[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 114 (Wednesday, September 5, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9091-S9109]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
EXPORT ADMINISTRATION ACT OF 2001
The PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the Senate will
resume consideration of S. 149, which the clerk will report.
The legislative clerk read as follows:
A bill (S. 149) to provide authority to control exports,
and for other purposes.
The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Nevada is recognized.
Mr. REID. Mr. President, the Senate is going to be working today on
the export administration bill. Senator Daschle called a joint
leadership meeting today, and he and Senator Lott, among others,
indicated a real desire to move on to the many things we have to do in
this month, especially appropriations bills.
Senator Sarbanes is certainly one of the most skilled legislators,
and I know he is doing everything in his power, as is Senator Gramm, to
move this export administration bill as quickly as possible. We had an
overwhelming vote yesterday on an amendment. The opposition to moving
this bill forward I think got 18 votes. From my personal perspective,
that is a high water mark. I certainly hope the few Senators who oppose
this legislation will recognize the need to move forward with the
legislation not only for the Senate but, more importantly, for this
country.
We have eight appropriations bills we need to complete by the end of
the month. Using the numbers we have, we probably only have about 12
legislative days this month, with the Jewish holidays and the big
conference being held late in the month that will take a day away from
us. We just need to move expeditiously.
I repeat, I hope those people who oppose this legislation will
recognize that we are going to pass this bill. It is just a question of
when. Their holding this up isn't to the good of this country. I know
that the people who oppose this legislation believe they are doing the
right thing. I hope they will recognize that just a few Senators are
opposing this bill. We need to move forward. We have a fiscal year that
is coming to an end in just a few weeks. We have not completed a single
conference on the five appropriations bills that have passed.
The leadership has committed 1 week to Defense authorization, which
takes away more time from our appropriating process. Whether people
like it or not, the 13 appropriations bills have to be passed or we are
going to wind up with a big fat omnibus bill called a continuing
resolution that doesn't help anybody, especially the country.
So I am confident there will be rollcall votes on amendments
throughout the day. The Senate is going to recess from 12:30 to 2:15
for the weekly party conferences today. Again--and I think I speak for
the joint leadership--we need to move past this bill and get on to the
appropriations bills. On appropriations bills, we have to have a way of
moving them more quickly. I think that is the belief the leadership has
in trying to move to the Commerce-State-Justice bill just as quickly as
possible.
The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The senior Senator from Maryland, Mr.
Sarbanes, is recognized.
Mr. SARBANES. Mr. President, I echo what my colleague, Senator Reid,
just had to say. We are back on the bill. We did a number of opening
statements yesterday. I know there were a couple Members who indicated
that they want to be able to just speak on the bill briefly. I invite
them to come over. Anyone who has amendments, we are open to consider
them. I hope we can possibly finish this bill today and thereby enable
the Senate to move on to other business for the remainder of
[[Page S9092]]
the week. I frankly say that ought to be our objective. Hopefully, we
can reach it. I do know there is a state dinner this evening that may
impact on the Senate's schedule.
Mr. REID. If the Senator will yield, all of us haven't been invited
to the state dinner, so some of us can still work.
Mr. SARBANES. I implore my colleagues who are within earshot, if they
wish to make a statement on this bill, to come to the floor and get
that done this morning before we go to the two weekly conferences. I
also hope that at some point shortly we could have an amendment laid
down and proceed to move through the amendments.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDENT pro tempore. The senior Senator from Tennessee, Mr.
Thompson, is recognized.
Mr. THOMPSON. I thank the Chair.
Mr. President, I have listened to the distinguished majority whip
this morning expressing concern that we move on with this bill. I think
we can do that. We had a good discussion yesterday. We had a vote on
one amendment that was a pretty definitive vote. We all get to the
point where we can count votes around here, and we know which way the
die is cast as far as this bill is concerned.
The administration supports this bill. Apparently, the administration
is going to oppose any and all amendments. That is unfortunate. That
is, frankly, shortsighted, but that is the way it is. I do not think we
want to belabor the matter any more than necessary.
I must say, we have had some very good discussions this morning on
both sides of export administration in this country. We are still
talking, and we may be able to come together on some things that will
help the bill and help some of us who have concerns about this bill. I
know Senator Kyl from Arizona is on his way to the Chamber and would
like to make an opening statement, and then we will move on from there
and see where we are.
Until Senator Kyl gets here, I will reiterate some of the bases for
our concern. We make no apologies for bringing these amendments up
regardless of the fact we have an appropriations bill pending. As
important as these appropriations bills are, the national security of
this country is even more important. That is what we are dealing with
here, the issue of national security. We all have the same thing as our
ultimate goal for the protection of this country, but we have some
quite distinct and different ideas about how to get there.
Export administration legislation in this country traditionally has
been designed not to facilitate business but to help protect the
national security interests of this country. If one looks at the
purpose that is set out in this legislation, it does not say anything
about expediting business.
No one wants to bog these exports down, but the fact of the matter
is, they are not being bogged down. It was said yesterday for a broad
category of items, the average processing time is 13 days, I believe--
13 days. What it does set out and the purpose for this legislation, as
similar legislation in the past has set out, is that we want to make
sure we are not assisting the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction. We want to make sure that in our haste to do business--
there is no greater freetrader in this body than I am--and to export
that we do not make mistakes. That is what the export administration
legislation is all about.
We are living in a different time than the last time we addressed
this issue. We are living in a world where we do not have the old
Soviet Union and the massive European assault that we all feared
looming over our heads. But what we do have is many different threats,
more insidious threats in many respects and more dangerous in many
respects because those threats are in the hands of totally
irresponsible individuals in other parts of the world.
We get these reports from Presidential commissions. We get these
reports from our intelligence community warning us, time and time
again, that it is growing, that it is based on technology, that the
threats are great--nuclear, biological, chemical threats--and the
ability to deliver those threats to our soil is growing year by year.
Even a country such as North Korea, which is starving it's people to
death, can pose a mortal threat to major American cities, having
already launched a three-stage rocket over Japan just to demonstrate
what they can do, while a million people are starving in North Korea.
That is the nature of the growing threat based on technology. Our
intelligence agencies point out to us that a lot of this technology is
derived from countries such as Russia and China, which our intelligence
agencies still say are massive proliferators of weapons of mass
destruction.
Here we are getting ready to pass legislation to make exports of
dual-use items, which can possibly be used for military purposes, to
countries such as Russia and China easier.
When Mr. Cox and others on the commission tell us that the Chinese,
for example, are diverting products imported for civilian reasons to
military purposes, and they also tell us that part of the problem has
been created by our own laxity in our export laws, I do not know how
much more definitive the record needs to be for us to be concerned,
when we sit down to write an export administration bill, that we not
make any significant mistakes in the bill with regard to contributing
to the growing threat to the national security of this country.
There are great commercial interests involved. There is substantial
commercial interest. They are substantially involved in the political
process, but in terms of the trade welfare to this country, they
constitute about 3 percent of our total exports. The exports to these
controlled countries constitute about 3 percent of our total exports;
90-some-odd percent of those export applications to those countries are
approved, so we are talking about a small fraction of 3 percent of our
exports that we are dealing with.
Some make it sound as if we are trying to shut down exports or we are
trying to close the borders. We are not. It is important, and it is
growing. The interest here is not what can happen today. The interest
is the potential, and the potential is great, but therein lies the
potential problem.
Even though the technological genie is somewhat out of the bottle, to
be sure, but not totally out of the bottle or we still would not be
trying to keep things out of the hands of Saddam Hussein, Iran, and
North Korea, we implicitly acknowledge some control is doable. But
let's just say for the sake of argument the genie is out of the bottle
and eventually everybody is going to get everything.
Does it not benefit our country somewhat to say with regard to these
most sensitive items we need to slow certain countries down while we
are trying to come together on a consensus on things such as national
missile defense? We are expending great political capital in this
country and will be spending, I think, great monetary capital, as it
were, on a missile defense system. I think that is an appropriate thing
to do.
We are willing to go to our European friends, Russia, China, and have
a debate here based upon this threat about which I am talking. Does it
make sense when we are so concerned about this threat, and we do not
have a missile defense system off the drawing board yet, for us to be
hustling to make sure that potential adversaries a few years down the
road are caught up to date, technologically, to be even with us or to
improve themselves to a point where they can be competitive with us?
Does it make sense for us to be helter-skelter assisting as much as
we can while we are in this stage over here and trying to defend
ourselves against these same technological challenges? That is what
this is all about.
We may have appropriations bills we want to get passed and we may
say: We had a big vote yesterday and the die is cast; get away, son,
you bother me.
It is not going to be quite that easy. This issue is not going to go
away. I understand those of us who comprise the committees that have to
do with intelligence and national defense matters form a distinct
minority. When we first started debating this issue, I was chairman of
the Governmental Affairs Committee that has jurisdiction over matters
of proliferation, as well as other things.
The chairman of the Armed Services Committee, the chairman of the
Intelligence Committee, and the chairman of the Foreign Relations
Committee,
[[Page S9093]]
all of us were as one in expressing the concerns I have laid out today.
We still have those concerns, although we are ranking members now
instead of chairmen of the various committees, but we also recognize we
are in a distinct minority. We have been unsuccessful in persuading
enough of our colleagues these concerns are so great we ought to at
least have some amendments to address some of these concerns.
I am still hopeful. We have had some good discussions recently, as
discussions tend to come about once we are considering an issue. With
regard to things like a Presidential commission, for example, that is
an idea that Senator Shelby, who was chairman of the Intelligence
Committee, now ranking member, has espoused for a long time and one
that we have all supported at one time or another. The idea is we have
a blue ribbon commission established. We know some of these commissions
do a good job and some do not, but we had such a good experience with
the Rumsfeld commission, a bipartisan commission made up of experts,
some from a more liberal persuasion, some more conservative, but people
of unimpeachable expertise who were appointed and took a look at the
kinds of issues I have been talking about this morning, why can't we do
something along those lines to answer some of these questions we have
posed, such as what effect are our export policies having on national
security?
As I talk about it, I am very well aware the distinguished senior
Senator from West Virginia, who now presides, has been a leader on this
very issue and he is responsible for a commission that is doing some
good things in this same area but perhaps targeted a little bit more on
answering some of these questions. The problem, as I see it, is not
that I have the answers that we are definitely doing something that is
going to be hurting national security or it is not that my colleagues
on the other side of this issue have the answers that they are
definitely sure we are not doing anything that is going to be harming
national security. I am afraid the point is, we do not really know. We
do not know the effect of what we are doing. We do not really know, now
that we are about to pass this bill, what the effect of this bill is
going to be or what it might look like a year from now.
As a part of the Defense appropriations bill in 1998, there was a
provision which acknowledged, first of all, that there was a massive
decontrolling of our supercomputers going on in the Clinton
administration. They changed the MTOPS level rapidly so more and more
supercomputers could be exported. There has been a growing concensus
almost, I would say, among a lot of the people who follow these matters
in the country that perhaps MTOPS is not the best way to decide what
should be controlled in terms of these supercomputers. Maybe we need to
look at something else. We did not really look at something else. We
decontrolled, and now what we are doing in this legislation, in terms
of MTOPS, is totally decontrolling and doing away with it. So it is an
extension of the Clinton policy.
Also in that 1998 legislation, there is a provision that says, as we
do that we must do a national security assessment of the effect of
doing this. That was never done. It has never been done.
It is bad enough we are not following our own laws, but it is doubly
bad we do not know the answer. So we are having some discussions now
about can we not get together and come up with an independent
assessment, over a period of time, as to what the effect of this might
be?
Another issue we are discussing is the so-called deemed export rules.
As I am sure the Presiding Officer knows, we have a system in this
country that basically says if you export a certain item or information
to another country, you need a license for certain kinds of things.
Also, if you give that same information to a foreign student, a foreign
national, who is over here working in, say, one of our laboratories, or
one of our businesses, if you give him that same information, that is
the equivalent, potentially, of exporting the matter. It is called a
deemed export, and we need to look at that carefully also.
We had hearings in the Governmental Affairs Committee a year or so
ago, and we found out that the law is being universally ignored by our
laboratories. Private business is doing a much better job of complying
with the deemed export rules and seeking licenses for these transfers
of information than is the Government. Of course, they have a
proprietary interest in doing so, but for whatever reason they are
doing a much better job. Our laboratories have done a very poor job and
now, of course, we know that valuable information has been taken,
illegally and improperly, from our laboratories, which is the
repository of some of the most sensitive information, if not the most
sensitive information, our country possesses. We need to do something
about that.
This bill does not address that. These are as much exports or
potential exports as some of the goods flying to another country.
My understanding is the administration has expressed some concern
that this is a complicated subject which they have not had an
opportunity to address yet and would prefer to have the opportunity to
address, and I understand that. A lot has been laid on their plate in a
short period of time. We came to them with this whole export business,
this whole overhaul issue, when they were still trying to get draperies
in their office. Getting any modern President's team together now is a
long, drawn out process. Some say it will be 12, 14, or 16 months
before this administration gets its team together. We are laying this
highly technical stuff on them at a time when many of the important
departments do not have their team together. I prefer to put this off
until later, until they have had the opportunity to get their team
together, but they have seen fit to agree to have this go forward. It
makes a certain amount of sense.
We do not want to discourage foreign students from coming to the
United States. It is important for many different reasons. We do not
want to close our borders. With as many problems as we have had with
the People's Republic of China over the last few years, they have
54,000 students here now. We do not want to reverse that process. Many
make valuable contributions to us and what we are doing. Many choose to
stay here. However, in the process we have to learn to protect
ourselves. Because we have peace and prosperity today does not mean we
will have it forever.
I just finished reading a book called ``While America Sleeps'' in
which the Kagans were drawing a parallel between the United States
today and England after World War I. This book is based on Winston
Churchill's ``While England Slept.'' They talk about when a country
wins a war or skirmish, the tendency is to allow your military to go
down, to have a higher threshold for engagement elsewhere. You want a
peace dividend. You want to come back home and enjoy the peace dividend
and forget about the unpleasantness. By doing that, you encourage
problems here, there, around the world. They are very small at first,
and they grow into major problems that ultimately a democracy has to
address. We do not want to do that. That is what we are trying to
avoid.
