Cox report on Chinese spy activities and Beowulf

[Joe Harrington]

rgb writes:
>  f) They should just give it up on the whole computer control/spy
>  thing.  Continue to try to control access to bomb-grade fissile
>  material (the sine qua non of bomb construction, after all).

Actually, it appears that separation of fissile material can be done
by tunable laser excitation of specific atomic weights in a gas, a
process you or I could set up in a basement if we studied lasers and
chemistry for a decade or so and didn't poison ourselves first.
Yellow cake uranium is too plentiful to monitor.  However, we're not
talking about terrorists with A-bombs here, we're talking about China
with space-efficient fusion "devices".  We're also talking about them
catching up to a place we expected them to get anyway in a decade or
two.  In essence, we've just written off the next decade or so of US
world military dominance.  I'm not so concerned by this.  20 years
ago, the popular media questionned whether the US was even a
superpower anymore.  Then the Soviet empire collapsed.  Now the PRC
has our most deadly weapon on its missiles.  Tables turn
unpredictably, and they will again.  I'm hoping that this time enough
people stand up and shout "information wants to be free" that our
government, which sponsors most of the ground-breaking weapons
research going on on the planet, might reconsider whether trying to
keep a 20-year lead is such a good idea, given the tendency of
information to escape and the impossibility of getting it back into
the bottle once it does.  Our long-term good is best served by
designing the *least* new weapons technology.

> Then why the efforts to steal it?

"hard" != "costly", in time and money.  The Chinese aren't stupid.
They know that a month in the laboratory can save you hours in the
library.  Also, they want to know what they're up against, and once
they do, why not start from there?  If this were our game, we'd all
play it the same way.

--jh--