[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 93 (Friday, June 27, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1355-E1358]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                        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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