These are a couple of areas on which I think we might still have come
together, even at this date. I am hopeful of that. Again, I reiterate,
this is not foolish business we are engaged in. These are not dilatory
tactics. These are not things to get on with while we wait to get on
with the more important business of spending money. It is not about
money but about the national security of this country. I do not care if
we have to have 95-5 votes on some of these issues. Time will tell the
correctness of the various positions. Some Members believe it is very
important to lay them on the table, require deliberate consideration,
and see whether or not even at this stage of the game we cannot come
together at least on some things that might make this a better bill and
ensure the enhanced security of this country.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Cantwell). The Senator from Maryland.
Mr. SARBANES. Madam President, I am hopeful we can work out some of
these matters which he discussed. I think the idea of a presidentially
appointed independent advisory committee to review the matter and
submit its findings to the Congress at an
[[Page S9094]]
appropriate time is a good idea. It may well prove of significant
benefit.
I repeat what I said yesterday. I think all 100 Members of the Senate
are concerned that our national security is effectively protected. I
hope what we went over yesterday, provisions of the bill and some of
the authority given to the President, provided some reassurance in
terms of ultimate authority to act on behalf of important national
security and foreign policy interests. I hope in the course of the day
we can work through some of these matters and perhaps move to a
conclusion.
Again, I state my appreciation to the Senator for the questions he
raised and focusing our attention on them. He has done that
consistently as we have moved through the process. I know my very able
colleague from Wyoming, Senator Enzi, has interacted throughout. What
is before the Senate in this legislation has been shaped in part by
questions and concerns the Senator has raised. It is not as though
there has not been a response to some of the matters brought forward,
and that is reflected already in the legislation before the Senate.
Mr. THOMPSON. If the Senator will yield, I certainly agree with that.
I should not leave the impression that this has been a totally
adversarial proceeding. We have had discussions, and this bill does
incorporate some of the points we have discussed at prior times. I
appreciate that.
Mr. SARBANES. I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arizona is recognized.
Mr. KYL. Madam President, this past weekend the Washington Post ran
articles on a Bush administration decision to impose sanctions on a
Chinese company that it found to be transferring sensitive missile
technology to Pakistan in violation of last November's agreement to
terminate such transfers. Two of my colleagues, the chairman of the
House Intelligence Committee and the chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, and I just returned from a visit to Pakistan,
and we expressed concerns about the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction technology in that area of the world. We are very aware of
the situation which could easily evolve in that part of the world
because of tensions between different countries that could
inadvertently result in the use of nuclear weapons, something no one in
the world wants to occur. Part of that is because of the willingness of
countries such as China to transfer technology to countries that could
use those weapons.
Sunday's Washington Post article to which I referred noted that the
decision to impose sanctions on the Chinese Metallurgical Corporation
came over the objections of Asia experts in our State Department who
``had warned that this could further fray Sino-American relations.''
Of course, anytime one enforces a provision which is designed to
protect the U.S. national security on a corporation that is violating
the terms of agreements or provisions which could prevent the transfer
of this technology, it will upset someone. They have been caught
cheating, and to the extent we are willing to enforce it, they are not
going to like the result. However, that is what is at stake: Our
willingness to enforce the regime which we have heretofore imposed that
hopes to at least reduce the amount of transfer of technology to
countries that would use that technology in an irresponsible fashion.
I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the article
``Chinese Arms Firm Faces U.S. Sanctions.''
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Washington Post, Sept. 1, 2001]
Chinese Arms Firm Faces U.S. Sanctions
Technology Allegedly Passed to Pakistan
(By Alan Sipress)
The Bush administration will impose sanctions today on a
major Chinese arms manufacturer because it transferred
sensitive missile technology to Pakistan despite assurances
by Beijing last year that it would refrain from these
exports, according to the State Department.
A department official said yesterday the United States
would place sanctions on the China Metallurgical Equipment
Corp., A private company that administration officials say
works closely with the Chinese government, and at the same
time on the National Development Complex of Pakistan, which
received the missile technology.
The decision to take these punitive measures comes a week
after a U.S. delegation to Beijing headed by Deputy Assistant
Secretary of State Vann Van Diepen failed to break a deadlock
over U.S. demands that China halt the transfer of technology
for missiles that can carry nuclear warheads. Last-ditch
negotiations in recent days also proved unsuccessful,
officials said.
The new American measures could further sour relations
between the United States and China, which have begun to
rebound after a tough spell in the opening months of the Bush
administration. With President Bush scheduled to visit China
late next month, the two countries have tried to move beyond
their dispute this spring when a U.S. Navy surveillance plane
and its crew were detained on Hainan Island after colliding
with a Chinese jet.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell raised American concerns
about missile proliferation during a visit to Beijing in July
and warned that the administration might impose sanctions
unless China adhered to an agreement reached last November.
Under that accord, the United States agreed to issue licenses
for American companies to launch satellites on Chinese
rockets.
Powell and his Chinese counterparts agreed during his trip
to resume talks on weapons proliferation. The two sides had
not discussed this matter since last November, when China
agreed not to help other countries build missiles capable of
delivering nuclear weapons. U.S. diplomats had filed formal
protests with China alleging that it had violated the
agreement numerous times by providing missiles or missile
technology to Pakistan and other countries.
Both the Chinese and Pakistani officials have denied
allegations of missile technology sales.
But a State Department official said yesterday that China's
transfer of Category 2 technology had contributed to
Pakistan's missile program, flouting the international
guidelines established to govern the proliferation of missile
parts and technology. Under the Missile Technology Control
Regime, Category 1 refers to whole missiles while Category 2
includes constituent parts and technology.
As a result, the administration has also been considering
whether to suspend the issuance of licenses for U.S.
companies to place their satellites on Chinese rockets and
make it illegal to transfer American technology to China's
satellite industry. The Los Angeles Times reported in today's
editions that the United States had decided to take these
punitive actions.
These steps, which could set back China's efforts to
develop its industry, may also prove painful for some
American companies that have seen Chinese rockets as a
relatively inexpensive way to place their satellites into
orbit.
The Bush administration has said it is worried about recent
reports that China was providing sensitive missile technology
to Pakistan. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), Chairman of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, pressed Beijing
during a recent visit there to end these transfers and called
for sanctions to be place on Chinese companies that are shown
to be helping Pakistan's missile program.
U.S. officials have at the same time expressed concern
about what they say are Pakistani attempts to develop a
nuclear missile program. The United States imposed sanctions
on Pakistan and India after both countries tested nuclear
weapons in 1998. India and Pakistan have a long-standing
border conflict over Kashmir and their development of nuclear
weapons, security analysts say, has made South Asia
potentially the most dangerous place in the world.
While Sino-American relations have been complex and often
difficult for decades, the United States long has close
relations with Pakistan, especially when it was a crucial
Cold War ally. But those ties have grown estranged in recent
years and not only because of Pakistan's nuclear program.
U.S. officials have also expressed dissatisfaction with the
1999 military coup by Gen. Pervez Musharraf that ousted
democratically elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and with
Pakistan's ties to the Taliban movement ruling much of
Afghanistan.
Mr. KYL. This mentality that enforcing the law could further fray
relations with countries such as China, for example, lies at the core
of much of what we are debating with respect to the legislation before
the Senate. It is the continued relevance of robust export controls on
the one hand versus legislation that is explicitly designed to weaken
those controls in order to enhance trade on the other.
While the case that the Washington Post article discussed involves
Chinese technology transfers to Pakistan, these actions on the part of
foreign countries with records of proliferating militarily sensitive
technologies are central to the overall debate over U.S. controls on
exports to countries that in turn transfer knowledge and hardware to
third countries to which the United States would not currently export
such items or knowhow. In other words, it is the transfer of this
technology through a middleman, so to speak.
In addition to this most recent China-related proliferation
development, the U.S. Customs Service last
[[Page S9095]]
week arrested two United States-based Chinese nationals involved in
smuggling, and smuggling extremely sensitive military encryption
technology to China--another violation of the Arms Export Control Act.
While the encryption case does involve the Arms Export Control Act
and not the export administration regulations which are the issue
today, it does nevertheless significantly highlight the scale of the
problem that confronts the United States in preventing certain
countries from either legally or illegally obtaining militarily
sensitive technologies that could most assuredly be used against the
United States or our allies in a future conflict.
There exists a mistaken notion that the end of the cold war
eliminated the national security justification for controlling exports
in technologies with both civilian and military applications, but
nothing could be further from the truth.
The President, in April, announced his decision to sell to Taiwan $4
billion worth of weaponry to better defend itself against the growing
military threat from China. That threat, already considerable, involves
primarily conventional arms, including the 300 missiles currently
targeted against Taiwan, a number that is projected to grow in the
future.
A decision to liberalize controls on dual-use technologies, every one
of which by definition have military applications, while acknowledging,
as we all do, the very real threat posed by China to Taiwan and to U.S.
interests in the Far East, is therefore inconsistent with and clearly
contrary to our national interest.
Make no mistake, much of this debate is about China. The so-called
rogue nations are at issue here only to the degree that other nations
such as China, and at times even the United States, end up selling
military-sensitive items to those countries, either directly or, as I
said before, through third parties. So this is just one example of the
fact that the end of the cold war has not ended the necessity of
keeping an eye on the kind of dual-use technologies sold abroad because
in the end those technologies could be used against the United States
or our allies.
Let me just give some examples of things that have happened with
exports in the not too distant past that illustrate this point.
In July of 1998, IBM's east Europe/Asia subsidiary entered a guilty
plea for the unlawful export of computers to Arzamas-16, a Russian
nuclear weapons laboratory.
Silicon Graphics similarly illegally sold high-performance computers
to Russia's Chelyabinsk-70 nuclear laboratory.
This past July a company in my home State, Arizona, settled charges
that it had illegally exported diode lasers to Israel, 16 times between
1995 and 1997.
And, of course, there is the 1994 sale by McDonnell to China National
Aero-Technology Import-Export Corporation of an entire warehouse full
of machine tools for the production of modern military aircraft and
missiles continues to represent not just a highly inappropriate export
but the problem of diversion of exported dual-use technologies to the
noncommercial side of the equation. Some of the machine tools in
question were diverted to a factory that manufactures Silkworm
missiles--the very missiles that now line Iran's coastal waters on the
Persian Gulf.
These are just a few examples of what can happen.
When the post-World War II export control regime was established in
1949, there was an explicit recognition of the difficulties that would
be faced in regulating militarily sensitive items that also had benign
commercial applications and that should not necessarily be denied to
all potential customers. It is a problem.
The principal country at issue then, of course, was the Soviet Union,
with China a secondary concern. The success of United States
unilateral, as well as COCOM multilateral export controls in keeping
many vitally important dual-use technologies out of the hands of the
Soviet Army was an important component in the national strategy that
ultimately resulted in the Soviet Union's demise.
There is no denying the gravity of the problems we faced after the
cold war when sensitive technologies exported by western countries to
Iraq were suddenly threatening United States and allied troops in the
Persian Gulf war. The lack of a more far-sighted export control
policy--and I would be remiss were I to ignore the geopolitical context
in which legal if questionable sales to Iraq occurred during the Iran-
Iraq war--was instructive as to the nature of the problem we face
today.
It must be assumed that nondemocratic regimes will exploit dual-use
technologies for military purposes. So the end of the cold war has not
reduced the need for us to continue to be concerned about the export of
these dual-use items.
I would like to take a couple of minutes to review a classic case of
dual-use technologies being permitted to be sold a nondemocratic regime
known to be interested in developing weapons of mass destruction and
the means to deliver them: the case of Gerald Bull's Supergun. The
British author James Adams back in 1992 wrote about Iraq's covert
efforts at acquiring the components with which Canadian ballistics
expert Bull was to assemble a cannon capable of firing large nuclear
payloads to Israel. We can discuss the military utility of that gun,
had it not been destroyed during the Persian Gulf war, all we want.
What we can't ignore is the manner in which it was being built. It is
also indicative of the type of problem the Customs Service recently
uncovered with regard to Chinese efforts at attaining United States
military encryption technology. This Adams described in his book on the
life of Gerald Bull:
British intelligence knew that . . . the Iraqis had already
established a vast international procurement effort . . .
[I]n information was discovered in Europe that suggested two
British companies, Walter Somers and Sheffield
Forgemasters, were also implicated in the scheme [in
addition to a Spanish company].
At the beginning of April, a few weeks after Jerry Bull had
been killed, SIS (British intelligence) was tipped off that a
shipment of parts destined for the supergun was about to be
sent to Iraq . . . On Tuesday, April 10, 1990, customs
officers examined a number of crates stored in the warehouse
on Quay Seven of Tees Dock . . . Eight wooden cylinders, each
twenty-five feet long by three feet wide, were marked
``Republic of Iraq, Ministry of Industry and Minerals,
Petrochemical Project, Baghdad, Iraq.'' The crates were about
to be loaded onto the Gur Mariner, a ten-thousand-ton
Bermudian-registered cargo ship that was due to sail for the
Iraqi port of Umm Qasr. The ship had been chartered by the
Iraqi Maritime Organization.
Inside each crate was a smoothbore barrel that had been
carefully machined so that it fit perfectly into the next
barrel, with the tube tapering toward one end.
Adams goes on to write:
``We are considering the possibility that the gun was
manufactured in Britain for the Iraqis,'' said a spokesman.
``It is capable of firing a nuclear shell, or anything else
you wanted to put on top of a one-meter shell, and could
easily hit Iran or any other Middle East spot.'' [Note: The
gun was, in fact, immobile and constructed against a mountain
pointing directly at Israel]
To conclude the item from the book:
After the raid on the company premises of Sheffield
Forgemasters, customs officials raided another company,
Walter Somers . . . the maker of high-technology heavy
forgings. They also claimed they had been supplying forgings
to an Iraqi petrochemical project. Both companies claimed
that the forgings were steel pipes and had no military
application . . . The company that had made the pipes,
Sheffield Forgemasters, claimed not only that the pipes were
for the oil industry but that the company had received
permission to export them from the Department of Trade and
Industry.
Finally, on this case, Adams notes that:
In fairness the DTI (Department of Trade and Industry) was
not familiar with the latest intelligence, and neither the
intelligence community nor the MOD (Ministry of Defense) was
made aware of the petrochemical contract. In addition, the
DTI employs ninety-four staff members to vet seventy thousand
export applications a year . . . It was precisely this kind
of bureaucratic fumbling that had allowed Iraq to build up
such an effective military machine in the face of
international arms embargoes.
