se system that would cover South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan . Revelations in early-to-mid 1999 indicating a pattern of Chinese nuclear weapons and missile technology espionage dating back from the 1970s to the mid-1990s has raised fears of China as an enemy to the highest level in 20 years. China's defense budget has grown more than 50% over the course of the 1990s and is said to have increased 15% in 1999. China's occupation of 11 islands and reefs in the Spratlys, including Mischief Reef, 378 kilometers from the Philippines is also used as evidence of the expansionist nature of China . The accusations of espionage are more telling of the weaknesses in U.S. security than of providing any significant evidence that the Chinese have used this data to gain a qualitative strategic advantage relative to the United States. A more balanced conclusion would be that the espionage reveals that the privatization of the management of nuclear weapons labs did not adequately take into account the United States' national security concerns. A report by Clinton's Foreign Intelligence Advisory concluded that a "culture of arrogance" at the weapons labs had "conspired to create an espionage scandal waiting to happen" while another report by the General Accounting Office said that Los Alamos and Livermore had ignored warnings about their security for years . The most recent news about the espionage situation with China has involved a man name We Ho Lee. Lee was terminated from his position at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in March 1999 for allegedly passing on classified information on the W-88 nuclear warhead to China. It is said that Lee leaked the documents electronically onto an unsecured computer network. Since the furor over alleged Chinese espionage waned over the summer, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials narrowed the list of nuclear secrets that Beijing most likely stole while expanding the pool of potential suspects. After three ...
