-Caveat Lector-
January 19, 2001
National security roulette
Kenneth R. Timmerman
The Washington Times
Among the many last-minute regulations, rules and executive
orders of the outgoing administration is a Commerce Department
bid that lifts export controls on military grade computers,
virtually guaranteeing that the United States will face dangerous
new threats in the coming years that our defense planners are
ill-prepared to meet.
The new regulations, announced amid yawns by the White House on
Jan. 10, allow a handful of U.S. companies to export
super-computers more powerful than those used in most Defense
Department weapons labs to Russia, China and other nations that
do not have the best interests of the United States at heart.
This is the sixth time the Clinton-Gore anti-defense team has
raised the limits on exports of high-performance computers (HPCs)
to please a handful of computer manufacturers and their cronies
who have contributed millions of dollars to the Democratic
National Committee. As a result of these earlier steps, the
White House now concludes — gee whiz — that there are "no
meaningful or effective control measures" any more.
Why should Americans care? Isn't my desktop PC far more powerful
today than it was in 1993?
Unfortunately for that argument, the export of a handful of
high-performance computers has little to do with the price or
power of desktop PCs. In fact, HPCs are designed for very
different tasks and do not use the same architecture as consumer
PCs. At the very low end, these machines are 80 times more
powerful than current desktops. At the high end, they are
several thousand times more powerful and are custom-built for
specific applications.
A 200,000 MTOPS (million theoretical operations per second)
machine, which can now be exported to Russia under the new
on-Gore rules, bears as much resemblance to a desktop PC as that
PC resembles an abacus. Top-grade desktops run at around 1,000
MTOPS.
Countries such as China, North Korea, Iran and Iraq use HPCs to
build more accurate ballistic missiles and test new nuclear
warhead designs using computer simulations instead of actual
tests, thus blind-siding our intelligence community. We will have
no way of knowing what's going on in the weapons programs of
these countries until they use their new weapons on the
battlefield against us and our friends.
In the Jan. 10 fact sheet, the White House admits that "the
administration would prefer to remove most controls on computer
hardware exports, including the existing controls on exports to
Tier 3 countries," a group that includes India, Pakistan, China,
Russia and most of the Middle East. Instead, they grudgingly
require that exporters seek a license for sales of HPCs above
85,000 MTOPS, way above the level needed for most forms of
ballistic missile simulation and nuclear weapons design work.
But there is good news. The truly bad players — Iran, Iraq,
Libya, North Korea, Cuba, Sudan and Syria — will not be able to
buy American supercomputers, not ever-ever-ever. "The United
States will maintain a virtual embargo on computer hardware and
technology exports to these destinations," the fact sheet states.
Of course, since the administration has now lifted all
restrictions on supercomputer sales to most of Europe, Africa and
Central and South America, the bad guys can simply buy through
third parties. In case you doubt that our "friends" would be so
unfaithful, ask the Sun Microsystems dealer in Tehran to buy you
a new supercomputer for your nuclear weapons lab in Isfahan.
He'll complain that the U.S. restrictions have made life so
difficult that it could take up to a month to get delivery.
Meanwhile, both Russia and China recently announced that they
were upgrading "scientific and technology" exchanges with Iran,
and would be signing a political treaty later this year to cement
their budding strategic alliance.
President Clinton's midnight regulations pose a clear and present
danger to America's national security. They should be rescinded
immediately by the new administration and replaced with a
common-sense approach that allows businesses to expand overseas
markets but places national security first.
First, the new administration should facilitate instant export
reporting by generalizing an electronic form of the shipper's
export declaration that all exporters are currently required to
file with Customs. This was a reform I initially proposed in
1993 that has been implemented only gradually by the current
administration. This information should be broadly disseminated
within the intelligence community and coded in ways to make
potentially troublesome exports stand out instantly from the mass
of innocuous transactions carried out each day.
Next, the new administration needs to conduct a thorough review
of the existing export-licensing system, and consider replacing
it with a more flexible and discretionary system driven by the
actual threats to our national security, not specific
technologies. For example, there is no conceivable threat to
U.S. security posed by the sale of a supercomputer to Israel;
however, damage could be done through the clandestine transfer of
used metalworking machinery to Syria, Pakistan or Iran.
Finally, once order and common sense have been restored to our
own house, the administration needs to rebuild a consensus among
our allies of the common threats we face, and where that fails,
work unilaterally to defend that United States by deploying
missile defenses and proactively denying exports to countries of
concern.
As Secretary of Defense-designate Donald Rumsfeld pointed out in
1998, U.S. enemies are actively building new missiles and
nuclear weapons. These reforms require urgent attention, because
U.S. security is at risk.
Kenneth R. Timmerman is the author of four books on foreign
policy, and was a candidate in the Republican primary for the
U.S. Senate in Maryland.
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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