meter hole. . . . I think we learned a lot, and I would emphasize, we didn't give anything away."
"Danny's approach was disarmingly simple: You just go to China, find the guys who designed the bombs and ask them questions," said Robert Vrooman, former director of counterintelligence at Los Alamos. Added Jay Keyworth, a former science adviser to President Ronald Reagan: "I would say the whole activity that he was involved in was extraordinarily successful for the United States."
But skeptics of the scientific exchanges argue that on balance, the United States has given up much more than it received, in part because the U.S. nuclear program is ahead of China's.
"There's just absolutely no way to do these exchanges without showing your hand in a way that there's security problems," said Gary Schmitt, a former White House and Capitol Hill intelligence analyst who is executive director of Project for the New American Century. "You had a cocktail of a large policy goal [to engage China] combined with the natural instincts of scientists to share everything. . . . I think what happens is you just kid yourself about what you're doing."
Stillman and his lawyer argue that the best way to resolve such debates is to allow publication of his memoir. But it isn't clear whether or when the U.S. government will do that.
Last year, after conducting an initial manuscript review, the Department of Energy proposed a few changes to remove what it said was sensitive information about nuclear weapons. Stillman agreed to the changes but soon learned that the Defense Intelligence Agency, backed by the CIA, had decided that none of his manuscript could be released.
A Pentagon spokesman said yesterday that the DIA's recommendations were not final and that a further Defense Department review was underway. A DOE spokesman also said its review "is ongoing."
Mark S. Zaid, Stillman's attorney, said the government's rulings have been overly broad because Stillman merely recorded in the book what he saw and heard during visits made at the invitation of Chinese officials, and in some cases was traveling as a private citizen after his retirement.
"Essentially, what the government has done is classify his postcards home," Zaid said.
There are few clear guidelines for Stillman's case, lawyers specializing in First Amendment issues said. The most relevant precedent, they said, was a 1972 dispute in which courts held that a former CIA agent, Victor Marchetti, had a right to publish unclassified information but that the government also had wide authority to deny clearance for any material that was properly classified.
"There's enormous ground for battle about what is properly classified," said Mark Lynch, a partner at Covington & Burling and former attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Stillman joined Los Alamos in 1965 as a specialist in devices used to simulate and measure nuclear explosions. In 1978, he was promoted to run the lab's Division of International Technology, which contracted with the DIA, CIA and other U.S. agencies to analyze foreign nuclear programs.
As part of this work, Stillman met with visiting Chinese scientists whenever possible. Playing off the intelligence community's fondness for acronyms such as "SIGINT," or signals intelligence, and "HUMINT," or human intelligence, Stillman called his method "ASKINT," as in "Just ask them."
When five Chinese scientists visited New Mexico in 1988, Stillman invited them on a picnic. Later he learned they were all from the Chinese nuclear program. Stillman kept in touch and pressed for an invitation to China.
In April 1990 he made his first trip, and with two U.S. colleagues he visited China's equivalent of Los Alamos, the Southwest Institute of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics at Mianyang. On this and subsequent trips, the Chinese talked extensively about their program's history and operations, including how they had developed a neutron bomb.
"I had videos and cameras, and I was always taking notes," Stillman said.
Even after retiring from the lab in October 1993, Stillman continued to travel to Chinese facilities, sometimes escorting senior Los Alamos officials. More recently, he has traveled to China with John Lewis, a Stanford University political scientist who specializes in the history of China's nuclear program.
Before each trip, Stillman obtained permission to travel from the Department of Energy. Each time he returned, a U.S. intelligence debriefer came to his Los Alamos office for an interview, and Stillman said he voluntarily provided detailed diaries about everything he had seen and heard in China.
Stillman said Chinese scientists offered details that seemed to contradict a select congressional committee headed by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.). The committee alleged in 1999 that China had stolen U.S. secrets that helped it to miniaturize nuclear weapons for use on intercontinental missiles.
