WASHINGTON, May 26 (AFP) - An alarmist US Congressional report on Chinese spying in the United States virtually guarantees that Sino-US relations will become an important issue in the upcoming presidential election campaign. The three-volume report, released Tuesday by a US congress panel, states that China stole secrets to every weapon in the US nuclear arsenal and passed key military data to US enemies. The Cox and Dicks report -- compiled by US Congressmen Christopher Cox, a conservative Californian Republican, and Democrat Norm Dicks from Washington state -- had US politicians of all stripes scrambling, either to hide or to use the report to flay their enemies. "Today, our cities are being held in threat by technology that left the United States decades ago," said Cox as he presented the report Tuesday. The report, combined with statements by Democratic fundraiser Johnny Chung that China's military intelligence chief ordered 300,000 dollars to be paid to Clinton's 1996 re-election fund, which both Clinton and China have denied, presages a new wave of anti-Chinese "red menace" rhetoric. The espionage report coaxed Texas Governor George W. Bush, the unproclaimed Republican front-runner in next year's presidential elections, to make his first major national policy statement. In contrast Bush's likely Democratic rival in the November 2000 presidential elections, Vice President Al Gore, was keeping a low profile. Bush said the report "shines a glaring light on the current administration's failed policies toward China." "China is not America's strategic partner," the governor said in Texas. "China is a competitor -- a competitor which does not share our values -- but now, unfortunately, shares many of our nuclear secrets." Polls show that Bush would defeat Gore, a staunch Clinton loyalist, if elections were held now. Clinton himself ran for cover. After earlier defending his administration's handling of nuclear security, he said Tuesday that he agreed with "the overwhelming majority" of the report's recommendations "We have a solemn obligation to protect such national security information and we have to do more to do it," Clinton said. Ironically, Clinton accused then-president George Bush with being too close with China during his successful 1992 White House campaign. Clinton especially criticized Bush for not being tough enough on China's human rights record. But with the Soviet Union now in the dustbin of history, conservative US Republicans have set China up as the nation's most feared enemy. China uses prison labor and does not respect free trade, intellectual copyrights, religious freedom or human rights, conservative Republicans will point out. Now China's nuclear weapons capability has substantially improved at US expense, even though China's nuclear arsenal is a fraction of the US nuclear power. Many Americans seem to agree: a recent Newsweek poll showed that 57 percent view Beijing as a major threat, while a Wall Street Journal survey found 49 percent put China on the top of the threat list. China greeted the Cox report by saying that it is based on "sheer fabrications out of ulterior political motives." "China has developed a nuclear capability through self-reliance. Our nuclear weapons are purely for defense purposes," read a three-paragraph statement from the Chinese embassy in Washington. Republican legislator Tom DeLay gave the same theme a different twist: Clinton and Gore have been indifferent to the allegations "because they had ulterior economic and political motives," including trade relationships. Report co-author Dicks was more cautious than his Republican colleagues in describing the report. "The United States still possesses overwhelming nuclear superiority over China with more than 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads currently in our inventory, compared to China's total of about two dozen," Dicks said. "Let's not break up our relations with China just because we had a lousy counterintelligence program," Dicks late Tuesday on CNN. "Let's not play the blame game; let's clean up the mess." And for all his heated rhetoric even Bush is not calling for trade sanctions on China, and still believes that China should be admitted to World Trade Organization. Bottom line: "I think that it's important for China to open its markets to US producers and US products," Bush said. Long forgotten in the political fracas over China here -- especially among the US public -- is NATO's mistaken bombing of China's Belgrade embassy.  