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4 July 1997

    Source: http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/aces/aaces002.html

    -------------------------------------------------------------------------

    [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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