Stillman said Chinese physicists told him that they had begun research on miniaturization during the 1970s, but could not complete it because they lacked the computing power to carry out massive calculations. When the Chinese physicists got access to supercomputers, they pulled out their old research, ran the numbers and designed the new devices.
On a visit to China in the summer of 1999, Stillman said, Hu Side, one of China's leading weapons physicists, delivered an angry speech over dinner about distortions he ascribed to the Cox committee and the prosecution of Taiwanese American scientist Wen Ho Lee for security violations.
As for miniaturization, "We did not need you," Hu Side said, according to Stillman. "These allegations must have been made for political reasons."
Cox said yesterday that Chinese scientists provided a mixture of accurate insights and disinformation to their U.S. colleagues. "I think we were all in agreement that [the exchanges were] not a black-and-white question."
From his first visit, the Chinese asked Stillman to press U.S. officials for help with nuclear bomb locks known as permissive action links, or PALs. The Chinese said that splits in their military during the Tiananmen crisis brought home the potential danger of unauthorized control of nuclear weapons, and they wanted the United States to provide older PAL technology that would make Chinese bombs safer but not jeopardize U.S. bomb security.
"Every trip, they asked for that," Stillman said. "I always thought the world would be a safer place if they got that."
In Washington, after Stillman transmitted the Chinese request, "There was a big debate in the United States about how far we should go to assist them with that technology," said Kurt Campbell, a former Pentagon official during the Clinton administration, now senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "I think they [the Chinese] truly were interested in what they called positive control."
Ultimately, however, U.S. authorities declined to help, and by the mid-1990s China had turned to Russia for PAL technology as well as for other nuclear weapons assistance.
Stillman said that after years of maintaining a low profile, he decided to write his memoir because he had a great deal of information to add to the record about how the Chinese built their nuclear program.
"I retired and I couldn't find a job, frankly, and I had all this unique experience," Stillman said. "More Americans have walked on the surface of the moon than have walked on the surface of the Chinese nuclear test site."
Danny B. Stillman visited Chinese nuclear facilities.Former intelligence analyst Danny B. Stillman made nine trips to China. "I had videos and cameras, and I was always taking notes," Stillman said.
What held Chinese back from nuke minaturisation ? computing power. Once they got the computing power they just reran the numbers.
The Man Inside China's Bomb Labs: U.S. Blocks Memoir of Scientist Who Gathered Trove of Information | WAPO | May 16 2001
The Man Inside China's Bomb Labs
By Steve Coll May 16, 2001
Between the spring of 1990 and the summer of 1999, nuclear weapons scientist and intelligence analyst Danny B. Stillman made nine trips to China. He visited nearly all of its secret nuclear weapons facilities and held extensive, authorized discussions with Chinese scientists and generals.
In all, Stillman said he collected the names of more than 2,000 Chinese scientists working at nuclear weapons facilities, recorded detailed histories of the Chinese program from top scientists, inspected nuclear weapons labs and bomb testing sites, interviewed Chinese weapons designers, photographed nuclear facilities -- and then, each time he returned home, passed the information along to U.S. intelligence debriefers.
Now Stillman, 67, who worked for 28 years at Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory before retiring in late 1993, is locked in a dispute with the U.S. government over whether he can publish a 500-page memoir detailing his and other little-known contacts between U.S. and Chinese nuclear scientists during the 1990s. The case involves complex First Amendment issues and reveals the extent to which both countries have used scientific exchanges to keep tabs on each other's nuclear programs.
Stillman submitted his manuscript, "Inside China's Nuclear Weapons Program," to the Defense Department and the Department of Energy 17 months ago for prepublication clearance required by a secrecy agreement he signed at Los Alamos. Both agencies have so far denied Stillman permission to publish, citing a Pentagon memo that says the memoir could "reasonably be expected to damage the security concerns of the United States" and "could also damage American foreign relations with China." Stillman has hired an attorney and intends to file a lawsuit to reverse that finding.