Forgive the digression onto an 11-year-old case, but it is highly
relevant to our discussions on S. 149, the Gramm-Enzi export
facilitation bill. S. 149 places inordinate control over dual-use
exports in the hands of the Federal agency least capable of making
informed decisions on the military applications of dual-use
technologies and most interested in increasing U.S. exports, namely the
Department of Commerce.
[[Page S9096]]
So the point of discussing the case is to illustrate that if you do
not have the involvement of the intelligence community, which knows
what is going on, or of the Department of Defense, that if you only
have the Department of Commerce approving the export of these items,
they are going to look at the face value of the application and assume
it is for a benign commercial purpose. Without the knowledge of the
intelligence community or the defense community, it will not
necessarily know that in point of fact there is an ongoing specific
effort to use that technology for very aggressive military purposes.
That is why you need an export regime which enables all of the
communities of interest to be able to be a part of the decisionmaking
process: To put the items on the list that need to be reviewed, to
review the items that are subject to review, and to grant whatever
licenses are appropriate to grant.
It is a big mistake to simply assume the department that is in charge
of commerce is going to be able to make those decisions using all of
the criteria that should inform the decision.
I go back, then, to this past weekend's stories on the sanctioning of
the Chinese company for transferring missile technology to Pakistan,
bringing this full circle. That simply illustrates the continued
relevance of cases such as the one that I described in the story of
Gerald Bull and the Iraqi supergun.
Take a look at the web site of the China Metallurgical Equipment
Corporation (MECC), the company sanctioned. This was the subject of a
Washington Post story. On the surface, this is a legitimate company
with legitimate customers. As its web site states, ``. . . the core
enterprise of the China Metallurgical Equipment Group, MECC is involved
in sectors of metallurgy, nonferrous metals, building materials,
environmental protection and light industry.'' It does business around
the world and considers itself a private enterprise.
While I support trade with China and certainly encourage
privatization of its industries, we cannot let this hope that China
will privatize industry and that we can expand trade with China get in
the way of our national security interests. China Metallurgical may
qualify as a private-sector company. It operates, however, under the
thumb of an autocratic regime that is the single worst proliferator of
technologies associated with nuclear weapons and ballistic and cruise
missiles, and which as violated numerous agreements that ban such
proliferation.
There should also be no mistaking the fact that we are not talking
about technologies that anyone can purchase today at Radio Shack, which
is something that sometimes you hear. We are talking about technologies
with applications for the design and construction of weapons of mass
destruction and their means of delivery. Cavalier assertions about the
availability of these items in your neighborhood electronics store
trivialize the gravity of this issue.
The case of the Iraqi supergun involved pipe sections forged with
highly advanced machine tools for extreme precision. At the end of the
day, though, they were still something as otherwise seemingly innocuous
as pipe sections. If supporters of S. 149 have their way, the kinds of
technologies that will be available for export will be far more
threatening than the Iraqi supergun.
For example, the Commerce Control List, which is maintained by the
Department of Commerce and which lists dual-use items for which a
license may be needed, has 2,400 items on it. The military applications
of most of them would, in the wrong hands, directly threaten the
security of the United States.
For example, thiodiglycol, which admittedly now falls under the
Chemical Weapons Convention and its production is being phased out, is
nevertheless a dual-use item. An industrial solvent, 500 tons were sold
by the Belgian company Phillips Petroleum to the Iraqi State Enterprise
for Pesticide Production. In 1988, the United States company Alcolac
International exported over 300 tons of it to Iraq. It is believed that
these shipments were diverted for use in the manufacture of mustard
gas.
Aluminum alloy, which has a number of legitimate commercial
industrial applications, is also used in the manufacture of rocket
casings. China developed a welded aluminum alloy for use in its Yu-3
torpedo.
Ceramic composite materials are used in commercial electronics, but
are also used in the construction of ballistic missile reentry vehicle
antenna windows.
Side-looking airborne radars are on the CCL, yet have a very obvious
application for foreign military aircraft against which we may find
ourselves fighting some day.
Something as simple as wind tunnels, used in measuring the
aerodynamic performance of airframe designs, are routinely used in the
design of military fighter jets and missiles.
The Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control has noted, with respect
to arguments that we should ``build higher walls around fewer goods,''
that ``Saddam Hussein's scientists were masters at upgrading medium-
tech items to `chokepoint' level. The Iraqis imported equipment that
was dual-use . . . The Iraqis bought dual-use isostatic presses to
shape A-bomb parts, dual-use mass spectrometers to sample A-bomb fuel,
and dual-use electron beam welders to increase the range of Scud
missiles. One of those Scuds killed U.S. troops sleeping in Saudi
Arabia.'' That was the largest loss of life in any single attack in the
Persian Gulf war.
There are many more examples.
A United States company headquartered in Rockville, Maryland,
American Type Culture Collection, was the most prominent of a long list
of United States biological laboratories that exported pathogens to
Iraq during the 1980s.
Biological pathogens represent the penultimate ``dual-use'' item.
Even the Biological Weapons Convention permits the possession of
otherwise banned pathogens for the purpose of developing vaccines.
We have just seen on the news this morning the breaking news about
the work the United States is doing on certain strains of anthrax for
purely defensive purposes because we understand those were developed
for offensive purposes by countries. Without some kind of antidote to
them, their use against other people would, of course, be devastating.
That is why we need to develop the technology to find a defense
against--a way of inoculating against--these particular pathogens.
But common sense should have indicated that the regime of Saddam
Hussein would use the dozens of shipments he received from American
commercial laboratories for the development of biological weapons,
which is precisely what happened. Such biological agents as anthrax and
botulinum toxin were sold to Iraq by American firms.
Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control has
noted another example of this kind of dual-use proliferation to Iraq.
It involved the component of what we refer to as the lithotriptor,
which is a medical device that is used in destroying kidney stones by
blasting high-energy beams. There are high-precision electronic
switches which are part of the lithotriptor. These kinds of switches
are also needed to detonate nuclear weapons. They would be decontrolled
here because they are part of the lithotriptor, a medical device.
It is interesting also because of their foreign availability. You can
buy them elsewhere, but they would be decontrolled in effect under this
legislation. Iraq purchases these lithotriptors. The amount of
lithotriptors they purchase is interesting.
Milhollin has also noted the suspicious nature of the Iraqi purchases
of lithotriptors, state-of-the-art machines used in breaking up kidney
stones. Iraq's purchases of the lithotriptors, and far more spare parts
than should ever be required, is suspicious because these devises are
also used as triggers for nuclear weapons and the number purchased is
consistent with the number of assembled weapons--minus the requisite
fissile material--Iraq is believed to have by former members of UNSCOM.
So the point is that we should be highly suspicious of the import of
these dual-use technologies by Iraq when they appear to be directly
related to Iraq's nuclear program. Yet under the legislation before us,
this shipment would be liberalized, and there is virtually no way to
stop that kind of export to Iraq.
[[Page S9097]]
Another case is glass and carbon fibers used in ballistic and cruise
missile construction as well as the enrichment of uranium. This would
be decontrolled because of their use in the manufacture of items such
as skis, tennis rackets, boats, and golf clubs. These fibers would also
fall under the mass market of foreign availability criteria of S. 149.
Maraging steel used in the manufacture of solid rocket motor cases,
propellant tanks, and interstage for missiles, as well as the
enrichment of uranium, would also be decontrolled because of their
application in the commercial rocketry and their availability in other
countries.
Another example listed is corrosion-resistant valves used in the
enrichment of uranium for nuclear weapons, yet also used in commercial
energy, paper, and cryogenic industries.
The list of deadly serious military applications for items this
legislation would decontrol is long and sobering. I will later ask
unanimous consent to put in the Record a list that further illustrates
this point.
Let's focus on the case that has been discussed in the past about
fiberoptic cables. All of us know about the situation in which the
United States actually had to destroy Iraqi air defenses because of the
development of these air defenses as a threat to the United States and
British aircraft carrying out their mission in Iraq. The systems were
being upgraded through the installation of fiberoptic cable provided
and installed by the Chinese.
Fiberoptic cable is clearly a dual-use item, but it also clearly has
significant strategic importance. And its export to China again would
be permissible under S. 149.
Allow me to talk for just a moment about the cost of business of
these export controls, because the argument is frequently used that the
reason we have to do this is because there is such a drag on the United
States economy from the existence of export controls today, and that is
why we have to liberalize the export of these dual-use technologies.
Many major corporations are lobbying hard for this legislation based on
this argument.
While I support free trade and support these appropriations normally,
I disagree with them on this description of the sense of urgency. The
fact is that the effect is only negligible from the export controls
because they represent such a minor part of our overall economy.
According to the Department of Commerce figures, the total value of all
the goods exported to the control destinations represents less than 3
percent of all U.S. exports. We would be talking here about a very
small percentage--less than 3 percent--of all of our exports.
Of just over 1,200 applications filed with the Commerce Department in
1999, for example, for licenses to export control dual-use items to
China, the total value of those applications of sales was less than
$1.5 billion, which is obviously a minuscule number as a percentage of
our gross domestic product.
In short, I don't think we should judge this legislation on the basis
that the U.S. economy is going to suffer if we continue to maintain a
sensible export control regime worthy of the values we represent and
the interests we seek to defend. In fact, there is really a critical
argument being made by some here.
On the one hand, they argue there is such a dramatic negative impact
on the American economy that we have to loosen up these exports. On the
other hand, they assure us nothing much is going to change, that the
same kind of items that have been controlled in the past that we
believe are necessary to control will continue to be controlled, so
don't worry about national security implications. One of those two
assertions cannot be true.
Now let me discuss for a moment why I think Senate bill S. 149
actually makes the problem worse. There is one advantage to the
legislation: It increases some penalties for violation by U.S.
companies. That is an important advantage, but it is about the only
thing that is better than current law.
I have spent a long time discussing some of the complexity of dealing
with dual-use technologies because it is a complex subject. But that
fact should not require us to throw up our hands and say we give up;
that because some of these things can be mass marketed in the United
States and because they are available abroad, we have to throw our
hands up in the air and forget controlling these items.
The question is whether the United States wants to be part of the
proliferation of technologies that could come back to haunt us in the
future simply because somebody else in the world might do the same.
Let me just illustrate the point. I say this with all due respect to
the members of these committees. The issue of export controls falls
under the jurisdiction of the Banking Committee. This creates a
situation analogous to that at the executive branch level. The
Department of Commerce, under the provisions of S. 149, would be given
most of the influence in the definition of what is on the control list
and the subsequent regulation and licensing of those items. That is
essentially at the expense of the involvement of the Department of
State and the Department of Defense, who heretofore have been much more
directly involved in the decisions made with respect to the export of
these items.
Remember the case I cited, on which I took some pains to get into
detail, of the gun sold to Iraq that could deliver a nuclear weapon.
The point was that the Commerce Department of Great Britain did not
know what the intelligence community and the defense community knew
about the potential use of the item that was being exported, which
calls into question a regime which only involves the agency of our
Government which is most interested in seeing that exports are
increased.
So it should come as no surprise that the Banking Committee, which
has this jurisdiction, has produced this bill which gives the Commerce
Department most of the jurisdiction and gives, frankly, what I consider
short shrift to the agencies of the Department of Defense, the State
Department, and our intelligence agencies that should have more of a
role to play.
The House version of this bill, on the other hand, interestingly,
originates with the International Relations Committee and will next go
before the Armed Services Committee, and it, of course, is much more
heavily tilted toward the involvement of the State Department and the
Defense Department, I would suggest, as a result.
So it seems to me we have to be a little more careful in the Senate
to recognize that there are other committees, that there are other
departments, and that we need to reconcile these differences between
the House version and the Senate version of this legislation in the
interest of national security.
Of course, it is true that the White House has endorsed S. 149. But I
think it is also recognized that there is the potential for some
improvements. They have indicated that in the administration of this
legislation, with an Executive order that will implement it, some of
the issues we have raised with them will be addressed. I very much
appreciate their willingness to address these concerns.
I must say, I have the highest confidence in the current
administration and in the officials who would have the obligation to
administer this legislation. So hopefully there will be some
improvements made at that time in the execution of the law.
It is also my hope--and I will echo what Senator Thompson said a
moment ago--that before we conclude the discussion on this legislation,
it will be possible for us to agree on at least some provisions that
would improve the bill from our standpoint.
So I will be participating in those negotiations. I hope we can come
to some conclusions on this matter. I will discuss a couple of the
items I think we should address in just a moment. But to move forward
with the description of the bill itself and why I think it is
problematic, the primary concern is the fact that it will seriously
weaken controls on literally thousands of items that have a dual-use
capability--again, items that have some commercial application but also
have some specific military capability.
For example, its provision establishing a National Security Control
List would continue the unfortunate trend of marginalizing those
agencies that are most responsible for national security--the
Department of Defense, the Department of State, as well as the
intelligence organizations that possess vital knowledge about the
military significance of some of these items.
[[Page S9098]]
Specifically, the bill diminishes the role of the Department of
Defense, the Department of Energy, the State Department, and the
intelligence community in the license review process. Even the Clinton
administration Executive order regulating dual-use exports in the
absence of a permanent Export Administration Act authorized the
Departments of Defense, State, and Energy to review any license
application submitted to Commerce. But S. 149 would leave to the
Secretary of Commerce the discretion to refer to the national security
agencies those applications the Secretary of Commerce deems
appropriate.
The bill would also repeal the requirement in the fiscal year 1998
National Defense Authorization Act that computers with certain
capabilities be controlled. This is important because this represents
the work of the Congress and the signature of the President on
important legislation just 2 years ago, in response, primarily, to the
breaking news of the technology transfers to countries such as China
and the work that different groups did to evaluate the way that was
happening, especially the work of the Cox committee which made, in
addition, a variety of recommendations of how we could tighten up the
process for exporting these kinds of items.
This National Defense Authorization Act had a very specific provision
about the export of computers. But President Clinton, as he was leaving
the White House, loosened significantly the export controls on high-
performance computers significantly. Under President Clinton's
guidelines, computers with a processing speed of fewer than 85,000
million theoretical operations per second--or MTOPS--no longer require
a license for export to military organizations in so-called tier III
countries, countries such as Russia, China, India, and Pakistan. By
contrast, in 1997, computers with processing speeds above 2,000 MTOPS
were barred from export for military end-users or users in tier III
countries.
