AT LEAST LET’S NOT PROVIDE THE SOVIET MILITARY ANY MORE STRATEGIC TECHNOLOGIES!

(Washington, D.C.): In less than two
weeks, the United States and other
members of the Coordinating Committee on
Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) are
scheduled, pursuant to an agreement
reached in Paris last June, to make
available to the Soviet Union an
abundance of sensitive, militarily
relevant goods and technologies. Unless
President Bush personally intervenes with
other COCOM members, it is
predictable that the very Soviet military
authorities that claim to have removed
Mikhail Gorbachev from power today will
obtain on 1 September 1991 unprecedented
opportunities to maintain the viability,
enhance the efficiency and reduce the
costs associated with the Soviet defense
industrial complex.

In June, on the grounds that
Gorbachev’s political preservation
justified meeting virtually any
demand he might make for advanced Western
technologies, the United States agreed
with its major allies to cut the
“core” list of goods and
technologies controlled for national
security purposes. At that time, a
heavily politicized process decided to
cut the core list by 50 percent.
Technologies scheduled for decontrol or
substantial liberalization include, for
example:

• advanced semiconductor
  manufacturing technology
  (which will, among other
  applications, permit the Soviet
  Union to produce customized
  integrated circuits or their arms
  industry);
• advanced digital and
  hybrid computers
  (including VAX and
  “ruggedized” computers
  used extensively in: U.S.
  military research, development
  and testing; telemetry; command,
  control, communications and
  intelligence; digital mapping;
  image analysis; weapons design;
  space and missile programs; and
  tactical weapon systems).
• specialized
  microprocessors (vital,
  for example, to the next
  generation of fighter aircraft);
• advanced sensors and
  optics (used in
  calculating missile
  trajectories);
• underwater sensor systems
  (significant in anti-submarine
  warfare); and
• certain sophisticated
  telecommunications switching
  equipment.

The Center for Security Policy urges
that: (1) the United States take the lead
in halting the imminent implementation of
the Core List which will decontrol
dual-use technologies to the Soviet Union
by calling for an emergency meeting of
COCOM; (2) temporarily suspend all export
licenses to the Soviet Union; and (3)
undertake immediately an urgent review of
the technologies decontrolled to that
country within recent years, many of
which were decontrolled without strategic
justification.

“Today’s military coup in the
Soviet Union has demonstrated the
absolute folly of basing our export
control policies on wishful thinking —
rather than on a rigorous assessment of
our long-term security interests,”
said Congressman Gerald B. Solomon
(R-NY), a senior Member of Congress and
leading advocate of caution against
liberalizing more security export
controls. “Just as decisions which
enabled Saddam Hussein to acquire Western
high technology prior to the Gulf have,
in hindsight, been properly seen as
irresponsible, so too are those that
would give the Soviet military vastly
more dangerous dual-use goods and
equipment today.”

Center Board member and former Deputy
Under Secretary of Defense Stephen Bryen
added, “The Bush Administration has
made an strategic mistake of historic
proportions in acceding to commercial
pressures to transfer dual-use Western
technologies to a nation that is still so
obviously controlled by the military,
KGB, and Communist Party. Under these
circumstances, such technology will
simply help make the most dangerous armed
forces in the world today still more
dangerous by making the Soviet military
industrial complex more competent, more
cost-effective and more efficient.”