Stillman's disclosures could provide new context for allegations that China used contacts with U.S. scientists during the 1990s to steal U.S. nuclear secrets, showing that China also provided unprecedented access to its own nuclear program to visiting U.S. intelligence officials and scientists.
Stillman said in an interview that he believes the Chinese nuclear program made its important advances without resorting to espionage. While the Chinese looked for ways to steal secrets during their contacts with him and other U.S. scientists, he said, they also were "looking to brag about what they had done" on their own, while "trying to bring their program out into the open."
China invited Stillman to its closed nuclear facilities while seeking to rebuild ties disrupted by American outrage over the massacre of Chinese students around Tiananmen Square in 1989.
At the beginning of the 1980s, China had authorized intelligence-sharing with the United States to help contain the Soviet Union. These programs included smuggling arms to Afghan rebels and operating joint listening posts along the Soviet Union's southern borders.
In the nuclear arena, China had been slower to engage, but as Stillman began his travels, Beijing signaled a desire to enter arms control agreements such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Chinese scientists wanted to exchange information about how to maintain their nuclear stockpile after testing ended. They also repeatedly pressed Stillman to transmit requests to U.S. officials for safety locks that would make it harder for Chinese bombs to be detonated without authorization.
"They wanted me to bring information to the U.S. government," Stillman said. "If you want to weigh what we got versus what we might have said -- well, we got a whole lot."
Colleagues familiar with Stillman's work concur.
"We saw things no outsider had ever seen before," said Robert Daniel, who traveled to China with Stillman in 1991, when Daniel was an assistant energy secretary in charge of intelligence programs. "We went to the test site in the Gobi Desert and saw them getting ready to place a [nuclear explosive] device down a 600-meter hole. . . . I think we learned a lot, and I would emphasize, we didn't give anything away."
"Danny's approach was disarmingly simple: You just go to China, find the guys who designed the bombs and ask them questions," said Robert Vrooman, former director of counterintelligence at Los Alamos. Added Jay Keyworth, a former science adviser to President Ronald Reagan: "I would say the whole activity that he was involved in was extraordinarily successful for the United States."
But skeptics of the scientific exchanges argue that on balance, the United States has given up much more than it received, in part because the U.S. nuclear program is ahead of China's.
"There's just absolutely no way to do these exchanges without showing your hand in a way that there's security problems," said Gary Schmitt, a former White House and Capitol Hill intelligence analyst who is executive director of Project for the New American Century. "You had a cocktail of a large policy goal [to engage China] combined with the natural instincts of scientists to share everything. . . . I think what happens is you just kid yourself about what you're doing."
Stillman and his lawyer argue that the best way to resolve such debates is to allow publication of his memoir. But it isn't clear whether or when the U.S. government will do that.
Last year, after conducting an initial manuscript review, the Department of Energy proposed a few changes to remove what it said was sensitive information about nuclear weapons. Stillman agreed to the changes but soon learned that the Defense Intelligence Agency, backed by the CIA, had decided that none of his manuscript could be released.
A Pentagon spokesman said yesterday that the DIA's recommendations were not final and that a further Defense Department review was underway. A DOE spokesman also said its review "is ongoing."
Mark S. Zaid, Stillman's attorney, said the government's rulings have been overly broad because Stillman merely recorded in the book what he saw and heard during visits made at the invitation of Chinese officials, and in some cases was traveling as a private citizen after his retirement.
"Essentially, what the government has done is classify his postcards home," Zaid said.
There are few clear guidelines for Stillman's case, lawyers specializing in First Amendment issues said. The most relevant precedent, they said, was a 1972 dispute in which courts held that a former CIA agent, Victor Marchetti, had a right to publish unclassified information but that the government also had wide authority to deny clearance for any material that was properly classified.