Now, to contrast: 85,000 MTOPS computers are extremely powerful. As a
comparison, in 1997, some of the initial computers developed in the
United States under our Stockpile Stewardship Program's Accelerated
Strategic Computing Initiative, the so-called ASCI--and the specific
project was called ASCI Red and ASCI Red/1024; very sophisticated
computing programs--these programs had processing speeds of 46,000 and
76,000 MTOPS, respectively. These computers were used for 3D modeling
and shock physics simulation for nuclear weapons applications; in other
words, the best we had just 3 years ago, used in the most sophisticated
analysis in which our country is involved right now, and these are
computers with less capability than those that are now off the list for
control with respect to export to countries such as China.
Under this bill, there are two major exemptions created that permit
this to happen. One is the so-called foreign availability, and the
other is the mass market status exception. Both of these would
effectively prevent the Federal Government from regulating the export
of many sensitive technologies that could be used to threaten U.S.
security. Under these provisions, if a product is available from a
foreign supplier or is widely available in the United States, it is
very unlikely that the President could meet the standards in the bill
necessary to maintain export controls on the item.
We all know trade is vital to the United States, but I hope that most
of us would agree that national security concerns do trump trade if
there is an irreconcilable conflict; at least it should. U.S. national
security interests dictate that there are some goods which should not
be sold in some markets. Again, I think all of us would agree to that
proposition, hypothetically at least. The fact that some Western
European firms, for example, helped Libya construct a chemical weapons
production complex should not justify the involvement of United States
companies in similar ventures. If we don't want that complex to be
built, then the United States should not sanction the export of U.S.
products which help to develop that chemical weapons production
complex. Nations which threaten our security interests should not be
armed by the United States. The fight against proliferation and rogue
regimes must include some degree of self-discipline within our own
borders.
The bill also weakens current export controls by making it very
difficult to control the export of a sensitive item if it is
incorporated or embedded into a larger product.
(Mr. CARPER assumed the chair.)
Mr. KYL. For example, the bill prohibits export controls on items
that contain controlled components comprising less than 25 percent of
the total value of an item and sets an extremely high standard for the
President to meet in order to control such items. Nations such as Iran
and Iraq spend millions of dollars to establish elaborate procurement
companies with front companies and shadowy middlemen in order to obtain
items that in some cases really only cost a few thousand dollars. These
nations could easily take advantage of this by purchasing the larger
items that contain the desired part.
There are a lot of examples of this, where you purchase the larger
item, and all you want is the little piece embedded in it. That is what
you need for your particular nuclear program or missile program. We all
know that the particular item is highly sensitive, that it has military
application. But in the bill, if it is only 25 percent of the total
value of the overall item, then it goes, notwithstanding the fact that
it can be easily taken apart, that the sensitive item can be pulled out
and put onto a missile or a nuclear weapon or whatever the use of it
might be. That doesn't make sense.
Finally, the current bill weakens current controls by treating export
controls adopted for foreign policy reasons as a sanction. The bill's
provisions in this area subject such export controls to a process that
is intended to make it as difficult as possible for either the
President or the Congress to impose or maintain sanctions. And it
requires that all such export controls sunset every 2 years.
Let me describe a little bit further the problems with the foreign
availability and market exemptions. As I said, the bill calls for the
creation of an office at the Commerce Department charged with
performing studies of whether products controlled for export by the
Federal Government are available from foreign suppliers or are widely
available in the United States. At least at first blush it would make
some sense that if you can get this thing anywhere, then why should the
United States punish its own people for exporting the item, but there
is more here than meets the eye.
The President may only maintain export controls on an item if he
certifies--and I am going through the bill--one, that the absence of an
export control on the item would be detrimental to the United States
national security and, two, there is a high probability that the
foreign availability of an item will be eliminated through multilateral
negotiations within a reasonable period of time. Furthermore, the
President may only maintain controls on an item for 6 months at a time,
up to a total of 18 months, if he has not reached some agreement with
the foreign suppliers to limit availability of the item.
The President of the United States, the ultimate person in our
country charged with our national security responsibility, is limited
by this legislation to only provide three 6-month extensions of a
limitation on the export of an item under this provision of the law.
Otherwise, after that, it goes.
The bill has a provision that says the President has an opportunity
to try to negotiate with the foreign supplier a limitation on the
export of the item to a third country. Why would any country have any
incentive to negotiate that when they know that after 18 months the lid
is off? It seems to me that it is very important for us to try to
change provisions such as this in the legislation to try to tighten up
the situation in which there is a finding of foreign availability but
there is an important reason for the United States to restrict the
transfer of an American component.
One example of this has to do with comparable quality. There is
nothing in the legislation as it is written right now that requires
there be comparable quality between the products. You can easily have
something called a computer that is available from two or three
countries on the foreign market
[[Page S9099]]
and a computer that is available in the United States. They may be
roughly the same price and they may have roughly the same capacity, but
that doesn't mean they are equal in quality in the least.
There are many qualitative factors that differentiate products. One
reason why people want to buy American products is because of that
built-in quality. Maybe the United States product is less prone to
break down. Maybe it has better service contracts. Maybe it is more
robust, it can stand more hustle and jostle.
The fact is, there are a lot of different reasons why two roughly
comparable products may be of substantially different quality. When we
go to the auto dealer to buy a car, some of the things we look at are:
how will it stand up? What is its service record? How much do the
repairs cost? All of these different things have to do with quality.
Yet there is nothing in this legislation that permits anybody to look
at the quality aspect. So a company in the United States says: Look,
one of our foreign competitors is beating us out here; they are selling
a product that is roughly comparable to ours in price and capability so
lift the restriction on us. There is a matter of foreign availability
involved.
Somebody in the United States needs to say: Yes, there is a matter of
foreign availability. But the reason you are being undercut is because
that is a product they can sell cheaper that countries will buy because
it is of lesser quality, but the fact is, they would rather have your
product because they know the quality is better.
We can deny them the quality of the United States product for their
military use if we have serious export controls. If we have nothing but
this test of foreign availability, then the sky is the limit.
The standards in the bill for maintaining controls on a product are
also very difficult to reach. The President may only maintain export
controls if ``decontrolling or failing to control an item constitutes a
serious threat to the national security of the United States, and
export controls on the item would be likely to diminish the threat to,
and advance the national security interests of the United States.''
There are a lot of items on the list. For the President to have to go
through every one and try to justify meeting a standard such as that is
unrealistic.
By incorporating into law the foreign availability and mass market
criteria that ignore both our moral responsibilities and our vital if,
for proprietary reasons, difficult to articulate technological
advantages, this legislation would open the floodgates to an outpouring
of highly sensitive goods. Foreign countries want American technology.
The fact that they can purchase roughly comparable items elsewhere does
not detract from the fact that we are the world leader in most key
technologies and that the United States and its corporations should not
be in the business of advancing the military capabilities of potential
enemies of the United States.
This matter of foreign availability is going to be forever subject to
interpretation. It is my view that the Department of Defense should
have a lot more in the way of a seat at the table to influence this
process.
The best example--at least one good example--of this situation is the
export of high-performance computers. Our technology exceeds that of
all foreign competitors. Yet our companies are asking for more liberal
controls on this basis of foreign availability. As I said before, the
Clinton administration, for all practical purposes, eliminated
restrictions on the sale of these computers. But because of the 18-
month limitation I cited before, the reality is there is almost no way
to control, at least after 18 months, the export of these items. It is
a very dangerous situation.
The Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control to which I referred
before addressed this issue. Let me quote one paragraph:
This [foreign availability] pushes export control down to
the level of the worst abuser.
Let me restate that:
This [foreign availability] pushes export control down to
the level of the worst abuser. Germany sold Iraq more pieces
of dangerous equipment before the Gulf War than all other
countries combined. If American policy had been as lax as
Germany's, Saddam's bomb program would have advanced much
faster. And for exports to Iran, U.S. policy would now have
to be relaxed because of sales by Germany, Japan and
Switzerland. Moreover, U.S. officials acknowledge that
estimates of foreign availability are too imprecise to
dictate export policy.
That is from the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. They are
interested in trying to limit the export of this kind of technology
that would spread nuclear technology around the world, nuclear weapons
technology. Their point is that the United States should not be dragged
down to the least common denominator. Simply because a country in the
world is willing to sell a rogue nation whatever it wants doesn't mean
that the United States should permit that same kind of export.
More important is the fact that under this bill if Iraq or Iran or
North Korea, for example, seek to sell China high-technology items that
can be used in constructing weapons of mass destruction and their means
of delivery, then U.S. companies would be similarly free to sell such
items to China.
The bill does nothing to prevent such a situation from occurring. So
here you have a case where it is not one of our allies such as Germany;
it is North Korea, Iran, or Iraq. If they are willing to sell an item
to a country such as China, the provisions will say the United States
must be willing to do so, too. With Iraq and China's penchant for
constructing these well-configured front operations to conceal their
activities, it is not outside the realm of possibility that they could
surreptitiously attain high-tech items to be ``sold'' to China. Indeed,
countries such as Germany and France that have sold weapons of mass
destruction capabilities to Libya and Iraq should not be setting the
tone for U.S. export control policy either.
If China sells dual-use items to Pakistan, does that qualify as
``foreign availability'' under this bill? Yes, it does. Is that the
test we want to apply here--if a country such as China sells a dual-use
item to Pakistan, therefore it is available on the foreign market?
China's record as perhaps the worst proliferator in the world does
not detract from its value as a market. It will receive dual-use
technologies under the export regime established by this bill. The risk
of those technologies ending up in countries such as Iraq should not be
ignored.
The bill contains a provision, section 301, that would prohibit the
President from placing controls on ``the export from a foreign country
(whether or not by a United States person) of any item produced or
originating in a foreign country that contains parts or components
produced or originating in the United States.''
Section 301, which is the principal foreign policy control provision
of the bill, places unreasonable standards for controlling the item of
technology for foreign policy purposes. By statutorily requiring a
finding that a ``serious threat''--not just a ``threat''--would be
posed to U.S. interests by the export of the item in question, the bar
has been raised very high indeed.
What to do, Mr. President? We are going to offer suggestions how to
improve the bill. Some changes have been made based on suggestions we
made, but there is far too much that has not been done in response to
the concerns we have raised. By ``we,'' I don't hesitate to note that
we are talking about the chairmen, primarily, of the committees of
jurisdiction with a concern of national security--chairman of the Armed
Services Committee and Ranking Member Warner, the ranking member of the
Intelligence Committee, the ranking member of the Foreign Operations
Committee, the ranking member of the Government Operations Committee, I
chair a Subcommittee on Terrorism and am a member of the Intelligence
Committee and Senator McCain, the ranking member on the Commerce
Committee. These are people who have expressed concerns about
provisions of the bill, as I have today.
We have tried to get some changes made in the bill. We will continue
to work with the sponsors of the bill and the administration to try to
make some additional changes that are a little bit more in line with
what we believe are true national security interests and closer to the
version passed by the House of Representatives.
Eventually, there is going to have to be a compromise between the
House
[[Page S9100]]
and Senate. We have amendments we would like to offer. One I will
describe briefly. I will offer it later on, unless we can work this
out. There is a possibility that we can work it out. It has to do with
the question of how you verify an agreement with another country to
inspect after the transfer has been made, to make sure that the
shipment has gone to the place they said it would go. Remember, we are
talking about dual-use technologies. They say: We want to buy item X to
use in our commercial sector. And you say: If you use it in the
commercial sector, that is OK, but it is not OK to use in your defense
establishment. They agree, so the item is shipped. Somebody needs to go
check to make sure the use is indeed in the commercial sector, that
they haven't surreptitiously sent it across the street to the defense
plant to be used for illicit purposes.
Under regimes that exist with China today, there is very little
postshipment verification permitted by China. If we are going to have a
trusting set of export controls, as we have in this legislation, we
need to have some way of enforcing the agreement these other countries
make when a limitation is placed upon a license that it must be used
for commercial, nondefense purposes.
The bill, right now, doesn't provide an enforcement mechanism with
respect to these countries. It does with respect to companies but not
countries. But in the case of China, for example, which has permitted
less than one-fourth of the transfers with respect to satellites to
have postshipment verification, notwithstanding its agreement in 1998
that it would do so, we need to have some kind of enforcement that, in
fact, when we sell them something for commercial purposes, that is what
it will be used for.
The only way to do that is to change a provision of the law which
would enable us to go in and inspect--not have the Chinese do it for
us, which is sometimes what they do today. They insist on doing their
own inspection. We need to verify postshipment that the item went where
it was supposed to go. If a country such as China does not permit that,
or we find they have violated the terms of the agreement, then we have
to have the ability to say no to future licenses.
Under the bill, the only thing you can say no to is that same kind of
item. Clearly, the U.S. Government needs a broader authority. If the
Chinese are cheating on satellites, for example, and then they want to
buy nuclear components ostensibly for a powerplant, but we also know it
has nuclear weapons capability, we want to have the ability to say no
until they show us they are abiding by the agreement with respect to
satellites; we are not going to export something that could be used
militarily by their armed services for a nuclear program.
I have suggested language to the proponents, and I hope they will be
receptive to a change that would give the U.S. the ability with respect
to subsequent license decisions to say no if, in fact, the U.S.
believes there is a lack of cooperation by this country.
There is so much detail one could get into here, and there are so
many changes I think we should make. I hesitate to go further with the
description. I have tried to generally describe some of the aspects we
think are wrong. I think it is important for us to have the ability to
offer some amendments, describe specifically the improvements we think
should be made in the bill, and hopefully throughout the course of the
proceedings we will be able to come to some agreement that will make
the bill a little better so we can get on with the work of dealing with
the House of Representatives so we can conclude work on this
legislation.
I know it is important to the administration. I don't want to hold it
up because of that. If the President says he wants to have a bill on
this subject, that is good enough for me. I am willing to try to have
that happen. We hope we can get work done on improving the bill in the
next day or two. Assuming that we can, my guess is that consideration
of the legislation will go more quickly.
I appreciate the indulgence of my colleagues. Later, I will discuss
the specific amendments I think would be appropriate--not in detail,
but by general subject matter--and that will enable us to decide how we
can move forward on the legislation at this time.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming is recognized.
Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Arizona for his
comments. I feel compelled to comment on a couple of the items he
raised. There were several mentions of jurisdiction in there. I know
there has been some jurisdictional friction during this entire time
that we have worked on the bill over the last 3 years. I hope the
Senators feel they have been included in discussions. We have lists of
a lot of meetings in which we participated. We mentioned the 59 changes
that have been made in the bill as a result of those meetings, probably
the most significant of which is the enhanced powers. We mentioned
foreign availability.
I have to tell you that the foreign availability in this bill was in
the 1979 act, but it has gotten some attention because we put in mass
market this time.
Because of comments raised by the Senator from Arizona and several of
his colleagues, we have a provision in here that provides for some
Presidential enhanced powers that trump all of that. We hope the
President won't trump all of that. We hope the President will work to
have some multilateral controls over these foreign availability items
instead of just the unilateral system that we are working now.
``Unilateral'' means we are letting the rest of the world sell this
stuff to anybody they want. ``Multilateral'' means we work together to
make sure anybody who makes that item doesn't sell it to the bad guys.
We have to have the multilateral control. Unilateral doesn't work.
Unless we put the foreign availability in there with a suggestion--and
it becomes a suggestion because of the paragraph we put in at your
suggestion with the Presidential enhanced powers--it is only a
suggestion because the President can trump that, but hopefully he will
work with these other countries and see, if a product that ought to be
controlled is made in a foreign country, if we can get the foreign
country to agree on who the bad guys are and agree they will not sell
it to them.
I appreciate the Senator's suggestion on that. I think it is the most
dramatic change that is in the entire bill.
On the jurisdictional question, the 1979 act was written by the
Banking Committee. It was their jurisdiction back then. It has been
advanced a number of times since then, each time by the Banking
Committee.
Of course, everybody recognizes the world is considerably different
now than it was in 1979. We do not have some of the same capability
because COCOM, which was a multilateral agreement, no longer exists. It
is now a voluntary agreement instead of an enforced agreement.
Throughout that whole uncertain time from 1979 until the Iron Curtain
came down, the Banking Committee held the jurisdiction over export
controls--not arms controls but export controls. Under the committee's
oversight, the EAA and its predecessor, the Export Control Act, served
as the key export control authority throughout the cold war and I think
significantly contributed to its demise.
In fact, the Banking Committee has long had broad national security
jurisdiction which has been rivaled by few other committees. Among the
laws within its jurisdiction are the Trading with the Enemy Act, the
International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the Defense Production
Act, the Exon-Florio amendment, the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, the
Export Administration Act.
Rule XXV of the Standing Rules of the Senate makes clear that the
Banking Committee has sole jurisdiction over dual-use export controls.
Paragraph (d)(1) states explicitly that ``all proposed legislation,
messages, petitions, memorials, and other matters relating to'' export
controls shall be referred to the Banking Committee. Nowhere else in
the rules is there any mention of export controls with regard to any
other committee.
The Banking Committee's jurisdiction over export controls is fully
authorized and appropriate. That is why we have been doing the work on
this bill.
The act has expired a number of times. When it expires, the only
action that can be taken is an Executive order
[[Page S9101]]
by the President under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
That just does not cut it, and I think everybody agrees that does not
cut it. We need to do something a little more dramatic than that.
We can go back to that act of 1979, but pretty much everybody agrees
that is inadequate at this point in time and that there should be some
differences made. There have been a number of studies done on that--one
of them was quoted yesterday--that Secretary Rumsfeld participated in
before he became the Secretary.
Yesterday we presented a letter showing that Secretary Rumsfeld
thinks this bill is an improved version of the 1979 act and will solve
the problems about which we have been talking. There are things that
need to be done in addition to this.
I do think continual review of our export policy is necessary. I
appreciate the suggestion of the blue ribbon panel. It has some
capability to take a look at this in the interim while we operate under
this new act so we have something substantial in place that will
protect us beyond an Executive order or even beyond the extension of
the 1979 act. I will have additional comments later. I did want to
clear up those things because we debated them a bit yesterday. There is
some foreign availability, but we have a Presidential trump done at the
Senator's suggestion and, again, a number of other changes.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who seeks recognition? The Senator from
Tennessee.
Mr. THOMPSON. Mr. President, I will take a couple of minutes, if I
may, to make brief remarks in response to my friend's statements.
Foreign availability, one might say, was in the 1979 act, but foreign
availability has been greatly expanded in this act. In the 1979 act,
foreign availability was allowed to be considered as one of several
factors in determining whether or not to issue a license. That is
perfectly appropriate.
In the current legislation, foreign availability is set up as a total
distinct category of items, whereby if there is foreign availability,
it is totally decontrolled as determined by the Department of Commerce.
That is a major difference.
Obviously, the proponents of this bill are going to prevail on the
notion that this is a good idea, but let's not deceive ourselves into
thinking we are just continuing on the 1979 policy. We are greatly
expanding the 1979 policy on foreign availability.
Secondly, I had not mentioned anything on jurisdiction. Apparently my
friend from Arizona did and Senator Enzi just did. There is no question
that the Banking Committee has jurisdiction. Since the subject has been
brought up, I find it somewhat odd that we as a body have decided to
take legislation whose purpose is to restrict the export of items that
would contribute to the military potential of countries so as to prove
detrimental to the national security of the United States, and
legislation designed to stem the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction and place that in the Banking Committee. We have done it.
There is no question about it.
I find that kind of odd. The House did not do it. It is not in the
Banking Committee on the House side, but it is in the Senate. I do not
know whether anybody wants to take a look at that. They are welcome to,
and it will be a fruitless exercise. But since the subject has been
brought up, I find it somewhat odd that we would choose to take
legislation designed to protect our country from proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction and place that jurisdiction in the Banking
Committee.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Who seeks time? The Senator from Maryland.
Mr. SARBANES. Mr. President, I know the able Senator from Utah has
been waiting to speak. If he will indulge me a couple minutes, I want
to get something into the Record in light of the comments that were
made by the Senator from Arizona.
One of the difficulties I am having, as I hear the critics of this
bill outline their concerns, I frequently find myself sharing their
concerns but then not understanding why they fail to perceive the bill
addresses their concerns. In other words, we have tried to cover this
matter.
The Senator from Arizona has spent a good deal of time talking about
foreign availability but, in fact, the legislation specifically
provides a whole procedure whereby the President can set aside a
foreign availability status determination. That is in section 212.
There is a detailed process by which he can set that aside.
Furthermore, and much more importantly in a sense, in response to
some of the points that were raised, we give the President in section
201(d) enhanced control authority.
Let me read that authority:
Notwithstanding any other provisions of this title, the
President may determine that applying the provisions of
section 204 or 211--
And 211 is the foreign availability mass marketing section--
with respect to any item on the National Security Control
List would constitute a significant threat to the national
security of the United States and that such item requires
enhanced control. If the President determines that enhanced
control should apply to such item, the item may be excluded
from the provisions of section 204, section 211, or both,
until such time as the President shall determine that such
enhanced control should no longer apply to such item.
No wonder the administration is supportive with that kind of blanket
authority placed in the hands of the President. I wanted to underscore
that.
The other point was raised about ascertaining end users.
On page 295 of the legislation, I am going to take a moment to read
the provisions because the Secretary shall target postshipment
verification to exports involving the greatest risk to national
security. Refusal to allow postshipment verification, which the Senator
from Arizona was just talking about, if an end user refuses to allow
postshipment verification of a controlled item, the Secretary shall
deny a license for the export of any controlled item to such end user
until such postshipment verification occurs.
Let me state that section again. If an end user refuses to allow
postshipment verification of a controlled item, the Secretary shall
deny a license for the export of any controlled item to such end user
until such postshipment verification occurs.
Furthermore, the point was raised, suppose the country refuses.
Again, if the country in which the end user is located refuses to allow
postshipment verification of a controlled item, the Secretary may deny
a license for the export of that item or any substantially identical or
directly competitive item or class of items to all end users in that
country until such postshipment verification is allowed.
So the problem was raised, but in my view the bill clearly addresses
the problem. Furthermore, the bill goes on to say on this specific
issue--I could do a similar exercise with other points that were made
or issues that were raised, but I am not going to take the time to do
that, and the Senator from Utah is being very patient and generous in
allowing me to proceed.
Let me just close with again discussing the end-use verification
because we recognize it is an important challenge, and we need to deal
with it. We are not contending it does not need to be addressed. We are
simply asserting there are ways we have addressed it in the bill, and
we think these ways of addressing it deal with the problem.
End-use verification authorization: There is authorized to be
appropriated for the Department of Commerce $4.5 million and such sums
as may be necessary to hire 10 additional overseas investigators to be
posted in the People's Republic of China, the Russian Federation, the
Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the Republic of India,
Singapore, Egypt, and Taiwan, or any other place the Secretary deems
appropriate for the purpose of verifying the end use of high-risk,
dual-use technology.
Then there is a provision for a report to the Congress from the
Secretary on the effectiveness of the end-user verification activities.
There is a further provision, in addition to the authorization
provided in paragraph 1--that is, the $4.5 million I just mentioned--
there is authorized to be appropriated for the Department of Commerce
$5 million to enhance this program for verifying the end use of items
subject to controls under this act. So there is an additional $10
million we are putting into this specific purpose.
[[Page S9102]]
Mr. THOMPSON. Will the Senator yield for a question?
Mr. SARBANES. Yes.
Mr. THOMPSON. Will the Senator agree the issue is whether or not it
is good policy to require the Secretary to cut off an end user, if
postshipment verification is not allowed, but would give the Secretary
discretion to cut off or not cut off a country that denies postshipment
verification? It seems that is the issue.
The point my friend from Arizona was making was in some cases you
have a country, such as China, where we have a situation with them
where we request postshipment verifications for various sites, and they
agree to a few and remain silent on the rest. They never say no; they
just never say yes. This is a country decision.
Under the legislation, the Secretary does have the discretion, and I
can see an argument for giving him discretion, but I can also see a
very good argument, and more persuasive, that as it makes good policy
sense to require the Secretary to cut off, as a matter of national
policy, an end user if they behave in such a way, that the same logic
would make it good policy to cut off a country if they are, in fact,
calling the shots, as is often the case.
Mr. SARBANES. There is some weight to the point the Senator is
making, but it seems to me cutting off the country has a broad range of
implications and consequences. Those have to be taken into
consideration and, therefore, giving the Secretary a ``may'' authority
rather than a ``shall'' requirement probably makes sense in that
instance. The counterargument can obviously be made that then you may
confront a situation in which, because of the host of considerations
that are involved, you do not want to actually exercise the authority,
but the statute would require you to do so.
The way it is worded, the authority is given, it is there to be
exercised, but exercising is not compelled. We came down on that side
of it. We are trying to give authority to the executive branch but give
them a certain amount of flexibility to deal with the problem.
The Senator himself yesterday referred to the unintended consequences
of consideration. As I commented yesterday, that was a very apt
perception and, again, we are trying to deal potentially with what
might be an unintended consequence.
Mr. President, the Senator from Utah has been extremely generous, and
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maryland yields the floor.
The Senator from Utah is recognized.
Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I thank the Chair and I thank my
colleagues for an illuminating debate. With some trepidation, I am
going to take a page out of the book of the senior Senator from West
Virginia and talk about Roman history for a moment because I think it
is appropriate in this circumstance.
The Roman Empire was the dominant military power for many centuries,
and it was the dominant military power for two reasons: one was
technology and the other was training.
In order to become a Roman legionnaire, I understand it took 14 years
of training to learn the technology. Now, it may sound strange in
today's world to call ``technology'' what the Romans used in their
military, but the Romans carefully studied the art of war and came up
with a technology that was new and unique in their time.
They had a large shield with which they could protect themselves
against the initial blow of the enemy, and then they devised a short
sword which could go around the shield and into the back of the soldier
with whom they were involved in close combat. They found the short
sword was technologically better than the long sword, and the
combination of training with the shield and the short sword gave the
Roman legions military dominance over all the world.
Why is that relevant? We are talking about technology. We are not
talking about training. We are not talking about the ability of the
American military and the American planners to use the available
technology better than other people can use it. It is a point which
must be made as we go through this debate because we are having the
debate as if the technology by itself constitutes military
superiority, as if a single export of a single item of technology to a
country that wishes us ill would automatically and immediately change
the military balance between us and that country. That simply is not
true.
The American military is not at risk because of the potential export
of computing power from American firms. The American military is as
powerful as it is because of the combination of the technology that it
employs plus the strategic expertise, the military doctrine and the
training and implementing of that doctrine that goes on in the American
military and that requires years to implement, just as it did back in
the days of the Roman Empire and the training of a legionnaire.
The barbarians in Roman times could easily duplicate a short sword.
That was technology that they could reproduce in their own foundries.
They didn't quite know how to use it. They didn't know how to use it in
conjunction with the shield. The possession of the physical attributes
of the shield and the sword did not create a military that could attack
and destroy the Roman legions.
The same is true of computer power today. The mere possession of
computer power by a nation that wishes us ill does not automatically
mean they have the power to take on the American military establishment
and defeat it. The other factor here that is different from the Romans
that we have to focus on has to do with the speed with which technology
is changing. The Romans dominated the world for centuries with the
shield and the short sword. But the Senator from Arizona has bemoaned
the fact that computer power that would have been improper, indeed
illegal, to export just 3 years ago, is today being exported all over
the world. Three years constitutes two cycles in what is known as
Moore's law. Computing power doubles every 18 months. That means that
which was considered to be a supercomputer just 3 years ago has been
replaced in the normal course of industrial technology by a computer
that has doubled and then doubled again, four times as powerful, so
that which is now being allowed to be exported without controls, which
would have been controlled 3 years ago, is not only being exported, it
is obsolete. Nobody wants it, except in a way I will describe in just a
minute.
This is the rate of the marketplace in which we are living today. It
is not slowing down. If anything, it is accelerating.
I quote from President Bush: The existing export controls forbid the
sales abroad of computers with more than a certain amount of computing
power. With computer power doubling every 18 months, these controls
have the shelf life of sliced bread. They don't work.
It is interesting the most powerful computer available now in the
standard marketplace--and even this statement is now obsolete; it was
true maybe 6 or 9 months ago--the most powerful computer available to
the general public came from Japan, not from America, and was available
in a toy, PlayStation 2. The computing power of PlayStation 2 was
sufficient to drive the entire missile control system of the Chinese
military as it existed at the time of the Cox report.
