4 July 1997
Source: http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/aces/aaces002.html
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[Congressional Record: June 27, 1997 (Extensions)]
[Page E1355-E1358]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
[DOCID:cr27jn97-63]
CHINA=RELATED CHALLENGES
______
HON. TILLIE K. FOWLER
of florida
in the house of representatives
Thursday, June 26, 1997
Mrs. FOWLER. Mr. Speaker, although China policy is in the news right
now, most Americans remain unaware of one of the most serious China-
related challenges our nation faces--the Clinton administration's
dramatic loosening of export controls on sensitive militarily-related
technology. Much of that technology is going to the People's Republic
of China, which could spell trouble for our national security and
interests abroad.
The Clinton policy has resulted in the transfer to the Chinese of
devices and technology ranging from telecommunications equipment that
is impervious to eavesdropping, to highly sophisticated machine tools
needed to build fighter aircraft, strategic bombers and cruise
missiles. The policy has also resulted in the decontrol of high-speed
supercomputers, leading to the sale of 46 of them to the PRC over the
last 15 months, as revealed in a recent congressional hearing.
The United States should remain engaged with China, which is an
emerging superpower. However, we must not forget that it is a Communist
country that has undertaken a large-scale defense buildup with the
clear intent of increasing its ability to project military power. The
U.S. should not be contributing to that goal. As I said yesterday
during the debate on MFN, free trade is something to be desired, but
commerce at all costs is not--especially when it provides a more level
battlefield, which no American wants.
I would like to request that two items be included in the Record
following my remarks: first, an article detailing the history and
details of the current policy of decontrol--and its many flaws--which
recently appeared in the independent newspaper Heterodoxy; and second,
the text of a resolution passed by the Board of Directors of the Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs [JINSA] regarding the sale or
transfer of supercomputers.
[From the Heterodoxy, April/May, 1997]
Clinton and the American Experience in China--Arming the Enemy
(By Dr. Stephen Bryen and Michael Ledeen)
At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. towered over the
world, the sole surviving superpower, the source of
inspiration for a global democratic revolution that had
destroyed tyrannies ranging from Spain and Portugal in the
'70s, to virtually all of Latin America and then Central and
Eastern Europe in the '80s culminating in the fall of the
Soviet Empire itself. Washington became the Mecca of a new
democratic faith, and the prophets and followers of
democracy, from Havel and Walesa to Pope John Paul II and
Nelson Mandela, came in a sort of democratic hajj to pay
reverent tribute. They all went to Congress and gave thanks
to America for having made it all possible, and continued to
the White House to pay their respects.
Any other nation in such a position would have extended its
dominion over others, and many nations in the rest of the
world fully expected us to do just that. They were stunned to
learn that America was not interested in greater dominion.
Indeed, America was barely interested in them at all. Having
won the third world war of the twentieth century, we were
about to repeat the same error we had made after the first
two: withdraw from the world as quickly as we could, bring
the boys home, cut back on military power, and worry about
our own problems. Americans are the first people in the
history of the world to believe that peace is the normal
condition of mankind, and our leaders were eager to return to
``normal.'' And they were encouraged to define this word in a
way that included truckling to China and helping it emerge as
a major threat to U.S. interests.
Thus was born a policy of criminal irresponsibility, a
policy that has not only failed to protect us and our allies
against the inevitable rise of new enemies, but actually
facilitated, indeed even encouraged, the emergence of new
military threats. It began with George Bush, Jim Baker, Brent
Scowcroft, and Dick Cheney and continued at a far more rapid
rate with Bill Clinton, Warren Christopher, Ron Brown,
William Perry, and Anthony Lake. All of them have helped
dismantle the philosophy and apparatus created by Ronald
Reagan and his team--most notably Defense Secretary Caspar
Weinberger--to defeat the Soviet Union by denying it access
to advanced technology and thus protect American military
superiority for years to come. To understand our current
plight with China, it is necessary to understand what we
unilaterally dismantled under Bush and Clinton.
It is widely believed that the fall of the Soviet Empire
was a great ``implosion'' produced by the failure of the
Soviet economic system and the visionary policies of Mikhail
Gorbachev. This is the leftwing view of recent events, a view
intended to deny credit to democracy and America in forcing
the outcomes. Western policies are rarely credited with a key
role in this drama, but in fact they were the crucial
ingredients. The Soviet economic system, for example, had
failed long ago. In fact, it had failed from the very
beginning, as each disastrous ``plan'' was replaced with
another. Russia was the world's greatest grain exporter
before World War I, and half a century later had become the
world's greatest grain importer. That is not an easy
accomplishment, and testifies to the shambles created by the
Communist regime.
