Sunday, September 17, 2000

Sandia Lab Chief Slammed for Testimony

By John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer
    Wen Ho Lee was locked away in December in part based on testimony from Sandia National Laboratories President C. Paul Robinson.
    The data Lee was charged with mishandling "could truly change the world's strategic balance," Robinson told the court.
    When the case against the Los Alamos scientist began to unravel last month, Robinson's testimony was a key target of defense attacks.
    The complaint against Robinson, said Steve Aftergood, is that he went beyond the technical details of the matter.
    "He indulged in hyperbole, and like much of the rest of the prosecution, overstated his case," said Aftergood, a government secrecy expert with the Federation of American Scientists who has closely followed the Lee case.
    Aftergood believes Robinson's reputation has been hurt by the affair, but less than others involved in the case.
    Robinson, through a Sandia spokesman, would not comment. He has repeatedly declined requests for interviews about his testimony in the case.
    Robinson took the witness stand Dec. 28 as one of the deans of the U.S. nuclear weapons program.
    He was chief of Los Alamos National Laboratory's nuclear-weapons program, and a U.S. arms control negotiator, before coming to Sandia in 1990.
    The computer data Lee was accused of downloading, Robinson told U.S. District Judge James Parker, "would allow the design of weapons that would kill several million people if a single weapon were detonated in a city."
    "These tapes could truly change the world's strategic balance," the distinguished Robinson, a former arms control ambassador, told the court.
    "I have got to say that this court, I believe, faces a 'you-bet-your-country' decision."
    It was a compelling piece of testimony, one that Parker later acknowledged played a key role in his decision to keep Lee in jail.
    Last month, it was called into serious question when Los Alamos scientist John Richter, one of the nation's most experienced nuclear weapons designers, took the stand in Parker's courtroom.
    At least 99 percent of the nuclear "secrets" Lee allegedly downloaded to data tapes were unclassified, published in open literature and not especially helpful to a foreign nation, Richter told Parker.
    If U.S. weapons software fell into foreign hands, Richter said, "I don't think it would have any deleterious effect at all. I think keeping him locked up is much more injurious to the reputation of the United States. That's why I'm here."
    Other veteran weaponeers joined Richter in questioning the importance of the tapes.
    Robinson remained unbowed, returning to the stand to defend his views. "I still believe that," Robinson told the court.
    "I believe that making some capability available to other nations, particularly the People's Republic of China, could change the global strategic balance, particularly for people in Asia," he testified.
    But the damage to the prosecution's case and Robinson's position was done. The crystal clear picture of the importance of Lee's tapes, Parker wrote in a later ruling, was suddenly cloudy.
    "It is no longer indisputable, as the government made it appear in December 1999, that the missing tapes contain crown jewel information about the nation's nuclear weapons program," Parker wrote. "All of the scientists seemed credible. They simply have honest and powerfully conflicting beliefs."