[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 10 (Monday, February 7, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: February 7, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
       THE ADMINISTRATION'S FRANKENSTEIN EXPORT CONTROL PROPOSAL

 Mr. D'AMATO. Mr. President, I rise today to again comment on 
the administration's export control proposal, or should I say, the lack 
thereof.
  For the second time, Mr. President, the administration has canceled a 
hearing before the Senate Banking Committee's International Finance 
Subcommittee to introduce its proposal to reform the Export 
Administration Act. That hearing was to take place on Wednesday, 
February 9, 1994.
  As I detailed on Friday, I am very concerned that the administration 
will allow the formation to occur of a weak successor regime to CoCom, 
which is due to expire on March 31, 1994, and that frail replacement 
will relegate multilateral export controls to the tenet of ``national 
discretion.'' In this sense, national discretion will really mean that 
each nation is left on its own, with no real prior notification, no 
veto power, and no real power to prevent any other member of the system 
from sending technology to some nation that will use it for violent or 
destructive purposes.
  This is unfortunate and I fear that it will lead to events that we 
will later regret. I can only hope that the administration does not 
place this Nation in the future, in the unenviable position of having 
to deal with a Frankenstein nation, bred, nurtured and empowered by the 
United States--and of course bent on doing our Nation or its interests, 
irreparable harm.
  Mr. President, I ask that the text of the article, ``The Perils of 
Perry & Co.,'' which appeared in the Washington Post, on Sunday, 
February 6, 1994, be included in its entirety following the conclusion 
of my remarks.
  The article follows:

                [From the Washington Post, Feb. 6, 1994]

The Perils Of Perry and Co.--Are They Soft on Nuclear Proliferation for 
                     the Sake of the Arms Industry?

                          (By Gary Milhollin)