Things were not much better in the industrial complex, even
the vaunted military sector. The Soviets were rarely able to
design and manufacture advanced technologies on their own.
Without exception, when the Soviets needed to modernize an
assembly line,
[[Page E1356]]
they went back to the original source and asked the Western
company to build them a new one. They were especially
dependent on Western technology in areas like electronics,
computers, and advanced machine tools. This gave the West a
great opportunity to get a stranglehold on Soviet military
technology, and, under Reagan, the opportunity was exploited.
An international organization Combat Command (COCOM) was
created to control the flow of military useful technology
from West to East. A list of dangerous technologies was
agreed upon, and all members of COCOM undertook to embargo
all of them for sale to the Soviets, or to any country
willing to resell to the Soviet Union or its allies.
Unanimous agreement was required for any exception.
Despite predictions that such a system could not possibly
work, it proved to be devastating, as shown by the behavior
of Gorbachev himself. Hardly a week went by without Gorbachev
or Shevardnadze or other Soviet leaders begging the West to
treat the USSR like a ``normal'' country, and thus dismantle
COCOM. Their cries of pain were fully justified, for the gap
between Soviet and Western military technology grew
relentlessly during the Reagan years. So much so that when
the Soviet crisis arrived, the Kremlin could not even dream
of solving it by a successful military action against us.
It does not require an advanced degree in international
relations to understand the great value of such a system of
export controls in a hostile world, and it should have been
maintained after the Cold War, especially if we were going to
dramatically reduce our research and development of new
weapons systems and technologies to upgrade existing systems.
The one thing we should not have wanted was to see potential
enemies acquiring the very technologies that had given us
such great military superiority. And of all the countries we
should have worried about, China was Number One, with Iran a
distant second.
There were, and are, two main reasons to think long and
hard about China. The first is size: China has the world's
largest population, and can therefore put into the field the
largest army. And the likelihood of conflict with China stems
from reason number two for thinking long and hard about this
threat: China is the last major Communist dictatorship, and
the history of the twentieth century is one of repeated
aggression by dictators. Simple prudence dictated that, until
and unless China joined the society of democratic nations, we
should have tried to maintain a decisive military advantage.
Call it deterrence.
Instead, for reasons that will intrigue the
psychohistorians for many years to come, we have not only
bent over backwards to be generous to Coins (our enormous
trade deficit leaves no doubt about our largesse), but we
have been busily arming the People's Republic so that it can
give us grief.
For China to effectively project power in the future, it
would have to get the technologies for its army that the U.S.
used to rout the Iraqi forces--actually superior to China's
in many regards--during Desert Storm. But from where?
China has four main sources of supply. The most prominent
in Russia. Russia has been able to offer China important help
in aerospace, missiles, and submarine technology. China has
bought Surkhoi fighter aircraft and Kilo-class diesel
submarines from Russia, and the Russians have provided
assistance to many other Chinese Army projects. But the
Russian connection is only a stopgap for China, not a
solution, because, while Russian technology is, in most
cases, better than China's, it is not the equal of the United
States. Russian military systems have well-known weaknesses:
poor reliability, mediocre performance, and outdated
technology. Russian arms lack the electronics found in
Americas systems; the computers are more than one generation
behind, and the radars and ``com'' links are old-fashioned.
The Chinese now all too well how easily American stealth and
smart bombs overwhelmed what the Russians supplied Iraq. In
need of a ``quick fix'' to be able to bully its neighbors,
China has been taking the Russian technology, but it needs
much more.
A second source of armaments and military technology is
Western Europe. European weapons are better than Russian, and
come close to American standards. But European systems are
frightfully expensive, and, for extras, the Europeans have
generally been unwilling to sell the manufacturing technology
for weapons. They want to sell the systems, and then supply
the spare parts in the future. The Chinese want their own
manufacturing capacity. Like any country preparing seriously
for war, China doesn't want to be dependent on others for
weapons.
A third source is Israel. Israel has been willing to sell
arms and arms technology to China, and has done so for a
number of years. Starting with air-to-air missile technology,
Israel appears to have sold Lavi 3rd-generation fighter
aircraft technology to China and its now trying to get the
Chinese to buy an Israeli version of the advanced early
warning radar aircraft. AWACS, which played such a big
role in the Gulf war by providing early warning and
vectoring allied aircraft against Iraqi planes, operating
at stand-off ranges in excess of one hundred miles.
