| ® | The Chinese Puzzle | 235 independently targeted warheads. Combined with the state-of-the- art technology it had licensed from Russia, its systematic use of espionage even made it possible for China to build its own stealth fighters. Unlike the United States, China did not achieve this remarkable capability to launch independently targeted miniaturized nuclear weapons and stealth them by investing hundreds of billions of dol- lars in developing them. It obtained this technology mainly through espionage. The Chinese intelligence service stole a large part, if not all, of America’s secret technology for weaponizing nuclear bombs during the 1980s and 1990s. The theft was so massive that in 1998 the House of Representatives set up a special bipartisan investiga- tive unit called the Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China. Based on the intelligence amassed by the NSA, the CIA, and other intelligence services, it concluded in its report that the Chinese intel- ligence service had obtained both by electronic and by conventional spying the warhead design of America’s seven most advanced ther- © monuclear weapons. Moreover, it found that espionage successes ® allowed China to so accelerate the design, development, and test- ing of its own nuclear weapons that the new generation of Chinese weapons would be “comparable in effectiveness to the weapons used by the United States.” Further, the committee reported that these thefts were the “results of decades of intelligence operations against U.S. weapons laboratories.” The Chinese intelligence service further obtained from private U.S. defense contractors through cyber espio- nage important elements of the stealth technology used in advanced planes and submarines. China shared (or exchanged) the fruits of its espionage on nuclear warhead design with North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, and Russia. Despite its formidable intelligence coups in the United Sta