Cox report on Chinese spy activities and Beowulf

[Robert G. Brown]

On Fri, 28 May 1999, texelsoft wrote:

> Whoa RGB you're getting carried away by a perfectly good rant.
> 
> >   e) That nuclear bombs basically Are Not That Hard To Build.  You
> >   cannot keep the laws of nature secret from anybody with even a paltry
> >   research budget (and the Chinese are far from mingy on research and
> >   defense, I'm sure).  Once the laws are known (and they've been
> >   generally known for decades, now) all that is left is engineering, and
> >   folks need to get a grip on their seats to hear this, but engineering
> >   is not all that difficult either.  What do they think, Americans have
> >   some sort of a monopoly on clever ideas so that the world has to steal
> >   them?  I think not...
> 
> 	Then why the efforts to steal it? Surely you're not sufficiently racist to
> suggest the chinese people, in general, are stupid. Equally unlikely is the

I'm suggesting from direct personal experience that they are far from
stupid.  In fact, they're more than smart enough that they didn't need
to steal anything to build advanced design bombs.

> notion that the engineering effort done in the last N years in american labs
> is valueless. Or perhaps you'd like to make the code open source? Kinda has

Not valueless, just easily duplicated by other smart people in
non-American labs given a decade or more and the resources to work on
it.  If you check out the website the Chinese government set up to prove
that they didn't steal any "secrets" to build their bombs, you will see
that the "code" already is "open source".  You might look up the nuclear
weapons FAQ site (it moves or I'd give you a URL, but a web browser
should easily find it) you can browse a fraction of what is known and in
the public domain about bombs.  The NWFAQ stops (just) short of
providing "engineering details" but, as the Chinese noted, most of those
details (physical dimensions, materials, specs) are in the open
literature or moderately unimportant (many ways to design a house or car
or bomb).  Curiously, the Chinese government stated clearly that they
think that America's claim that they (needed to steal because they are
"ignorant Chinese" and hence) "stole" the bomb "secrets" is what is
really racist.  I agree.

I will make a Pronouncement. In my professional opinion, as a physicist
of reasonably good standing, a team made up of just the physicists from
China that >>I personally<< have taught in graduate school at Duke over
the last decade (most of whom were at or near the top of their graduate
classes grade-wise) could easily build any kind of nuclear bomb you like
from the descriptions of bombs available on the NWFAQ and throughout the
open literature.  Sure, they'd need a decent budget, some readily
available computers, and the support of a corps of explosives (and
other) engineers, but again, I feel confident that the Chinese are up to
the challenge of building explosive lenses out of well-documented
explosive materials with well-documented differential burn rates.
Especially given a decade or more to experiment and perfect.  They
manage to build lasers, ballistic missiles, integrated circuits, and all
sorts of other "high-tech" devices; their best engineers are certainly
competent and creative enough.  

I'm not a nuclear theorist, but I'm totally confident that I could do it
all by myself in a decade (given a budget of a a few hundred million $$
and a cast of thousands, of course;-).  The physics just isn't all that
difficult any more, and the physics is the hardest part.

The only thing at all difficult about building a bomb is acquiring
bomb-grade fissionable materials.  This a country the size of China
obviously has no problem with.

The place where the Chinese obtained the "secrets" required to build the
bomb is in the many top-level graduate physics departments across the
country that have been eagerly accepting Chinese students for ten years
or so now.  Note that those students represent the heavily selected
"cream" of students from a population pool of approximately 1 billion
people, in a culture that has valued education as a means of personal
advancement (and hence to some extent selected for intelligence) for
some 3000 years.  We have trained them in nuclear physics, laser
physics, condensed matter physics, computational physics, pretty much
any kind of physics they wanted to learn, all sorts of engineering and
mathematics -- there have been no "restrictions" on the kind of
knowledge foreign students, including the Chinese, are permitted to
acquire in American universities.

This is the same place, by the way, that both the Pakistanis and the
Indians (the latter with an equally large population pool of their own)
learned the requisite physics.  Sure, both countries have some excellent
universities of their own, but face it -- the best graduate physics
institutions in the world are arguably in USA (with some equals in
Western Europe) right now.  We accept and train the best students from
all over the world.  It's hardly surprising to me that a few Fermis or
Tellers or Oppenheimers are among them, especially when the REALLY hard
part, the conception and proof of the Idea, is long since accomplished.

The last observation to make about the whole issue is that the flow of
this sort of information is inevitably from "unknown" to "secret" to
"generally and openly known".  In the early 1940's nuclear bomb design
stopped being "unknown".  It remained approximately "secret" up to
perhaps the late sixties, with occasional (very brief) bursts of new,
ever "smaller" secrets as new bomb designs were obtained.  Once it is
known that something (like a neutron bomb, or a very small implosion
warhead) is possible, however, it is just a matter of time before its
"secrets" become public domain and generally known.  Inside the next
decade, every detail of building any kind of bomb you like will become
publically available, instantly retrievable knowledge; most of the
details are already available if you look carefully for them.  We might
as well get used to the idea.

The USA is trying to stop the bleeding of an amputation with a band-aid,
or building an armed bunker around the barn long after the horse has
departed, or passing water into the face of a force seven hurricane, or
trying to reverse the course of the second law of thermodynamics
(literally, as this dictates the direction of the flow of information
from isolated to disseminated).  Perhaps we'll buy a few years before
any Iraqi armed with a web-browser can get the details.  Perhaps not;
personally I think that the Iraqi's have done just fine building bombs
lacking only the "pits" to make them functional even without web
browsers.  Either way their response of the moment is redolent with
jingoistic hysteria.  We don't really need some sort of Nuclear
McCarthyism introduced into American politics to restrict free trade in
computers and distract us from real issues -- that it is occuring anyway
strikes me as blatant election-year issue-creation.

> > (Speaking of which, let us pray for the Indians and Pakistanis who are
> > about to die in the world's second nuclear war...and who didn't steal
> > any codes or misuse any controlled computers to build the devices that
> > they will use in it).
> Good sentiment if a bit overwrought with nuclear hysteria. Pray for the
> young indian and pakistani men and women who really are dying right now from
> conventional weapons too.

Good point, although they are dying by the tens or even the hundreds in
a very confined locale.  In almost any kind of nuclear exchange in the
crowded Indian sub-continent, I would expect casualties four to five
orders of magnitude greater.  A hundred million dead or wounded or
poisoned by fallout would not be out of the question.

I actually lived in India from 1959 to 1967, during one of the earlier
India-Pakistani wars (and not so long after their splitup, Nehru was
Prime Minister when I first arrived).  I had occasion to visit India
again fairly recently.  Based on this experience, I'm not at all
optimistic about the current situation there.  Perhaps I'm being
"hysterical"; certainly I'm being cynical.  Very, very cynical.

   rgb

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb@phy.duke.edu