But Israel's assistance to China is limited in a number of
ways. Because China sells arms to Iran and Iraq, and has sold
missiles to Saudi Arabia and Syria, Israel has to exercise
extreme caution about what it sells to China. The Chinese
suspect--and they are surely right--that Israel is not going
to sell China a system that Israelis cannot defeat.
Another difficulty for China buying from Israel is that
Israel is not a one-stop solution. The Lavi is a good
example. The Lavi is a modern, lightweight, single-engine,
high-performance fighter plane with an advanced engine,
composite structures, advanced computers and electronics, ECM
pods, and missile and weapons launch capabilities. But China
wants to manufacture the aircraft, and many of the parts come
from the U.S. and were provided to Israel under carefully
controlled munitions export licenses. In most cases the
manufacturing knowhow was not even released to Israel, and
other valuable design and manufacturing secrets were also
withheld. The engine is an even graver problem: the only two
sources for a suitable Lavi engine are American companies,
Pratt & Whitney and General Electric. There is no other
engine with the performance and weight to match it. While
some have suggested the Russians could soon give the Chinese
an acceptable engine, none has yet appeared. The U.S. engines
are a generation ahead of anything the Russians have. So the
Chinese have been able to acquire some of the technology from
Israel. But to get the rest they need the United States.
It is often said that, in the world of advanced technology,
embargoes or export controls cannot possibly work, because it
they don't get it from us, they'll get it from somebody else.
This is false. To compete with the U.S. militarily. China has
to get our technology, and, most of the time, that means
getting it directly from us.
It's easy to understand why the Chinese want our
technology, it's far more difficult to comprehend why the
American government would let them get it. We know that the
Chinese routinely sell advanced weapons to `rogue nations''
that rank among our worst enemies; Iraq, Iran, Syria, and
Libya. We know China is a totalitarian regime. And we know
that the stronger China becomes the easier it will be for
Peking to maintain its evil regime.
There are some extraordinary cases in which it might make
sense to sell a limited amount of advanced military
technology to China, but there aren't many of them. (It might
make sense to sell them devices for nuclear safely, or for
certain military systems with important civilian
applications--satellite launchers, for example.) But that is
not what is going on. The American government is allowing
massive sales of highly advanced military technology to
China, and the policy has reached dimensions and achieved a
momentum that make clear that we are not doing so on a
limited, special-case basis. It is a deliberate policy that
appears to have full approval from the highest levels of the
Clinton Administration, despite strong objections from
government agencies or from individual officials outraged
at what is happening. The Clinton Administration has not
done this openly and honestly, by going to Congress and
asking for a change in legislation. It has, for the most
part, acted secretly, resorting to clever bureaucratic
maneuver. Take the case of the aircraft engines for the
Lavi, for example.
Powerful aircraft engines contain special technology that
greatly enhances their thrust, and this technology has long
been on the so-called ``Munitions List'' of goods and
services that would endanger American security if they were
sold to hostile or potentially hostile countries. It is
illegal to sell anything on that list to anyone, anywhere,
without formal approval from the State Department, which in
practice almost always clears its decisions with the military
services. Moreover, hard on the heels of the Tiananmen
Massacre in Peking, Congress passed laws forbidding the sale
of anything on the list to China, unless the president felt
it so important that he were willing to issue a formal
waiver. In the eight years since Tiananmen, this has happened
just once, when a waiver was issued for technology having to
do with the launch of commercial satellites on the Long March
rocket (a military rocket).
The administration was unwilling to openly issue any other
waivers, knowing there would be a political firestorm. So
Clinton and his people did it slickly, by taking the engine
technology off the Munitions List and shifting control from
State to Commerce, where the president's buddy Ron Brown held
court. Within days, Commerce issued licenses permitting U.S.
engine producers to sell the technology to China. And since
the sales have the explicit approval of the government, we
can be sure that American corporations will do everything
they can to help set up the manufacturing facilities. The
result of all this maneuvering is that China will soon have
the world's finest engines in its fighter aircraft.
The story is repeated elsewhere. Supercomputers, for
instance, are the crown jewels of computers, and are in use
at some of our best national laboratories such as Lawrence
Livermore, Sandia, and Los Alamos. The U.S. National Security
Agency uses supercomputers to keep track of our adversaries.