Are we going to say we would prohibit American firms from exporting
computers that have the same power as the toy PlayStation 2, in an
effort to deny that ability to the Chinese, when they can walk into
Toys R Us, anywhere in the world, and pick it up for a few hundred
dollars.
That is what is happening in this world of technology. We turn our
backs to that reality if we say somehow we must prevent the Americans
from exporting this kind of thing even though the foreigners are
producing it and selling it all over the world.
John Hamre, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said to me in a
conversation about this, toward the end of his term with the Department
of Defense, and I am paraphrasing: My realization that we are on the
wrong side of this issue came when it suddenly occurred to me that if
we continue to prevent Americans from being in the world market, we are
hastening the day when the American military will have to go to foreign
suppliers for the latest technology because American suppliers have
been damaged.
The Senator from Arizona said we must not arm our enemies or that our
enemies should not be armed by the United States. I say we should not
get
[[Page S9103]]
ourselves into a position where the United States must go to foreign
sources for the technology it needs to arm itself.
But if we say to American manufacturers, you cannot play in the world
market except on a time-delayed basis, you cannot compete with
companies in Germany, Britain, Japan, and, yes, China because there are
computer manufacturers that are making machines with high levels of
MTOPS in China trying to get into the international market--if we say
to the Americans, you cannot compete in the international market with
these foreign firms except with a delayed time fuse created by the
government, we are saying, ultimately, that the leadership of
technology will go from the United States overseas, and the American
military will be faced with a very difficult situation, a very serious
Hobson's choice. They will have to decide either we use American
technology that is behind the curve because the American firms have
been damaged by their inability to compete in the international
marketplace and thereby to sell in a larger marketplace and thereby to
cut their costs by virtue of increased sales or we have to go overseas
to buy that technology.
That is not a choice I want the Secretary of Defense 5 or 10 years
from now to have to make. I want the Secretary of Defense 5 to 10 years
from now to be in the position he is now, to say the leading technology
sources are American and that is where I will go to buy.
The days are over when American technology companies manufacture
solely for the Defense Department. They manufacture for dual use
everywhere. I remember a time when the telephone system in the Pentagon
was completely secure because it was run entirely by the Defense
Department. Those days are over. When the Secretary of Defense picks up
the telephone now he is connected to Verizon. Why is that the case?
Because Verizon has developed better technology using the marketplace
of both the military and the private sector. It is more reliable than
the old defense system was, and it is cheaper.
When the Defense Department goes out to buy computer chips, they
don't buy them from a source solely dedicated to defense contracting.
That was the norm in the 1950s and the 1960s. I remember giant
corporations that produced nothing but defense technology. They did all
of their research for the Defense Department. They had only one
customer and that was the Defense Department and everything was focused
there. It was also very expensive.
Now when they develop a new chip or a new technology they offer it to
the Defense Department the same time they offer it in the civilian
market. It is the profits they make in the civilian market that
subsidize the work they do for the defense market, bringing costs down
for everybody, and increasing the technical ability of the products
they make.
If we say to them, artificially, you cannot sell these products
anywhere but in the United States, even though your principle
competitors in the borderless economies of the world are selling their
products everywhere else, as well as in the United States, we are
handicapping these American firms to a point that will ultimately
become a national security issue for the United States, that will
ultimately take us to the situation that Secretary Hamre was worried
about where the Defense Department will have to choose between American
manufacturers forced to be behind the curve internationally or foreign
manufacturers located offshore.
We may not like this situation but that is where we are and we are
not going to go back. The borderless economy is a reality of the
future. It cannot be turned back. We have to accept this new reality
and say the best national security step we can take is to keep American
technology firms absolutely in the forefront, and the best way to keep
them in the forefront is to give them the opportunity to compete in the
largest possible market that they can.
That is why this bill is so important. That is why this bill has
significant national security implications that cannot be ignored. But,
once again, let us remember as we get concerned about the military
applications of this technology in other countries, that the American
military is as strong as it is not solely because of its technology but
because of the entire structure of technology, strategy, and training
that has been built around it.
There are others who recognize that everything is changing in the way
that I have described. We have the letter from Secretary Powell, from
Secretary Rumsfeld, as well as Secretary Evans, all three of them
saying this is the new reality and endorsing the bill.
But let me describe how the new reality comes along to make these
past controls obsolete. This information is available everywhere in the
world. Once again, it is a borderless economy. We cannot keep it
secret. This is published in Scientific American, an article of August
of 2000. It is called ``The Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer.''
Scientists have found a cheaper way to solve tremendously
difficult computational problems: connect ordinary PCs so
that they can work together.
It is a wonderful story. The authors of the article describe how they
created what they called the stone soupercomputer, only they spelled it
S-O-U-P-E-R, after the old fable about stone soup. We all remember
hearing that as children: two fellows come to town and they are going
to have a big bowl of soup, and they get a big caldron, put water in it
and then put stones in it. The villagers gather around and ask: How are
you going to get soup out of stones?
Oh, they say, this is wonderful. We will have the most wonderful soup
in the world. Do you want to contribute something to it?
Someone says: Is it really going to be that good?
Oh, yes. We'll give you some of it.
So someone puts in a little carrot to see if that will help the stone
soup. And someone says I have a little bit of beef that I can put in.
And at the end you have the wonderful soup that, frankly, didn't cost
the makers of the soup anything.
They talk about the stone soupercomputer because they were faced with
a computing challenge that would require traditional supercomputers and
they could not afford a supercomputer. So they thought, what if we took
existing computers and linked them together, like the villagers
bringing their various vegetables and linking them together? Could we
create a supercomputer? If I can quote from the article:
In 1996 two of us (Hargrove and Hoffman) encountered such a
problem in our work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in
Tennessee. We were trying to draw a national map of
ecoregions, which are defined by environmental conditions:
All areas with the same climate, landforms and soil
characteristics fall into the same ecoregion. To create a
high resolution map of the continental United States, we
divided the country into 7.8 million square cells, each with
an area of 1 square kilometer. For each cell we had to
consider as many as 25 variables, ranging from average
monthly precipitation to the nitrogen content of the soil.
A single PC or work station could not accomplish the task.
We needed a parallel-processing supercomputer--and one
that we could afford.
So there is the problem. It is the kind of daunting problem that we
have learned to solve with computers. What did they do? Going back to
the article:
Our solution was to construct a computing cluster--
If I can interpolate, listen very carefully to what they used here,
in view of the comments of the Senator from Arizona about the necessity
of quality.
Back to the quote:
. . . using obsolete PCs . . . that would otherwise be
discarded. Dubbed the Stone SouperComputer because it was
built essentially at no cost, our cluster of PCs was powerful
enough to produce ecoregion region maps of unprecedented
detail. Other research groups have devised even more capable
clusters that rival the performance of the world's best
supercomputers at a mere fraction of their cost.
So here is a situation where they not only used PCs rather than a
supercomputer, they used PCs that were obsolete, that would otherwise
have been discarded. But they were able to string them together in such
a way as to duplicate the power of the supercomputer.
I ask unanimous consent the entire article be printed in the Record
at the conclusion of my remarks.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(See exhibit 1.)
[[Page S9104]]
Mr. BENNETT. How would you feel if you were the manufacturer of a
computer that could compete internationally with the best the Japanese,
the Chinese, the Germans, the Dutch or the British could offer and you
were told: No, you cannot export that until this long regime of
analysis has gone on because it might be used to duplicate the outcome
of a supercomputer, and you saw that people were using obsolete
computers to produce the same result?
The reality is, we find ourselves in an age that, as recently as 5
years ago, and certainly as recently as 10 years ago, we could never
have imagined.
This bill before us is an attempt to bring the law into some kind of
congruity with reality and say we have to make the opportunity for
American computer and high-tech firms to compete in the world
marketplace and thereby prosper as friendly as possible.
We have a national security obligation to see to it that the American
firms retain their lead, the lead that has been established at great
expense and great effort by American research firms, by American
universities, by the inventiveness of American entrepreneurs and
American programmers. We must not deny them the opportunity to compete
in the world market on the same basis as every other country's
entrepreneurs can compete because, if we do, we run the risk of having
them fall behind to the point that America will ultimately end up being
as dependent on foreign technology as we are currently dependent on
foreign oil.
That is not something we want to have happen. That is something that
has been driving me, at least, in my analysis and sponsorship of this
kind of effort.
I congratulate my friend from Wyoming, Senator Enzi, for the
leadership he has taken in the Banking Committee to pull together the
concepts that are involved in this into a piece of legislation that
will do the job.
I have no doubt that we are going to have to visit this again, maybe
within 3, 5, certainly 10 years. Because the technological landscape is
going to change just as dramatically in the next 10 as it has in the
last 10. But I listen to those who are opposed to this bill recite
circumstances that are 3 years old, 5 years old, 8 years old. I do not
challenge their motives, their patriotism, or their determination to do
the right thing. They are as determined to do the right thing as I hope
I am. But I do think that the world is changing so rapidly around us
and this portion of the economy is changing so rapidly that we must
recognize that and respond appropriately and accordingly.
Finally, in the report from the General Accounting Office that came
in December of 2000, which was stimulated by the concerns of the
Senator from Tennessee, with whom I worked to see that the GAO would
give us this report, we read the following:
The current system of controlling the export of individual
machines is ineffective in limiting countries of concern from
obtaining high performance computing capabilities for
military applications. In addition, . . . using MTOPS to
establish export control thresholds is outdated and no longer
a valid means for controlling computing capabilities.
That summarizes my position.
We are ineffective with the controls that exist now in limiting rogue
countries from getting the technologies they would need. Our security
is dependent not on this ineffective kind of control; our security is
dependent upon the overall expertise of the American military, which,
as the Roman legions, is dependent on training and strategy every bit
as much as the technology they have.
For that reason, I will support this bill as it stands and resist
amendments to it. I appreciate the efforts on the part of the Senator
from Wyoming and the Senator from Maryland as they work to see that
this bill becomes law.
I yield the floor.
Exhibit 1
[From Scientific American, Aug. 2001]
The Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer
scientists have found a cheaper way to solve tremendously difficult
computational problems: connect ordinary pcs so that they can work
together
(By William W. Hargrove, Forrest M. Hoffman and Thomas Sterling)
In the well-known stone soup fable, a wandering soldier
stops at a poor village and says he will make soup by boiling
a cauldron of water containing only a shiny stone. The
townspeople are skeptical at first but soon bring small
offerings: a head of cabbage, a bunch of carrots, a bit of
beef. In the end, the cauldron is filled with enough hearty
soup to feed everyone. The moral: cooperation can produce
significant achievements, even from meager, seemingly
insignificant contributions.
Researchers are now using a similar cooperative strategy to
build supercomputers, the powerful machines that can perform
billions of calculations in a second. Most conventional
supercomputers employ parallel processing: they contain
arrays of ultrafast microprocessors that work in tandem to
solve complex problems such as forecasting the weather or
simulating a nuclear explosion. Made by IBM, Cray and other
computer vendors, the machines typically cost tens of
millions of dollars--far too much for a research team with a
modest budget. So over the past few years, scientists at
national laboratories and universities have learned how to
construct their own supercomputers by linking inexpensive PCs
and writing software that allows these ordinary computers to
tackle extraordinary problems.
In 1996 two of us (Hargrove and Hoffman) encountered such a
problem in our work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
in Tennessee. We were trying to draw a national map of
ecoregions, which are defined by environmental conditions:
all areas with the same climate, landforms and soil
characteristics fall into the same ecoregion. To create a
high-resolution map of the continental U.S., we divided the
country into 7.8 million square cells, each with an area of
one square kilometer. For each cell we had to consider as
many as 25 variables, ranging from average monthly
precipitation to the nitrogen content of the soil. A single
PC or workstation could not accomplish the task. We needed a
parallel-processing supercomputer--and one that we could
afford!
Our solution was to construct a computing cluster using
obsolete PCs that ORNL would have otherwise discarded. Dubbed
the Stone SouperComputer because it was build essentially at
no cost, our cluster of PCs was powerful enough to produce
ecoregion maps of unprecedented detail. Other research groups
have devised even more capable clusters that rival the
performance of the world's best supercomputers at a mere
fraction of their cost. This advantageous price-to-
performance ratio has already attracted the attention of some
corporations, which plan to use the clusters for such complex
tasks as deciphering the human genome. In fact, the cluster
concept promises to revolutionize the computing field by
offering tremendous processing power to any research group,
school or business that wants it.
beowulf and grendel
The notion of linking computers together is not new. In the
1950s and 1960s the U.S. Air Force established a network of
vacuum-tube computers called SAGE to guard against a Soviet
nuclear attack. In the mid-1980s Digital Equipment
Corporation coined the term ``cluster'' when it integrated
its mid-range VAX minicomputers into larger systems. Networks
of workstations--generally less powerful than minicomputers
but faster than PCs--soon became common at research
institutions. By the early 1990s scientists began to consider
building clusters of PCs, partly because their mass-produced
microprocessors had become so inexpensive. What made the idea
even more appealing was the falling cost of Ethernet, the
dominant technology for connecting computers in local-area
networks.
Advances in software also paved the way for PC clusters. In
the 1980s Unix emerged as the dominant operating system for
scientific and technical computing. Unfortunately, the
operating systems for PCs lacked the power and flexibility of
Unix. But in 1991 Finnish college student Linus Torvalds
created Linux, a Unix-like operating system that ran on a PC.
Torvalds made Linux available free of charge on the Internet,
and soon hundreds of programmers began contributing
improvements. Now wildly popular as an operating system for
stand-alone computers, Linux is also ideal for clustered PCs.
The first PC cluster was born in 1994 at the NASA Goddard
Space Flight Center. NASA had been searching for a cheaper
way to solve the knotty computational problems typically
encountered in earth and space science. The space agency
needed a machine that could achieve one gigaflops--that is,
perform a billion floating-point operations per second. (A
floating-point operation is equivalent to a simple
calculation such as addition or multiplication.) At the time,
however, commercial supercomputers with that level of
performance cost about $1 million, which was too expensive to
be dedicated to a single group of researchers.
One of us (Sterling) decided to pursue the then radical
concept of building a computing cluster from PCs. Sterling
and his Goddard colleague Donald J. Becker connected 16 PCs,
each containing an Intel 486 microprocessor, using Linux and
a standard Ethernet network. For scientific applications, the
PC cluster delivered sustained performance of 70 megaflops--
that is, 70 million floating-point operations per second.
