In the 1940s atomic espionage was real. Klaus Fuchs, who served nine years in prison in Britain, and probably Ted Hall, who left Los Alamos for Britain, passed on classified nuclear information to the USSR. What was unreal was the myth of the "vital secret" and the companion hysterical belief that the United States was threatened by an internal red menace. Way back in 1945 three of our leading scientists wrote in Life, "The fact is that a fundamental secret of the atomic bomb simply does not exist." The belief that if we could stop or prevent atomic espionage somehow America's security would be guaranteed simply had no basis in fact. Yet a half-century later, our inability to distinguish between real and imagined threats remains, and the image of "the vital secret" continues to exert its weird influence. There is no better illustration of the continuing hold that cold war modes of thinking exert over the American political culture in the nuclear realm than the fiasco surrounding the incarceration, amid wild spying changes, of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, the Taiwan-born US citizen singled out for vilification because of his ethnic background.

Even as Republican angst fueled the frantic Congressional inquisitions of the McCarthy era, the Wen Ho Lee case had its origins in a Republican-sponsored Congressional committee whose real purpose was to search for political evidence to impeach the by-then demonized President Clinton. The whole episode was eerily reminiscent of the 1940s and '50s, when, to deflect Republican critics, Harry Truman signed on to their red hunt. The Clinton Administration, recovered from impeachment and mired in a campaign finance scandal (including the charge that Beijing had secretly funneled money to the Democrats), worried that the China issue could be used effectively against Al Gore in the election. Like the Truman Administration a half-century earlier, the Clinton Administration went along. "[It] wanted to prove to its critics that it was tough on Chinese spying, whether or not that spying existed and whether or not it had anything to do with Wen Ho Lee," as Robert Scheer put it in The Nation [October 23, 2000].

Eventually, when the government's case against Lee crumbled, it agreed to dismiss fifty-eight of the fifty-nine counts that had been lodged against him, but only after the spy hysteria whipped up by the Cox Committee and the press had taken a terrible toll on the life of the scientist and, as Scheer reported, "cast suspicion over the entire community of Asian-American scientists, many of whom are now boycotting employment in the nuclear weapons labs." The furor has reflected more than Clinton-era factionalism. It also reminds us that the cold war mentality has not gone the way of the cold war.

Historians of American nativism have long contended that the nativist impulse connects the radical, the foreign or alien, and the immoral, linking them all as the Enemy Other. During the McCarthy era, as Arnold Forester, the general counsel of the Anti-Defamation League, once observed, "There was an evident quota of anti-Semitism in the McCarthy wave of hysteria. Jews in that period were automatically suspect. Our evaluation of the general mood was that the people felt if you scratch a Jew, you can find a Communist." Fifty years later, where national security is concerned, the Jews seem to have given way to the Chinese. In the policy arena, the reinvigoration of NATO, the defeat of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the decision of the Bush Administration to cancel talks with North Korea and the intent of the Administration to go forward with its Strategic Defense Initiative are all of a piece, as China (along with other nonwhite countries) begins to replace Russia in America's post-cold war demonology.

There is something in the national mood that is a stark reminder of the ugly underside of the McCarthy era. The hysteria over Wen Ho Lee; the expulsion of fifty Russians as possible spies after the discovery that one FBI man had been spying for the Russians; the malicious, inappropriate and disproportionately impassioned Republican attempt to impeach the President for sex-related lying; the blatant disregard for due process, legal precedent and constitutional doctrine by a partisan Supreme Court bent on installing a Republican President; even the incessant harping on and front-page recycling of charges--in the absence of proof--that Clinton staffers committed large-scale acts of vandalism before departing the White House; and the idea that his ill-advised pardon of Marc Rich might justify the removal of the pardon power from the Constitution, are reminiscent of nothing so much as the bullying and power plays of that bygone era when the country temporarily lost its moorings.

None of this is to deny that there are real-world problems out there, that like all countries in the intelligence game we are targets for friend and foe alike. Vide, Richard Hanssen, the FBI agent who still denies that he sold secrets to the Soviets and their Russian successors, while his lawyers bargain for his life; vide, Jonathan Pollard, now serving a life sentence for his espionage efforts on behalf of our ally, Israel; and vide, the brouhaha and continuing diplomatic disaster-potential of our surveillance flights near (or is it over?) China's borders.

But once again the security dangers proclaimed by the middle, near and far right seem based more on paranoia than reality. It would thus be a mistake to regard the rumblings from the right as solely a partisan matter, just as it would be a mistake to regard the fulminations of the counterrevisionists as solely an academic matter. Party politics and academic politics are both beholden to and work their influence on the surrounding political culture, just as they did in the overheated days of the domestic cold war. Together they send a troubling signal. The cold war is over, but it was never buried. The ghosts of the cold war--its culture and apparatus--live on, perhaps with consequences as troubling as the irrational forces that possess us.

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