The Defense Department, and leading defense contractors, use
supercomputers to develop stealth technology and simulate
testing of precision guided weapons, advanced weapons
platforms, and delivery systems.
Only two countries, the United States and Japan, build
competent supercomputers. And both countries, recognizing
that the random sale of supercomputers would constitute a
grave risk to Western security, agreed in 1986
[[Page E1357]]
to cooperate and coordinate sales of supercomputers. This
agreement made it impossible to sell supercomputers to China.
But that was then, and this is now, and Clinton & Co. have
sabotaged any effective control over supercomputer sales to
China.
The first move was to change the definition of
supercomputers. In the Bush administration, it was generally
agreed that a computer with a speed of 195 million
theoretical operations per second (MTOPS) was a
``supercomputer,'' and therefore strategic. Two years later,
the Clinton administration lifted the ceiling to 2,000 MTOPS.
This ten-fold increase wasn't nearly enough, though, and
shortly thereafter the administration unilaterally renounced
the existing regulatory controls, such that China could get
supercomputers up to 7,000 MTOPS. This drastic move provoked
violent protests from many of our allies, including several
that did not even manufacture such computers, and hence had
no commercial interest in the matter. We thumbed our nose at
them.
But even this was not enough, because it would still have
been possible for the Department of Defense to oppose
supercomputer sales to China on strategic grounds. The
solution was to redefine the computers for ``civilian use,''
and within the past 15 months. U.S. companies including IBM,
Convex (later, Hewlett Packard), and Silicon Graphics (and
perhaps others) have sold the Chinese at least 46
supercomputers, many of them going into China's defense
industry, or being put to use in nuclear weapons design.
This represents a truly terrifying hemorrhage, for
supercomputers are the central nervous system of modern
warfare. The sales of 46 supercomputers give the Chinese more
of these crucial devices than are in use in the Pentagon, the
military services, and the intelligence community combined.
They enable the Chinese to more rapidly design state-of-the-
art weapons, add stealth capability to their missiles and
aircraft, improve their anti-submarine warfare technology,
and dramatically enhance their ability to design and build
smaller nuclear weapons suitable for cruise missiles. Thanks
to the folly of the Clinton Administration, the Chinese can
now conduct tests of nuclear weapons, conventional
explosives, and chemical and biological weapons by simulating
them on supercomputers. Not only can they now make better
weapons of mass destruction, but they can do a lot of the
work secretly, thus threatening us with an additional element
of surprise.
Finally, since supercomputers are the key to encryption, we
have now made it easier for the People's Republic to crack
commercial and, perhaps, even government secret codes.
There are many other areas where the American public has
been told almost nothing about our arming of China, and
reports indicating major problems with the Chinese have been
suppressed or buried. In the past two years, for example, the
Customs Department has interdicted 15 shipments of military
parts going from the United States to China. Some of these
were parts from our latest air-to-air missiles and from
fighter aircraft like the F-15. These parts were ``scrapped''
by the U.S. military, but were never demilitarized. At much
less than a penny on the dollar, Chinese agents were buying
the parts and shipping them back to China. Customs acted in
the belief that the sales were illegal, yet not a single
charge has been filed against the exporters.
Worse still, China has been buying up whole defense
factories in the United States, and the administration, fully
aware of what is going on (in fact, the Defense Intelligence
Agency has sent some of its top Washington experts to witness
some of these transactions), let it happen.
As America downsizes its defense programs, many defense
factories are being shut down. Some produced state-of-the-art
fighter aircraft for the Air Force and Navy. Others were
involved in building intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Still others were developing advanced electronics. One
building at a Defense site contained sophisticated
spectrometers, clean rooms, special plasma furnaces and
lasers, and special measurement antennas operating at very
high radar frequencies. It was a laboratory for testing
``stealth'' technology, and everything in it was sold, for a
pittance, to the Chinese. So we have not only guaranteed that
the Chinese will have superb fighter planes, we have ensured
that we won't be able to ``see'' them in combat.
Defense factories being ``decommissioned'' have provided a
bonanza for the PRC. For example, a multi-axis machine tool
profiler (measuring hundreds of feet long), designed to build
main wing spans for the F-14 fighter plane, which originally
cost over $3 million, was gobbled up by the Chinese--for
under $25,000. There is more: Global Positioning System
manufacturing know-how, which will make Chinese cruise
missiles uncannily accurate, was licensed for sale by the
administration, as were small jet engines for a ``training
aircraft'' that doesn't exist. The Chinese are working to
copy those jet engines to modernize their Silkworm cruise
missiles, and substantially extend their range and payload.
