years of a narrow focus on the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab in New Mexico and Wen Ho Lee, officials now acknowledge that the classified information China most likely stole was accessible to hundreds of people at several federal facilities . A primary piece of evidence continues to be a 1988 Chinese document that suggests China stole valuable information about nearly every major weapon in the current U.S. nuclear arsenal, including the W-88 miniaturized submarine warhead that is one of America's most sophisticated weapons. This document was an important element of the report issued by a congressional committee chaired by Rep. Christopher Cox on Chinese nuclear espionage earlier this year. The Cox Report pointed to that document as evidence to the extent of Chinas spying at U.S. nuclear labs. More recent assessments by U.S. intelligence, however, conclude that a large portion of the information in that document most likely came from publicly available documents, some of which contained misinformation about American weapons. In the case of the W-88, intelligence officials now believe the 1988 Chinese document, which U.S. officials obtained in 1995, contains only a couple of pieces of classified information that could have been stolen only from secure facilities . The growing dominance of commercial over security issues (as evident in the cases of the missile launches by Loral and Hughes) points to the dangers of having U.S. business interests shape peace and security issues toward China. Within the Clinton administration, a faction led by the Treasury and Commerce departments and promoted by transnational corporations opposed and continues to oppose security-based restrictions on trade and commerce, arguing that China's partial liberalization make it a land of enormous trade and investment opportunity . The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies concludes that "China does not have the resources to project a major conv...
