Reason for Disarmament.

• Position: Report alleging that China stole U.S. nuclear secrets unsubstantiated

In late May, a Select Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives headed by Christopher Cox, Republican of California, issued a report entitled "U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China." The 700-page document known as the Cox Report said that China "has stolen design information on the United States' most advanced thermonuclear weapons," adding that the spying at "our national weapons laboratories spans at least the past several decades and almost certainly continues today."

The report is unsettling, to say the least. It is dismaying to think that our national weapons laboratories have been so lax about security. But the hysteria over the alleged Chinese spying scandal is not warranted.

First off, the Cox Report may not prove much. There's a big question about how compromised, exactly, U.S. national security is. "If you look at the Cox Report, nobody really knows what they got, if anything," says Lisbeth Gronlund, senior staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"It's amazing how many conclusions they've based on a relatively small amount of information," says Frank yon Hippel, a physicist who teaches nuclear control and disarmament issues at Princeton University. "They don't seem to have enough information to prosecute anybody."

Not only does the report hedge repeatedly, but members of the intelligence community and even members of the committee that came up with the report are saying that it may be wrong. For instance John Spratt, Democrat of South Carolina, said the report may not be accurate in some of its assumptions.

"The conclusions of the report have been written in a worst-case fashion," added Norm Dicks, Democrat of Washington, and a member of the committee.

The intelligence community also disputes the findings. One of the few voices of caution recently has been the CIA, which, according to a New York Times report, has said that no one knows for sure whether. China did steal documents from weapons laboratories.

And an April 21 report by a CIA panel led by Admiral David Jeremiah concludes, "To date, the aggressive Chinese collection effort has not resulted in any apparent modernization of their deployed strategic force, or any new nuclear weapons deployment."

Other critics have claimed that the report's conclusions seem extreme. "The report draws some conclusions in its public version that go beyond what you can conclude from the classified version," Senator John...