October 28, 1997

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: GARY SCHMITT, Executive Director

SUBJECT: “Playing Chicken” with Supercomputers & the Defense Authorization Act

The members of the House National Security Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee have recently completed work on the FY 1998 Defense Authorization Act. The bill’s conference report contains language requiring exporters of a certain category of high performance computers to notify the government in advance of prospective sales to states such as China and Russia. Within ten days of the notification, if either the secretary of defense, state, commerce or energy questions the export, the sale cannot go forward until it has received an export license from the Commerce Department.

Given Monday’s story in the New York Times about the illicit diversion of sixteen of these supercomputers to a Russian nuclear weapons laboratory and the documented account of a similar diversion to a Chinese military-related institute, one would think this modest and eminently reasonable step would be welcomed by those whose job it is to care about the country’s national security. But apparently not. In a letter sent to the Congress last week, national security adviser “Sandy” Berger objected to the provision in the defense bill, stating in Kafka-esque fashion that the diversions, instead of demonstrating the need for tightened export controls over these computers, “in fact” showed the current policy to be “successful.”

The administration is now making noises that President Clinton will veto the defense authorization bill in part because of the supercomputer provision. Congress shouldn’t fall for this bluff. As the following piece by Lawrence Kaplan, a Project research fellow, written at the start of the House-Senate conference makes clear, the national security argument for tightening controls over this category of computers is far more persuasive than the unsupportable rhetoric of the administration and its supporters. The bottom line is that these kinds of computers are not widely available and, in the hands of weapons designers, give them a capacity to build more sophisticated and lethal weapons far more rapidly than they otherwise would have.