There are so many scandals swirling around Washington these
days that it is difficult to get anyone to pay attention to
another one. Yet the policy of arming China involves more
than punishing people who stole from the public trough, or
lied to Congress, or destroyed the lives of innocent public
servants. This criminality could threaten the lives of our
children in years to come by forcing them to fight the
largest army in the world, equipped with the finest weapons
American technology could design.
A great deal of the damage done to our security by the
Clinton Administration--and to a lesser degree by the Bush
Administration before--is irreversible, and ultimately we
will undoubtedly have to spend a lot of money and effort to
ensure that we have military technology even better than what
we've given the Chinese. But it is long past time for
Congressional leaders to stop the hemorrhage. Export controls
must be enforced; the Munitions List must be tightened; we
must once again try to piece together workable agreements
with our allies. Above all, our politicians have to start
earning their money. Is there not a single committee in the
House and Senate capable of holding hearings on this madness?
Is there not a single ``news'' organization that judges this
scandal worthy of daily coverage? Or must we wait for another
Pearl Harbor?
____
JINSA Board of Directors Resolution: Supercomputers and U.S. Export
Control Policy
U.S. policy regarding the sale or transfer of
supercomputers is a sensitive national security issue which
may ultimately help to determine which countries are able to
develop nuclear capabilities and which are stymied in their
attempt.
In 1986, the U.S. Japan Supercomputer Agreement set up a
system whereby the two major producers of supercomputers
agreed to carefully monitor and regulate sales to third
countries. This cooperation demonstrated that two highly
competitive countries could work out an effective means to
regulate trade in this sensitive equipment, and take it out
of the realm of ``national discretion.''
The Agreement was primarily to guard against nuclear
proliferation in non-communist countries. (COCOM, the Paris-
based Coordinating Committee on Export Controls was
controlling sensitive exports to the communist countries.)
However, in 1993, after the demise of COCOM, the U.S.
massively liberalized its controls on supercomputers without
consulting Japan. For the most part, the Clinton
administration has decided that only a very limited subset of
supercomputers would qualify as strategic. And even those are
under a weak control system that cannot effectively safeguard
against the transfer of these machines to third countries.
Some argue that supercomputers are not strategic systems,
noting that many of America's nuclear weapons and delivery
systems such as ballistic missiles and long-range bombers
were built on computers whose performance is inferior to the
supercomputers of today. But, America needs supercomputers to
design the next generation of defense systems, reduce costs
and improve performance ensuring our strategic security.
Furthermore, supercomputers make it possible to do effective
design engineering with less risk taking, and less expensive
and dangerous testing to increase the safety of nuclear
weapons and other systems including ballistic missiles and
smart weapons. Therefore, their acquisition by hostile
countries would vastly enhance the capabilities of those
countries.
The landmark government study on nuclear weapons design
concluded that, ``The use of high-speed computers and
mathematical models to simulate complex physical process has
been and continues to be the cornerstone of the nuclear
weapons design program [of the United States].'' The study
also considered the ``efficiency'' of the process. With
supercomputers, a new nuclear weapons design or concept
involves exponentially fewer explosive tests. For example, in
1955 a new concept would require 180 tests; in 1986 the
number of tests required was reduced to 5. As even more
powerful machines are available today, it is highly probable
that the number of tests may be reduced even further, or
testing altogether eliminated.
This means that a country that gets supercomputers can
develop nuclear weapons covertly, and have plausible
deniability if challenged. It means that we may totally
misjudge the capabilities of a hostile country or potential
adversary, as we did in the case of Iraq. It also means that
the cost of developing nuclear weapons can be significantly
reduced if supercomputers are available. This is important
because many countries lack both the requisite technical
experts and the infrastructure to develop nuclear weapons.
For Russia and China the acquisition of supercomputers is
of great importance in allowing them to develop a viable
nuclear strike capability. Russia has been seeking
supercomputers for more than two decades after the investment
of billions of rubles trying to design their own
supercomputers resulted in failure. Consequently, the Soviet
government and then the Russian government sought to get such
machines from the West, and pressed hard for disbanding COCOM
in order to remove export restrictions.