Though modest by today's standards, this speed was not much
lower than that of some smaller commercial supercomputers
available at the time. And the cluster was built for only
$40,000, or about one tenth the price of a comparable
commercial machine in 1994.
NASA researchers named their cluster Beowulf, after the
lean, mean hero of medieval legend who defeated the giant
monster Grendel by ripping off one of the creature's arms.
Since then, the name has been widely
[[Page S9105]]
adopted to refer to any low-cost cluster constructed from
commercially available PCs. In 1996 two successors to the
original Beowulf cluster appeared: Hyglac (built by
researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and Loki (constructed at Los
Alamos National Laboratory). Each cluster integrated 16 Intel
Pentium Pro microprocessors and showed sustained performance
of over one gigaflops at a cost of less than $50,000, thus
satisfying NASA's original goal.
The Beowulf approach seemed to be the perfect computational
solution to our problem of mapping the ecoregions of the U.S.
A single workstation could handle the data for only a few
states at most, and we couldn't assign different regions of
the country to separate workstations--the environmental data
for every section of the country had to be compared and
processed simultaneously. In other words, we needed a
parallel-processing system. So in 1996 we wrote a proposal to
buy 64 new PCs containing Pentium II microprocessors and
construct a Beowulf-class supercomputer. Alas, this idea
sounded implausible to the reviewers at ORNL, who turned down
our proposal.
Undeterred, we devised an alternative plan. We knew that
obsolete PCs at the U.S. Department of Energy complex at Oak
Ridge were frequently replaced with newer models. The old PCs
were advertised on an internal Web site and auctioned off as
surplus equipment. A quick check revealed hundreds of
outdated computers waiting to be discarded this way. Perhaps
we could build our Beowulf cluster from machines that we
could collect and recycle free of charge. We commandeered a
room at ORNL that had previously housed an ancient mainframe
computer. Then we began collecting surplus PCs to create the
Stone SouperComputer.
a digital chop shop
The strategy behind parallel computing is ``divide and
conquer.'' A parallel-processing system divides a complex
problem into smaller component tasks. The tasks are then
assigned to the system's nodes--for example, the PCs in a
Beowulf cluster--which tackle the components simultaneously.
The efficiency of parallel processing depends largely on the
nature of the problem. An important consideration is how
often the nodes must communicate to coordinate their work and
to share intermediate results. Some problems must be divided
into myraid minuscule tasks; because these fine-grained
problems require frequent internode communication, they are
not well suited for parallel processing. Coarse-grained
problems, in contrast, can be divided into relatively large
chunks. These problems do not require much communication
among the nodes and therefore can be solved very quickly by
parallel-processing systems.
Anyone building a Beowulf cluster must make several
decisions in designing the system. To connect the PCs,
researchers can use either standard Ethernet networks or
faster, specialized networks, such as Myrinet. Our lack of a
budget dictated that we use Ethernet, which is free. We chose
one PC to be the front-end node of the cluster and installed
two Ethernet cards into the machine. One card was for
communicating with outside users, and the other was for
talking with the rest of the nodes, which would be linked in
their own private network. The PCs coordinate their tasks by
sending messages to one another. The two most popular
message-passing libraries are message-passing interface (MPI)
and parallel virtual machine (PVM), which are both available
at no cost on the Internet. We use both systems in the Stone
SouperComputer.
Many Beowulf clusters are homogeneous, with all the PCs
containing identical components and microprocessors. This
uniformity simplifies the management and use of the cluster
but is not an absolute requirement. Our Stone SouperComputer
would have a mix of processor types and speeds because we
intended to use whatever surplus equipment we could find. We
began with PCs containing Intel 486 processors but later
added only Pentium-based machines with at least 32 megabytes
of hard-disk storage.
It was rare that machines met our minimum criteria on
arrival; usually we had to combine the best components from
several PCs. We set up the digital equivalent of an
automobile thief's chop shop for converting surplus computers
into nodes for our cluster. Whenever we opened a machine, we
felt the same anticipation that a child feels when opening a
birthday present: Would the computer have a big disk, lots of
memory or (best of all) an upgraded motherboard donated to us
by accident? Often all we found was a tired old veteran with
a fan choked with dust.
Our room at Oak Ridge turned into a morgue filled with the
picked-over carcasses of dead PCs. Once we opened a machine,
we recorded its contents on a ``toe tag'' to facilitate the
extraction of its parts later on. We developed favorite and
least favorite brands, models and cases and became adept at
thwarting passwords left by previous owners. On average, we
had to collect and process about five PCs to make one good
node.
As each new node joined the cluster, we loaded the Linux
operating system onto the machine. We soon figured out how to
eliminate the need to install a keyboard or monitor for each
node. We created mobile ``crash carts'' that could be wheeled
over and plugged into an ailing node to determine what was
wrong with it. Eventually someone who wanted space in our
room bought us shelves to consolidate our collection of
hardware. The Stone SouperComputer ran its first code in
early 1997, and by May 2001 it contained 133 nodes, including
75 PCs with Intel 486 microprocessors, 53 faster Pentium-
based machines and five still faster Alpha workstations, made
by Compaq.
Upgrades to the Stone SouperComputer are straightforward:
we replace the slowest nodes first. Each node runs a simple
speed test every hour as part of the cluster's routine
housekeeping tasks. The ranking of the nodes by speed helps
us to fine-tune our cluster. Unlike commercial machines, the
performance of the stone SouperComputer continually improves,
because we have an endless supply of free upgrades.
parallel problem solving
Parallel programming requires skill and creativity and may
be more challenging than assembling the hardware of a Beowulf
system. The most common model for programming Beowulf
clusters is a master-slave arrangement. In this model, one
node acts as the master, directing the computations
performed by one or more tiers of slave nodes. We run the
same software on all the machines in the Stone
SouperComputer, with separate sections of code devoted to
the master and slave nodes. Each microprocessor in the
cluster executes only the appropriate section. Programming
errors can have dramatic effects, resulting in a digital
train wreck as the crash of one node derails the others.
Sorting through the wreckage to find the error can be
difficult.
Another challenge is balancing the processing workload
among the cluster's PCs. Because the Stone SouperComputer
contains a variety of microprocessors with very different
speeds, we cannot divide the workload evenly among the nodes:
if we did so, the faster machines would sit idle for long
periods as they waited for the slower machines to finish
processing. Instead we developed a programming algorithm that
allows the master node to send more data to the faster slave
nodes as they complete their tasks. In this load-balancing
arrangement, the faster PCs do most of the work, but the
slower machines still contribute to the system's performance.
Our first step in solving the ecoregion mapping problem was
to organize the enormous amount of data--the 25 environmental
characteristics of the 7.8 million cells of the continental
U.S. We created a 25-dimensional data space in which each
dimension represented one of the variables (average
temperature, precipitiation, soil characteristics and so on).
Then we identified each cell with the appropriate point in
the data space. Two points close to each other in this data
space have, by definition, similar characteristics and thus
are classified in the same ecoregion. Geographic proximity is
not a factor in this kind of classification; for example, if
two mountaintops have very similar environments, their points
in the data space are very close to each other, even if the
mountaintops are actually thousands of miles apart.
Once we organized the data, we had to specify the number of
ecoregions that would be shown on the national map. The
cluster of PCs gives each ecoregion an initial ``seed
position'' in the data space. For each of the 7.8 million
data points, the system determines the closest seed position
and assigns the point to the corresponding ecoregion. Then
the cluster finds the centroid for each ecoregion--the
average position of all the points assigned to the region.
This centroid replaces the seed position as the defining
point for the ecoregion. The cluster then repeats the
procedure, reassigning the data points to ecoregions
depending on their distances from the centroids. At the end
of each iteration, new centroid positions are calculated for
each ecoregion. The process continues until fewer than a
specified number of data points change their ecoregion
assignments. Then the classification is complete.
The mapping task is well suited for parallel processing
because different nodes in the cluster can work independently
on subsets of the 7.8 million data points. After each
iteration the slave nodes send the results of their
calculations to the master node, which averages the numbers
from all the subsets to determine the new centroid positions
for each ecoregion. The master node then sends this
information back to the slave nodes for the next round of
calculations. Parallel processing is also useful for
selecting the best seed positions for the ecoregions at the
very beginning of the procedure. We devised an algorithm that
allows the nodes in the Stone SouperComputer to determine
collectively the most widely dispersed data points, which are
then chosen as the seed positions. If the cluster starts with
well-dispersed seed positions, fewer iterations are needed to
map the ecoregions.
The result of all our work was a series of maps of the
continental U.S. showing each ecoregion in a different color.
We produced maps showing the country divided into as few as
four ecoregions and as many as 5,000. The maps with fewer
ecoregions divided the country into recognizable zones--for
example, the Rocky Mountain states and the desert Southwest.
In contrast, the maps with thousands of ecoregions are far
more complex than any previous classification of the
country's environments. Because many plants and animals live
in only one or two ecoregions, our maps may be useful to
ecologists who study endangered species.
In our first maps the colors of the ecoregions were
randomly assigned, but we later produced maps in which the
colors of
[[Page S9106]]
the ecoregions reflect the similarly of their respective
environments. We statistically combined nine of the
environmental variables into three composite characteristics,
which we represented on the map with varying levels of red,
green and blue. When the map is drawn this way, it shows
graduations of color instead of sharp borders: the lush
Southeast is mostly green, the cold Northeast is mainly blue,
and the arid West is primarily red.
Moreover, the Stone SouperComputer was able to show how the
ecoregions in the U.S. would shift if there were nationwide
changes in environmental conditions as a result of global
warming. Using two projected climate scenarios developed by
other research groups, we compared the current ecoregion map
with the maps predicted for the year 2099. According to these
projections, by the end of this century the environment in
Pittsburgh will be more like that of present-day Atlanta, and
conditions in Minneapolis will resemble those in present-day
St. Louis. [see Stone SouperComputer's Global Warming
Forecast]
the future of clusters
The traditional measure of supercomputer performance is
benchmark speed: how fast the system runs a standard program.
As scientists, however, we prefer to focus on how well the
system can handle practical applications. To evaluate the
Stone SouperComputer, we fed the same ecoregion mapping
problem to ORNL's Intel Paragon supercomputer shortly before
it was retired. At one time, this machine was the
laboratory's fastest, with a peak performance of 150
gigaflops. On a per-processor basis, the run time on the
Paragon was essentially the same as that on the Stone Souper-
Computer. We have never officially clocked our cluster (we
are loath to steal computing cycles from real work), but the
system has a theoretical peak performance of about 1.2
gigaflops. Ingenuity in parallel algorithm design is more
important than raw speed or capacity: in this young science,
David and Goliath (or Beowulf and Grendel!) still compete on
a level playing field.
The Beowulf trend has accelerated since we built the Stone
SouperComputer. New clusters with exotic names--Grendel,
Naegling, Megalon, Brahma, Avalon, Medusa and the Hive, to
mention just a few--have steadily raised the performance
curve by delivering higher speeds at lower costs. As of last
November, 28 clusters of PCs, workstations or servers were on
the list of the world's 500 fastest computers. The LosLobos
cluster at the University of New Mexico has 512 Intel Pentium
III processors and is the 80th-fastest system in the world,
with a performance of 237 gigaflops. The Cplant cluster at
Sandia National Laboratories has 580 Compaq Alpha processors
and is ranked 84th. The National Science Foundation and the
U.S. Department of Energy are planning to build even more
advanced clusters that could operate in the teraflops range
(one trillion floating-point operations per second), rivaling
the speed of the fastest supercomputers on the planet.
Beowulf systems are also muscling their way into the
corporate world. Major computer vendors are now selling
clusters to businesses with large computational needs. IBM,
for instance, is building a cluster of 1,250 servers for
NuTec Sciences, a biotechnology firm that plans to use the
system to identify disease-causing genes. An equally
important trend is the development of networks of PCs that
contribute their processing power to a collective task. An
example is SETI@home, a project launched by researchers at
the University of California at Berkeley who are analyzing
deep-space radio signals for signs of intelligent life.
SETI@home sends chunks of data over the Internet to more than
three million PCs, which process the radio-signal data in
their idle time. Some experts in the computer industry
predict that researchers will eventually be able to tap into
a ``computational grid'' that will work like a power grid:
users will be able to obtain processing power just as easily
as they now get electricity.
Above all, the Beowulf concept is an empowering force. It
wrests high-level computing away from the privileged few and
makes low-cost parallel-processing systems available to those
with modest resources. Research groups, high schools,
colleges or small businesses can build or buy their own
Beowulf clusters, realizing the promise of a supercomputer in
every basement. Should you decide to join the parallel-
processing proletariat, please contact us through our Web
site (http://extremelinux.esd.ornl.gov/) and tell us about
your Beowulf-building experiences. We have found the Stone
Soup to be hearty indeed.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Lincoln). The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. THOMPSON. Madam President, let me make one thing clear. Those of
us who are concerned about certain provisions of this legislation are
not denying anyone the right to export. Those of us who have concerns
about the direction in which we are going are not advocating that we in
any way lessen the overall quantity of our exports in this country. The
Senator from Utah very effectively constructed an elaborate straw man
and has now beaten him to pieces.
We cannot take ourselves out of the world market. We cannot allow our
exporters, the people who are producing high technology in this
country, to be frozen out of the market and become insular. No one is
advocating that. That is not the case now, and that would not be the
case of every amendment we thought would be a good one and which
passed.
The people who are advocating this legislation tell us--I am not sure
these figures are precisely accurate--that something like 98 percent of
all of these export applications are approved. It is not as if we are
holding up anything, except in rare circumstances where there are
national security considerations. The problem is not that our exporters
are being frozen out of the market or that in some way they are victims
of 19th century thinking; it is that they don't want to have to wait a
few days to get a license.
We are not saying we need to shut down computer exports or even
supercomputer exports. We are just saying that before they go out the
door, somebody ought to take a look at it and make sure it is a good
idea in terms of the nature of the equipment that is being sent, in
terms of the end user, or in terms of the potential use of the entity
to which it is being shipped.
This is not a matter of export versus nonexport or export opposition.
As I say, the overwhelming number of applications have been approved,
or will be approved, under any circumstance. The question is, Does the
Department of Commerce predetermine broad categories of things that
might prove to be dangerous without even going through a licensing
process where somebody can take a look at it? That is what this is all
about.
