From Bad to Worse: Why Is The Administration Making it Easier For Potential Foes to Obtain Our Technology?

The Center for Security Policy today expressed real regret that — even as the Bush Administration is taking resolute and courageous action to defeat Saddam Hussein — the Administration is proceeding with steps that will facilitate the rise of a future totalitarian threat. Despite the evidence that Saddam’s ambitions have been abetted by access to militarily relevant Western technologies, the Administration will soon dispatch a high-level delegation to Paris for meetings that will greatly expand Soviet and other potential adversaries’ opportunities to acquire such technologies.

Within a matter of weeks, a delegation of senior U.S. officials will travel to Paris to meet with representatives from Germany, France, the United Kingdom and other members of the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM). Their purpose: to finalize an agreement that would drastically reduce the list of dual-use goods and technologies controlled by the West for national security purposes. The meeting was originally scheduled for 28 February, but was postponed last week because, according to State Department sources, the decontrol agenda is so ambitious that preliminary work by functionaries remains incomplete.

This massive liberalization of access to militarily critical Western technologies comes on the heels of a series of similar decisions taken over the past eighteen months. The earlier weakening of the export control regime — combined with a deliberate U.S. government policy of coddling Saddam Hussein — did much to advance the Iraqi chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missile programs. The further changes expected to emerge from the Paris meetings on Thursday will surely enhance the military-industrial complexes of the next Saddam Hussein, wherever he may be.

Importantly, this weakening of the multilateral export control regime has been strongly opposed by the U.S. defense and intelligence communities. Responsible officials from these organizations have expressed strong concerns about both the content and timing of the new COCOM initiative. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration seems determined to repeat past mistakes — once again discounting or disregarding opposition like that previously expressed by the Defense Department and members of the intelligence community to the policy of high-tech sales to Iraq.

"In proposing to liberalize the access potential adversaries can have to militarily relevant U.S. technology, the Bush Administration is setting the stage for more American firms to find themselves in the unhappy position of arming our foes," said Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director. "Just as many companies now regret sales their government encouraged them to make to Iraq, it is absolutely predictable that U.S. and allied enterprises — and the American people — will shortly wish that Washington and other Western capitals had not taken this irresponsible approach to export controls."

The Center has learned that the following are among the militarily critical technologies the new COCOM initiative would make more freely available to the Soviet Union and/or other potential adversaries:

• Sensors — including those of direct relevance to night-vision equipment;

 

• Micro-electronics — a crucial component of virtually all modern weapon designs and manufacturing;

 

• Powerful computers — the proposed liberalization will allow the export of computers to the Soviet Union which possess a 500-percent greater capability than those currently allowed;

 

• Testing equipment — widely applicable to quality control in weapons manufacturing;

 

• Jig grinders — used in the precision manufacture of nuclear and other sophisticated weaponry;

 

• Deep underwater equipment — a key ingredient in advanced anti-submarine warfare operations; and

 

• Parallel and vector processing — powerful precursors of supercomputers with a variety of applications for military purposes.

The Center believes that liberalized exports of such sophisticated dual-use technologies by the West to the Soviet Union and — by definition — to virtually all other destinations, is particularly ill-advised under present circumstances. Consider the following:

• The resurgence of the military in the Soviet Union. According to today’s Wall Street Journal, Judge William Webster recently provided classified testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in which he stated: "[Gorbachev] now relies heavily on the Communist Party, the KGB, and the military — institutions that are comfortable with the coercive methods used to enforce law and order….Gorbachev has lost much of his political support, and with it, the ability to control the course of events." Such a statement simply reinforces what the Center has suspected for some time — high technology provided to Moscow is sure to be diverted to meet military, not civilian, needs.

 

• Gorbachev’s brutal crackdown in the Baltic states last month. If nothing else than as a question of timing, it is bizarre to be rewarding the perpetrators of this crime — the Soviet military and Interior Ministry forces — with even greater access to strategic technologies in the midst of their oppression.

 

• Gorbachev’s decree authorizing KGB search and seizure on the premises of Soviet joint ventures involving Western companies. Over fifty percent of U.S. export licenses to the Soviet Union carry conditions, frequently including strict assurances that the American firm will oversee the security of the technology in question. It would appear that such assurances can no longer be made in good faith — or accepted by the government as the basis for taking a certain amount of risk with technology transfers.

 

• In the absence of COCOM controls, certain member countries will have inadequate legal instruments to prevent exports of technologies that lend themselves to nuclear proliferation. For example, some Western nations do not have the legal ability to impose restrictions on the export of missile technologies — unless such technologies are controlled multilaterally by COCOM. It makes no sense to be compounding a non-proliferation problem that is already profoundly complex and difficult.

"Clearly, there needs to be a prolonged period of reassessment — both with respect to the future direction of the Soviet Union and the ability of our allies to enforce existing export controls," said Jennifer J. White, senior associate with the Center. "The technology transfer scandals that continue to come to light in the wake of the Persian Gulf crisis suggest that our attentions should be devoted to finding new ways to safeguard critical technologies, not new pretexts for giving them away."

The Center calls on the Bush Administration to reconsider its approach to the 28 February COCOM meeting. Should it fail to do so, the Center urges Congress to intervene so as to compel a postponement that would permit a thorough reexamination of the assumptions and the implications of a further liberalization of the multilateral export control regime.