China has gone down a similar path. Last year, when China
carried out aggressive military exercises in the Taiwan
strait, effectively closing the strait to both shipping and
air traffic, the United States--sensing China might turn the
exercise into a full scale invasion of Taiwan--moved two
carrier task forces into the area. As the tension rose, a
high ranking Chinese official threatened to launch nuclear
ballistic missiles against Los Angeles. Such threats, and the
willingness to make such threats, should make it clear that
there are serious dangers today, and we should not want to
exacerbate
[[Page E1358]]
them by providing technology that will increase the risk and
danger, as supercomputers will.
In light of these issues, it is hard to imagine how the
administration decided to make it easy to export and buy
supercomputers. For most transactions, the administration's
supercomputer export controls are no more burdensome than
export controls on personal computers.
Put simply, the regulation says that high performance
computers can be exported without individual validated
licenses, but there are some restrictions based generally on
the country and end user--with countries organized into three
groups or ``tiers.'' The makeup of each tier is, to a certain
extent, bizarre.
For example, the middle tier (Tier 2) countries that can
receive supercomputers less than 10,000 Millions of
Theoretical Operations Per Second (MTOPS)--includes Antigua
and Barbuda, Bangladesh, Belize, Equatorial Guinea, Haiti,
Liberia, Nicaragua, Poland, the Slovak Republic, Somalia and
Togo, as examples. Keep in mind that the entire Defense
Department owns only two computers more powerful than these
and hardly any computers in this middle category.
Israel resides in Tier 3, a motley collection of countries
including Angola, Belarus, India, Oman, Saudi Arabia and
Tajikistan. They can get computers in the range of 2,000 to
7,000 MTOPS. Israel, a staunch U.S. ally and country with
which our Defense Department and defense industries cooperate
on an ongoing basis, is lumped in with Angola, Belarus and
India, hardly traditional friends of the U.S.
Tier 1 includes our allies and a few others whose presence
is hard to understand. For example, it includes Iceland,
which was never a COCOM member and never cooperated with the
U.S. on export controls. The same holds for Liechtenstein and
Luxembourg, from which technology diversions were common in
the 1970's and 1980's. San Marino is there. Tier 1 countries
can receive any level of performance supercomputer.
The caveats in the regulation are applied only where the
end use or end user is nuclear, chemical, biological, or
missile related. This sounds good, but in practice it is
meangingless because it requires the selling company to
``know'' whether or not the ``buyer'' falls into a restricted
category. Burt since there are no licenses and scant record
keeping is required, even these minimal restrictions are hard
to enforce.
The 1996 sale of supercomputers by Silicon Graphics that
somehow'' ended up in a nuclear design installation in Russia
is a case in point. Exactly how it happened is still under
investigation and Silicon Graphics says it would never
knowingly have made a sale to the Russian Scientific Research
Institute for Technical Physics. But there is no doubt the
computers now serve Russia's nuclear weapons industry. This
is the first time any supercomputer has been lost or gone to
a nuclear weapons designer.
Part of the problem clearly is that once a supercomputer is
delivered it can be retransferred and the U.S. government and
the company are, in fact, out of the loop. For example, a
supercomputer sold to a shoemaker in Iceland can be resold to
a Chinese missile factory. Because there is no international
licensing system or other mechanism, it is reasonable to
conclude that there is next to nothing we can do about such a
re-export transaction.
The United States needs supercomputers, particularly in
this era of restricted budgets; they will be the keystones
for future defense systems which, more and more, will be
based on high technology--and less and less on politically
sensitive testing.
However, there are still those who want even more
liberalization of export controls on supercomputers.
Supercomputers are a critical tool for developing defense
systems for the next century. Making such machines freely
available to the world under the flawed system we now have
will help erode both our technology leadership and our
national security. If the United States wants to retain its
superiority in an era of collapsing defense budgets, it is
critical to hold the line on these sensitive exports and keep
these machines out of the hands of potential adversaries or
proliferators. At the same time, we must make sure that the
military departments and research activities of the
Department of Defense have access to the best computing
technology.
Therefore, the Board of Directors of JINSA urges Congress
to:
1. Suspend the current regulations on High Performance
Computers, restoring the previous validated licensing
requirements for supercomputers.
2. Demand a full accounting of supercomputer sales under
the current export regime.
3. Conduct a full assessment of the impact of computer
sales on national security and on weapons proliferation.
4. Assess, using the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency,
who is seeking supercomputers and why they are wanted.
5. Develop and propose an effective multilateral export
licensing system.
Passed unanimously 2 June 1997.
____________________
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