We heard yesterday in broad categories of items that I think the
average time it took before the approval was made was 13 days. I have
read otherwise where there are categories of items that required 40
days for the process to go through. I am sure the exporters would
rather not wait 24 hours. But we are talking about matters of national
security.
Why do we even have an export law? If in fact everything is out the
door, the genie is totally out of the bottle, and we don't even need
licenses for anything to anybody, why do we still restrict exports to
Iraq? Why do we still restrict exports to Iran and Libya and North
Korea? Wouldn't that be the logical conclusion of the position that
everything is out there now and no one can restrict anything?
Our policy has been, and still is, and will be I think implicit based
on the supposition and the assumption that in some ways, for some
things, to some end users, we should and we must and we can exercise
some degree of control. The question is, Where do you draw the line?
You don't do it foolishly. You don't try to control things that are
uncontrollable. You don't try to control things to your friends the way
you would someone who is a potential enemy. But surely we are not
saying that there is no degree of control, and no degree of
supervision, where we ought to have somebody in our Government take a
look at it for national security purposes. Otherwise, why have any
restrictions to Saddam Hussein if he can go next door and get the same
thing from somebody else? The answer is because we know that is not
true. What this is all about is we have some exporters who are in
business and who need to be in business. We are all for them. They
don't want to have to go through a licensing process. That is what this
is all about.
I think it is true that the key to our success in the future is not
going to be totally reliant on some kind of export control. The more
important part is going to be our ability, as they say in the business,
to run faster. We must keep our technology at a level that outstrips
all the rest. We should stay ahead. In order to do that, we need
vibrant industries. I agree with all of that. But it doesn't totally
answer the question. The rest of the question is whether or not we are
doing what we need to do to help others run faster in significant ways.
Pick a country of concern--a country that is on the upswing
economically, a country that is rapidly building up their military, a
country that has already been known to use our technology for its
military purposes. Is it wise policy to have no consideration for how
rapidly they may be able to use our technology for their purposes? I am
[[Page S9107]]
not saying that is an easy question. Do you slow them down by an hour
or do you slow them down by a year?
Those are important answers that I don't have. It would depend on the
circumstances that would hopefully be considered by our Government when
a license is on the table and people are sitting around the table
asking, Is this a good idea or not?
Under this bill, if they are foreign available as determined by a
technician over in the Department of Commerce, or if they are mass-
marketed under the same determination, you don't have to go through
that process; I don't have to wait for 13 days, or the 40 days, or in
some cases longer, I am sure, but an average of numbers that we have
used here. That is the question.
It is true that nowadays you can cluster computers to boost the MTOPS
power. I, for one, have changed my view somewhat about the efficacy of
regulating, controlling computers based on MTOPS. The GAO report also
said there are possible other ways of controlling computing power that
might be questionable, that have never been explored, and that have
never been tried. And goodness knows, there is no one outside of
Government who has any motivation to explore or try those other
methods.
They also demonstrated that while you can cluster computers to reach
high MTOPS levels, those clustered computers cannot be used in the same
way that another, shall we say, unclustered computer could be used with
the same MTOPS level. If you want to use a clustered computer situation
for research, or something like that, it is perfectly suitable. If you
want to use it for military purposes, it is much more questionable.
So these are complex issues that have complex answers. And I don't
think anybody has all the answers. But we do know that technology is
expanding, it is more accessible. That is not the issue; everyone
understands that. But I hope everything we are doing--and the purpose
of this legislation; it is in the bill --is premised on the notion that
we can, by legislation, do something to assist in curbing the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. That is what this is all
about. If we do not believe we can do that, if technology is such and
the world has changed as such that we can have no control over anything
at any time for any period of appreciable time, then we might as well
do away with the legislation altogether.
Our legislation, our policy, is premised on the contrary. So it is
not black and white. It is: Where is the balance? And who decides? That
is the issue. Where is the balance between, we can't do anything, so
let's eat, drink, and be happy, and make our money while we are arming
our adversaries, or that we need to build a wall around the country and
not give anything out? Where is the balance? And who decides?
Well, we have decided, so far, in this country that the people whose
business it is to promote commerce essentially decide. In some ways, in
some instances, they have to get the approval of or consult with
others, but in many important respects we have decided--I think
mistakenly in this legislation and as a matter of policy--that the
Department of Commerce makes these important national security
decisions.
Now we are going to be deciding, when we pass this bill, that the
Department of Commerce will not even get to take a look at things that
have been deemed to be mass marketed or foreign available. So be it.
But let's not fool ourselves into thinking that this is an all-or-
nothing situation or that someone is suggesting that we not export
computers or that we isolate ourselves in that regard or that we blind
ourselves to the technology revolution. That is not the case at all. We
are just trying to reach some kind of a reasonable, measured way in
which we can do what is doable.
My basic problem with all this is that we do not know to what extent
we may be making a mistake. We do not know to what extent some of this
is controllable, as the GAO has pointed out. The GAO listed in its
report, I think, about a dozen potential ways supercomputers can be
limited in ways that other people did not have them and also pointed
out that they have not been tried, they have not been attempted.
Our law required, in the 1998 Defense authorization bill, that there
be a national security assessment, as we were in the process of totally
decontrolling computers. I would not cite the Clinton administration as
having good policy in that regard, but I must confess, this
administration is picking up where the Clinton administration left off
in that respect. The law required that we have a national security
assessment. It has never been done.
So I have one opinion and my colleagues--a clear majority of them--
have another opinion about the effect of what we are doing with this
legislation, but the fact of the matter is, nobody knows. And that
concerns me. It concerns me greatly because it is going to be some time
now before we know the effect of this. We should have been studying
this issue. We should have had a blue ribbon commission. We should have
had a group of objective people who are unaffiliated with people who
are in the export business--which is hard to come by on this subject,
by the way--to make an objective assessment.
I am hoping before this debate is over with we can, at least after
the fact, move in that direction. I may be wrong about some of my
concerns, but I can afford to be wrong. As to those who say there is no
problem, we cannot afford for them to be wrong because that would mean
matters of national security would be implicated.
So I am hopeful we will be able to move in that direction, the
direction of really doing an objective assessment as to where this
balance is and to who ought to be making the decisions.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming.
Mr. ENZI. Madam President, I thank my colleague from Tennessee for
his concern and his consideration and, again, for all of the effort he
has put into this bill. He has been responsible, along with several
others, for a number of the changes that have been made in this bill.
But there are a couple of things I need to emphasize based on the
comments he just made. One of them is in relation to the comment that
there should have been somebody studying the issue. There have been
people studying the issue. There have been a lot of people studying the
issue, not to mention all of the Senate and House hearings that have
been held, particularly since 1994.
When the Export Administration Act expired, we began a study. And one
of the things this town is not short on is documentation. We document
everything. That gives you a chance to go back and look at what
everybody thought in the history of this country, but particularly on
the history of this issue. It was an opportunity to go back and see
what kinds of problems there were and what the pitfalls were that kept
the reauthorization from happening again, what kept the updates from
happening. We have been very close, throughout this whole process, of
having it happen again.
We talked about balance. One of the balance things that happens in
this bill is that the Department of Defense, the Department of State,
and the intelligence community get a greater say through this bill than
they had under the Export Act of 1979, that got reapproved through
1994. There is more balance in this bill if you want Defense, State,
and intelligence to have more of a say. They have more say under this
bill than they had before.
There is a continuation of a lot of the things they had before, but
that is because they all agreed on them. But what we have is an
endorsement from State and Defense on this particular bill saying this
is a better situation than what we are operating under now. So we are
trying to get that done.
In relation to the applications, actually, 99.4 percent of the
applications get approved, only .6 percent get denied. So what does
that tell you? A thing that it does not exactly say is that on the 99.4
percent that get approved, a lot of those have conditions. What this
committee gets to do is put conditions on the application. But there is
still a vast number that are readily approved.
Why are we making the licensing application folks take all of their
time on items that will be approved that are routinely, regularly
approved at the present time? Without this bill, we are forcing them to
concentrate the bulk
[[Page S9108]]
of their effort--probably about 90 percent of their time--on items that
do not need to be considered, where all of these agencies say: This is
an automatic for us, but there is no way for us to kick this automatic
out of the process. We have to spend the bulk of our time working on
things that are absolutely routine. Wouldn't it be nice if we could
concentrate on the 10 percent of the things that really need some
conditions, that really need some concentration, that perhaps need to
be denied?
During this process, I had an enforcement officer on exports assigned
to my office because I wanted a greater understanding of how the
enforcement process worked. That includes the postshipment
verifications. I have had people assigned to my office who worked with
the applications, and we went to the different agencies to see how they
participated, how they wanted to be able to participate, and whether
their rights and abilities were being stomped on by the old process.
I think we have arrived at a bill that the agencies agree they have a
say and that they can do a better job of enforcing those things that
need to be enforced.
Senator Kyl mentioned there were some arms control problems, probably
a nuclear gun. That sounds like arms control which is not export
control. Maybe somebody was trying to fudge it in there.
I have to mention that there is a very small provision in this bill--
actually a big provision--where we provide additional resources to
people doing the enforcement. One of the specific things we put in
there is some training for freight forwarders. These are the people who
look at those 30-foot long cylinders and say: What the heck is in here;
could it be something damaging to the United States? That is going to
be some enforcement that we haven't had before that will help solve the
situation.
When we are talking about who ought to be looking at these things, we
are assuming that we ought to be looking at them from the worst
possible standpoint. That is probably true. So maybe what we ought to
have is the IRS auditors checking the capability on all of these
licenses.
The reason Commerce gets the main say in this situation is that we
are talking about commerce. We are talking about the economy and what
we export. The Department of Defense and the Department of State handle
the arms export. That is the really dangerous stuff. There is some
stuff that can be dangerous. There is always a secondary use for
anything. You can pick up a brick and you can hit somebody over the
head. That makes it a weapon. But it is primarily a brick.
The factory that designed that brick probably used a computer to
design the factory, but that doesn't make them an arms designer. That
makes them a computer designing brick factory.
One of the reasons that Commerce has the main control is that it is
commerce, and it is kind of the old story: If all you have is a hammer,
everything looks like a nail. If you give it to Defense, then it all
looks like weapons. Commerce gets to have a say in this, but with this
bill we give greater authority to Defense, State, and the intelligence
community.
We are not just talking about computers in this legislation. We are
talking about a lot of small companies in this country that could
compete more effectively if they could get contracts more readily.
During that process of getting the 99.4 percent licensure, people lose
contracts or they are not asked to participate in a bigger contract at
all. From Wyoming, I have some of those folks.
There is an outfit called Hi Q technology. They make tachometers. I
love this little success story. This guy used to have the parts
manufactured in Taiwan and the parts assembled in Taiwan. He said: Wait
a minute. Wyoming has some great folks who could put these things
together. I bet they could put them together more carefully, make a
better machine that would have less errors than the Taiwanese. So he
started to have the parts shipped back to the United States and made in
Powell, WY. He now makes the best tachometers in the world and ships
them around the world in competition with Taiwan.
Do you know what he is going to do next? He is going to start having
the parts manufactured in Powell, WY, too, because he can do that
better with American labor. He can compete on the world market.
Now he can't, if every tachometer has to go through this licensing
process. You can buy tachometers all over the world. You can't buy as
good a quality tachometer as he has, but you can buy them anywhere in
the world. They would like to have his, and he would like to sell them.
If this licensing process stops him, he can't do that.
We have a another fellow in Cody, WY, who invented a chest seal. If
you get your chest punctured, if you get shot, fall on rebar or
something like that, your lung will collapse unless somebody puts, in
the old method, a credit card over it, which allows you, when you
inhale, to inflate your lungs. Then they take it off when you exhale
and it allows the blood and other stuff to come out. A Navy SEAL who
now lives in Cody, WY, thought he could improve on that system.
He came up with a chest seal that is a Band-Aid about that big. You
wipe off the chest and you apply the Band-Aid. The secret is right in
the middle of it there is a thing that looks like the end of a balloon.
When you breathe in, it pinches shut. When you breathe out, everything
comes out. That is in military kits around the world now. It has saved
a lot of lives on farms, ranches, and a lot of other places.
Sun screens and planes: There is a guy in Wyoming who figured out if
these things work in cars, maybe they would work in planes. And he
started putting them in planes, specialized for the windows and stuff.
During Desert Storm, one of our big problems was a recognition that
instruments in Saudi Arabia in the planes were being damaged by the
intense heat. Somebody said: Wait a minute, I know this guy in Wyoming.
He makes this simple stuff that goes inside planes and keeps all of the
instruments from deteriorating. And it saves about $16,000 a year per
airplane. It is used militarily, but it is not a military piece of
equipment. It can be duplicated other places in the world. He kind of
has the corner on the market, like Kleenex, because he thought of it
and he does it better.
If he is prohibited from selling this, except to the military of the
United States, he can't be in business or he would have to sell it for
a lot more.
Another guy, in Sheridan, WY, a guy who has the Big Horn Valve
Company, found a new way to do valves so that you don't have to have a
T that will leak. It is always internal. The valve twists half a turn
and shuts off. Any area in between gives some capability. How is it
used? NASA uses part of this now. It is a disconnect on a missile. They
can keep the fuel going into the missile the last possible moment. When
that missile takes off, the valve separates and closes. Refineries use
it because it doesn't leak like the old-fashioned valves.
Again, if he has to go through this licensing process, he can lose
his international opportunity.
The times are changing, and I have to say, it is the young people who
are changing it. Eight years ago my son was at South Dakota School of
Mines. He played a little basketball there. And after the basketball
game, I went back to his dorm to pick something up. By the time we had
driven halfway across South Dakota to get back to his dorm, it was
about 3 in the morning. We went into the dorm; the lights were on
everywhere. There were kids, young engineers, taking computers apart.
They were borrowing pieces of computers from each other, and they were
making supercomputers. That was 8 years ago.
I have no idea what they are up to now, but I did read that these
computers' best activity is math. The first thing they will do, because
it is the best activity, is solve math problems. One of the new
Internet problems this last week was people feeding math problems into
the system and all of the computers concentrated on that. And the
messages would not go through.
It is technology. We have to keep the technology going. I apologize
for running over here in my excitement of being able to share a few
Wyoming examples with everybody. I did that. I did want to emphasize
why it is important that we streamline the licensing process, not to
the point where it hurts our national security but where we can include
some things that will enhance the national security by allowing some
concentration.
[[Page S9109]]
I yield the floor.
____________________