       ``Sensible and safe.'' That was the verdict of the New York 
     Times and almost everyone else when President Clinton 
     nominated William Perry last month to be secretary of 
     defense. In fact, for all the impression of blandness he 
     conveyed as he sailed through last week's Senate confirmation 
     hearings, some of Perry's views are deeply troubling--
     especially those on the spread of nuclear arms.
       Perry makes no secret of his hostility to export controls. 
     When he was being confirmed a year ago as Les Aspin's deputy, 
     he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that it was a 
     ``hopeless task'' to control technology that is ``dual-
     use''--capable of making nuclear weapons or long-range 
     missiles, but also having civilian applications. Perry said 
     ``it only interferes with a company's ability to succeed 
     internationally.''
       But dual-use technology is precisely what Saddam Hussein 
     imported from the West during the 1980s to build his nuclear, 
     chemical and missile programs. This puts Perry's views in 
     opposition to those of, for example, U.N. inspectors in Iraq. 
     Without ``strict maintenance of export controls by the 
     industrialized nations,'' the inspectors have warned in their 
     reports, Saddam will revive his war machine.
       The Iraqis, for example, claimed that they needed high-
     performance vacuum furnaces to cast artificial limbs for 
     soldiers injured in the war with Iran. But U.N. inspectors 
     found that the Iraqis used these furnaces to cast nuclear 
     bomb components.
       Almost everything needed to make a nuclear weapon is dual-
     use and current export laws reflect that fact. The Iraqis 
     bought dual-use isostatic presses to shape nuclear bomb 
     parts, dual-use mass spectrometers to sample bomb fuel and 
     dual-use electron beam welders to increase the range of Scud 
     missiles. There is no hope of stopping development of an 
     Iraqi bomb without controlling such exports.
       Curiously, Perry and his lineup of ex-academics make the 
     Pentagon weaker now on the proliferation issue than it was 
     under Presidents Reagan or Bush. During the tenure of Defense 
     Secretary Richard Cheney, the Pentagon listened carefully to 
     industry--a natural thing for Republicans--but never agreed 
     to junk export controls. It even dug in its heels and blocked 
     deals that State and Commerce wanted to approve.
       Now, under Perry, there appears to be no institutional 
     counterweight to the pro-export pressure of industry and its 
     allies in the Commerce and State departments. A Pentagon 
     expert on clandestine trade complains that ``under Perry, the 
     Pentagon is de-controlling things faster than we can track 
     the ships carrying them.''
       ``We are trying to figure out how to bomb the things the 
     United States is now exporting,'' says one longtime Pentagon 
     arms-control specialist. A key congressional aide asserts 
     that Perry, a former electronics executive, ``wants to 
     protect the defense industry, so he is trying to cushion the 
     blow from the current budget cuts. Unfortunately, that 
     translates into lowering the gates for exports.''
       Perry's office last week was called repeatedly for a 
     response but declined to comment.
       None of the several Pentagon staff members interviewed for 
     this article agreed to be named, but they did agree, in the 
     words of one, that ``we now have four layers of bosses who 
     don't believe in export controls.'' The reference is to the 
     Perry team: Frank Wisner, an undersecretary; Ashton Carter, 
     an assistant secretary, and Mitchell Wallerstein, Carter's 
     deputy.
       For the past year, Wisner has been scaling back the export 
     controls on missile technology--controls laboriously built up 
     under Reagan and Bush. The new policy is to sell large rocket 
     technology immediately to Australia, Italy and Spain, and 
     eventually to Argentina, South Korea and Taiwan.
       The rockets are meant to be used as satellite launchers, 
     and their sale is supposed to entice more countries to join 
     the Missile Technology Control Regime, a pact among the major 
     industrial countries to curb missile exports. But Pentagon 
     rocket experts ridicule the idea; they call it ``missiles for 
     peace.''
       The Pentagon fought the idea under Bush, for good reason. 
     Selling other countries rockets in exchange for a promise not 
     to sell missiles is like giving people donuts to join the 
     health club. Space rockets can perform the same missions as 
     ICBMs.
       Nor do countries without missile industries need to acquire 
     launchers: It is much cheaper to hire another country's 
     launcher to put up satellites than to build one's own. This 
     point is beyond dispute--it was amply supported in a 
     Pentagon-sponsored RAND study in mid-1993. Finally, there is 
     the risk the U.S. rocket technology could wind up in Iran, 
     Iraq or Libya because buyers like Spain and Italy cannot 
     control their own exports.
       In August, the Senate's five leading experts on arms 
     control protested Wisner's plan in a letter to the White 
     House. In the letter, Sens. Jeff Bingaman, John Glenn, Jesse 
     Helms, John McCain and Claiborne Pell warned that space 
     launchers ``are essentially indistinguishable'' from missiles 
     and predicted that Wisner's plan would ``eviscerate the 
     Missile Technology Control Regime.''
       The senators have picked up support recently from the CIA. 
     In a secret study declassified last November, the CIA found 
     that a space launcher ``could be converted relatively quickly 
     by technologically advanced countries (in about one or two 
     years) to a surface-to-surface missile.'' This bit of caution 
     applies precisely in the case of Spain, which, according to 
