Los Alamos and Wen Ho Lee: Migration, nation, and security (California, China).

摘要

The Wen Ho Lee case involves touchstone sociological issues like immigration and ethnicity, the state ownership of secrets of military and technological force, and the definition and policies of national security. Given the international currents of the post Cold War 1990s and Lee's position at Los Alamos National Laboratory, he became the classic scapegoat in a process in which elements of the Cold War security apparatus in this country were seeking to define the international threat picture and the possible rivals to U.S. power. As a perennial domestic dispute about foreign policy toward China raged on, and Clinton was pursuing a trade-based relationship with the People's Republic of China, a number of policy actors and agencies portrayed China as a hardline communist state and active military threat to the United States. The tenor of these claims increased from concerns about Chinese launching of European and American satellites, to allegations about PRC and People's Liberation Army contributions to U.S. political campaigns (although now curiously there is little interest in investigating the campaign contributions and connections of the purported double-agent Katrina Leung, who was a major Republican Party fundraiser and donor in California), to intelligence and security warnings about Chinese espionage, to outlandish claims at the root of the Lee case that the PRC had stolen a wide variety of technological knowledge from the U.S. (which would supposedly allow them to fulfill their longtime goal of military modernization and thus become a major superpower threat to the United States), to the claim that it was Lee, a Taiwanese-born, U.S.-naturalized citizen who had worked for the U.S. government for more than twenty years, who was singlehandedly responsible for divulging a number of key nuclear secrets to the PRC, including the design codes and knowledge for the compact and powerful W-88 warhead.