WASHINGTON, May 25 (AFP) - The head of a congressional probe into Chinese spying said Tuesday that security at US nuclear weapons laboratories remains vulnerable "to this very day." Representative Christopher Cox made the statement as his panel released a report claiming China stole key nuclear weapons secrets and shared them with US enemies. US officials said ahead of the report's release that security has been improved in the year since the report was compiled, but Cox disagreed. "What we were sad to learn is that the People's Republic of China has stolen classified information on every currently deployed warhead in the US ballistic missile arsenal," Cox told a news conference in releasing the report. "The PRC has also stolen information on the neutron bomb, which the United States has not yet deployed. "These thefts began in the late 1970s, continued during the 1980s and '90s, and significantly, our report concludes, it is exceptionally likely that that penetration of our US national weapons laboratories continues to this very day." Cox also said it was the unanimous judgment of the committee that Beijing "will exploit elements of that stolen US thermonuclear weapons information in its future designs, including a weapon that could be deployed as early as 2002." Earlier, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, whose agency supervises nuclear research labs, told CBS the report "is a little out of date ... because it was completed late last year." Richardson also said the United States had made "enormously strong security improvements in cybersecurity, computers, in counterintelligence" to improve security at the labs. Cox also said that the US administration has labeled China a "significant proliferator" of weapons of mass destruction technology. "Ten years, 20 years, 30 years from now, we may be looking at this information that has been stolen from the United States in the hands of regimes much less stable than the People's Republic of China, Third World and rogue states that engage in unpredictable behavior," he argued. Representative Norman Dicks, the top Democrat on the panel, called the breakdown "one of the worst counterintelligence failures in the nation's history." But he said the Department of Energy "is implementing a credible counterintelligence program at our national labs" that can be in place within several months. Dicks also maintained that the conclusions of the report have been written in "a worst-case fashion," and that as of now, China has not deployed any new nuclear weapons based on the information they have obtained. "So let us keep this report in perspective," Dicks said. "The United States still possess 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." -=-=- 