     Defense News and Jane's Defense Weekly, is developing a 
     three-state missile capable of reaching Morocco or Algeria.
       Ashton Carter, a former Harvard professor, has been named 
     assistant secretary for nuclear security and counter-
     proliferation. ``Counter'' rather than ``non'' proliferation 
     is the new Pentagon credo. It emphasizes high-tech military 
     solutions to cure proliferation after it happens, rather than 
     diplomacy and export controls to prevent it in the first 
     place.
       In a September briefing, Carter tried to explain this idea 
     to congressional aides who specialize in defense issues. 
     After saying in effect that he was not interested in export 
     controls, one of these aides recalls, he shocked his 
     listeners by proposing that the United States give nuclear 
     weapon safety devices (the electronic ``locks'' that make 
     warheads safe to handle) to nuclear weapon aspirants like 
     Pakistan.
       Carter, asked last week to comment on the reported 
     conversation, declined to do so. Carter, according to one of 
     his staff, apparently did not know that such aid to Pakistan 
     would violate the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which bars 
     the United States from helping other countries build the 
     bomb.
       According to several members of his staff, this mistake was 
     typical of Carter, whom they term naive. In a recent 
     discussion of India's two reactors at Tarapur, Carter 
     proposed that the United States start selling them nuclear 
     fuel. The reactors are in jeopardy of shutting down this year 
     because France, which is now fueling them, is cutting off 
     supplies to countries such as India that reject the 
     Nonproliferation Treaty. Carter apparently did not know that 
     the United States itself fueled the reactors until 1982, when 
     further U.S. supply became illegal under the U.S. Nuclear 
     Nonproliferation Act.
       Counter-proliferation also means targeting new countries 
     with U.S. missiles and bombs--not a promising idea. U.S. 
     planes did not destroy a single operational Scud missile 
     during the Gulf War, despite around-the-clock trying. Nor did 
     U.S. Patriot missiles knock down many Scuds in the air. Nor 
     did U.S. planes destroy Saddam's nuclear weapons program--the 
     Pentagon did not know where it was. And if war should erupt 
     on the Korean peninsulas, our pilots will have no greater 
     chance of hitting Pyongyang's stock of nuclear fuel. Instead 
     of an effective strategy, counter-proliferation appears to be 
     mostly a ploy for rescuing the Pentagon's Cold War budget.
       Carter was not a hit at the Capitol Hill briefing; the 
     Senate Armed Services and appropriations committees refused 
     to fund his counter-proliferation project. A member of 
     Carter's own staff used a colorful phrase to describe the 
     policy: ``The Clinton people believe the cure for 
     proliferation is an enema delivered by a B-52.''
       Carter's deputy is Mitchell Wallerstein, formerly at MIT, 
     whose new job is to figure out how to target U.S. nuclear 
     warheads on Third World bomb makers. But Wallerstein has no 
     background in nuclear weapons or strategy. His only relevant 
     experience was at the National Academy of Sciences, where he 
     led industry-dominated studies decrying export controls.
       In the opinion of a senior Pentagon analyst, the new policy 
     contains a ``logical disconnect.'' Outgoing Secretary Aspin 
     warned in October that if rogue nations get the bomb, they 
     ``may not be deterrable'' by U.S. nuclear weapons. But, says 
     the analyst, ``if these nations are `undeterrable,' we should 
     be willing to pay a high price to stop them from getting the 
     bomb. Yet we are not willing to pay the price of export 
     controls, which is one of the best ways to stop them.''
       Industry appears to have convinced the Clinton 
     administration that dropping export controls will create 
     jobs, but export controls have only a microscopic effect on 
     employment. The total American economy was about $6 trillion 
     in 1992. Of that, only 7.5 percent ($448 billion) was 
     exported as goods. And of the exports, less than $24 billion, 
     four-tenths of one percent of the economy even went through 
     export licensing. Finally, only $790 million worth of export 
     applications were denied--that is about one-hundredth of 1 
     percent of the U.S. economy and less than half the cost of a 
     B-2 bomber.
       The real impact of export controls is strategic. They can 
     buy the time needed to turn a country off the nuclear weapons 
     path. Argentina and Brazil agreed to give up nuclear weapons 
     mainly because of the costs that export controls imposed upon 
     them. And in Iraq, secret documents found by the U.N. showed 
     that export controls on dual-use equipment seriously hampered 
     the Iraqi nuclear weapon design team. Dual-use controls are 
     not hampering India's effort to build an ICBM.
       At last week's brief confirmation hearing, Perry should 
     have been asked why he is abandoning export controls, as well 
     as these questions: If regulating dual-use exports is as 
     ``hopeless' as he says, why is the U.N. monitoring such 
     exports in Iraq? Why did the Bush administration decide to 
     deny such exports to Iran? Why has Perry ignored the 
     objections of the five senators who want to stop the spread 
     of missile technology?
       We are now passing the third anniversary of the Gulf War. 
     Have we already forgotten its lesson? U.S. pilots died to 
     bomb equipment that Western companies sold Saddam. As one 
     Pentagon official puts it: ``When you talk about export 
     controls, you're not talking about politics, you're talking 
     about body bags.''

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