"Our cities are being held in threat," Cox said Tuesday of the result of China's nuclear-technology espionage, skipping right to the hottest of the hot buttons that is being pressed in Washington this week: That the Clinton administration's negligence (and that of its predecessors) has spawned a new Evil Empire, a threat to the nuclear world order, a legitimate contender for the geopolitical throne. In 2003, go the national-security nabobs, China will have a new and improved generation of nuclear weapons, all thanks to Bill Clinton, Loral and Wen Ho Lee. And all the Pentagon will have to do is cross out USSR and write in PRC -- and aim everything in the arsenal a little to the right.
It's a shame Stanley Kubrick isn't alive to make "Dr. Strangelove 2: How I Learned to Stop Engaging and Love the Cold War." Half a century after the freeze began with two big bangs and a decade after it ended with a long Russian whimper, could America really be headed back to its bomb shelters? Clinton, the president who tried, perhaps too fervently, to gain China instead of lose it all over again, is now being excoriated as the man who lost the U.S. instead. He gave them supercomputers for their infrastructure, and they used them to build bombs. He gave them satellites for their economy, they used them to guide the bombs. He hired their scientists, they looted Los Alamos. And all that time, say the critics, the commander in chief never batted an eye.
Certainly all this is a rank humiliation. But it is surely a single-edged sword. OK, so the U.S. lost -- pride, secrets, self-confidence -- but there's little logic to the notion that China somehow won. Remember, these are nukes, not stealth bombers, or fighter jets, or even tanks. If this is the second Cold War, it started a long time ago.