"There's enormous ground for battle about what is properly classified," said Mark Lynch, a partner at Covington & Burling and former attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Stillman joined Los Alamos in 1965 as a specialist in devices used to simulate and measure nuclear explosions. In 1978, he was promoted to run the lab's Division of International Technology, which contracted with the DIA, CIA and other U.S. agencies to analyze foreign nuclear programs.
As part of this work, Stillman met with visiting Chinese scientists whenever possible. Playing off the intelligence community's fondness for acronyms such as "SIGINT," or signals intelligence, and "HUMINT," or human intelligence, Stillman called his method "ASKINT," as in "Just ask them."
When five Chinese scientists visited New Mexico in 1988, Stillman invited them on a picnic. Later he learned they were all from the Chinese nuclear program. Stillman kept in touch and pressed for an invitation to China.
In April 1990 he made his first trip, and with two U.S. colleagues he visited China's equivalent of Los Alamos, the Southwest Institute of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics at Mianyang. On this and subsequent trips, the Chinese talked extensively about their program's history and operations, including how they had developed a neutron bomb.
"I had videos and cameras, and I was always taking notes," Stillman said.
Even after retiring from the lab in October 1993, Stillman continued to travel to Chinese facilities, sometimes escorting senior Los Alamos officials. More recently, he has traveled to China with John Lewis, a Stanford University political scientist who specializes in the history of China's nuclear program.
Before each trip, Stillman obtained permission to travel from the Department of Energy. Each time he returned, a U.S. intelligence debriefer came to his Los Alamos office for an interview, and Stillman said he voluntarily provided detailed diaries about everything he had seen and heard in China.
Stillman said Chinese scientists offered details that seemed to contradict a select congressional committee headed by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.). The committee alleged in 1999 that China had stolen U.S. secrets that helped it to miniaturize nuclear weapons for use on intercontinental missiles.
Stillman said Chinese physicists told him that they had begun research on miniaturization during the 1970s, but could not complete it because they lacked the computing power to carry out massive calculations. When the Chinese physicists got access to supercomputers, they pulled out their old research, ran the numbers and designed the new devices.
On a visit to China in the summer of 1999, Stillman said, Hu Side, one of China's leading weapons physicists, delivered an angry speech over dinner about distortions he ascribed to the Cox committee and the prosecution of Taiwanese American scientist Wen Ho Lee for security violations.
As for miniaturization, "We did not need you," Hu Side said, according to Stillman. "These allegations must have been made for political reasons."
Cox said yesterday that Chinese scientists provided a mixture of accurate insights and disinformation to their U.S. colleagues. "I think we were all in agreement that [the exchanges were] not a black-and-white question."
From his first visit, the Chinese asked Stillman to press U.S. officials for help with nuclear bomb locks known as permissive action links, or PALs. The Chinese said that splits in their military during the Tiananmen crisis brought home the potential danger of unauthorized control of nuclear weapons, and they wanted the United States to provide older PAL technology that would make Chinese bombs safer but not jeopardize U.S. bomb security.
"Every trip, they asked for that," Stillman said. "I always thought the world would be a safer place if they got that."
In Washington, after Stillman transmitted the Chinese request, "There was a big debate in the United States about how far we should go to assist them with that technology," said Kurt Campbell, a former Pentagon official during the Clinton administration, now senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "I think they [the Chinese] truly were interested in what they called positive control."
Ultimately, however, U.S. authorities declined to help, and by the mid-1990s China had turned to Russia for PAL technology as well as for other nuclear weapons assistance.
Stillman said that after years of maintaining a low profile, he decided to write his memoir because he had a great deal of information to add to the record about how the Chinese built their nuclear program.
"I retired and I couldn't find a job, frankly, and I had all this unique experience," Stillman said. "More Americans have walked on the surface of the moon than have walked on the surface of the Chinese nuclear test site."
Danny B. Stillman visited Chinese nuclear facilities.Former intelligence analyst Danny B. Stillman made nine trips to China. "I had videos and cameras, and I was always taking notes," Stillman said.
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