By David Ruppe

Global Security Newswire

Although he recently called for strengthening export controls, U.S. President George W. Bush yesterday announced a planned massive relaxation of U.S. national security export controls on high performance computers (HPCs) and microprocessors to states of nonproliferation concern (see GSN, Dec. 18).

The changes, made by an executive order signed by Bush and urged by the computer industry, would in 60 days remove government licensing and scrutiny of HPCs up to 190,000 MTOPS, or millions of theoretical operations per second, for military and civilian entities in “Tier 3” countries such as India, Pakistan, China, Russia, and all of the Middle East.

Former President Bill Clinton set the previous threshold at 85,000 MTOPS last year, on his last full day in office.

Bush also raised licensing requirements for general-purpose microprocessors from 6,500 MTOPS to 12,000 MTOPS.

The changes continue a trend of controversial, unilateral HPC export control relaxations started by the Clinton administration expressly designed to increase global trade of the U.S. industry as it develops increasingly powerful computer technologies.

“These changes will advance the president's goal of updating the U.S. export control system so that it protects U.S. national security, and at the same time, allows America's high-tech companies to innovate and successfully compete in today's marketplace,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said in a statement similar to those issued by the Clinton White House accompanying earlier computer decontrols.  Click here to read White House statement.

“These reforms are needed due to the rapid rate of technological change in the computer industry,” said McClellan.

The White House announcement did not explain how or why U.S. national security is protected by the changes, although a fact sheet it issued did say the Commerce Department, which is responsible for restricting the exports, “will remind exporters of their duty to check suspicious circumstances and inquire about end-uses and end-users.”  Click here to read White House fact sheet.

HPC Advantages

Critics of the decision say it does not protect U.S. national security—that countries affected, such as China, India, Pakistan, Israel and Russia, could use the computers to more rapidly and covertly develop new nuclear weapons and ballistic missile capabilities, as well as other military technologies such as advanced encryption and code-breaking that could hasten erosion of U.S. military qualitative advantages.

Tight U.S. and allied Cold War restrictions on HPC exports were instrumental in giving U.S. forces a decisive qualitative edge in military hardware over the Soviet Union and other potential adversaries, becoming a decisive factor in the rapid Gulf War victory over Iraq, according to Stephen Bryen, who founded and headed the Pentagon’s technology security office during the Reagan administration.

“It’s one of the reasons we won the Cold War. [The Soviets] couldn’t modernize, upgrade their equipment, couldn’t match our Strategic Defense Initiative efforts … [and the lack of computing power] added to their costs in terms of people. Their design bureaus had to do it by hand,” he said.

A secret 1986 CIA analysis released last year, said the Soviet Union lagged behind the United States in supercomputing by about 10 years, and as a result required larger testing programs and engineering design teams, and greater development time and expense to produce new weapons systems of relatively poorer performance.  Click here to read CIA analysis.

“Computational capabilities, as they improve, they speed up the solutions to very tough problems. However, you can solve those problems without having the very best machines or advanced computational capability,” according to Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, and a Defense Department nonproliferation official during the first Bush administration. “The point isn’t that you need these things, it’s that they help.”

Vow to Tighten Controls

Bush’s decision comes less than a month after his expressed intention to step up U.S. export controls on technologies that could be used to develop weapons of mass destruction.

“To meet our new threats, I have directed my national security advisor and my homeland security director to develop a comprehensive strategy on proliferation,” Bush said in a Dec. 11 speech on the future of the U.S. military at the Citadel military academy, in Charleston, S.C.  Click here to read Bush speech.

“Working with other countries, we will strengthen nonproliferation treaties and toughen export controls. Together we must keep the world's most dangerous technologies out of the world's most dangerous people,” Bush said.

“The contrast between the speech at the Citadel and his action puts pressure on them to somehow come up with a broader nonproliferation agenda,” Sokolski said.

Nonproliferation Coordination

The eased controls could place U.S. HPC manufacturers well in front of the handful of other HPC-supplying countries.

HPC exports are subject to a multilateral regime, the Wassenaar Arrangement, whereby member countries agree to similarly restrict exports of technologies with military applications.

“The administration has consulted with other nations, including members of the Wassenaar Arrangement, to ensure that they understand the basis for these decisions. We are committed to working closely with them to adjust multilateral controls to reflect technological advances and collective security concerns,” the White House said in a fact sheet on the changes.

Wassenaar controls on HPC exports were raised from 6,500 to 28,000 MTOPS in December 2000. Delegates met in Vienna last month to discuss further export control policy changes, including changes for HPCs. Unable to reach consensus, they will meet again next month.  Click here for a summary of Wassenaar changes made in December 2000.

The Bush announcement could complicate U.S. efforts to curb nonproliferation to rogue states, said Sokolski.

“If you broaden what you are trying to do with regard to Iraq and Iran and other places, you better have some other routine to argue well, yes, we decontrolled computers, but that does not argue for lifting controls with regard to these states … I think it requires a bit of Kabuki.”

Consensus Within the Administration

Previous relaxations of U.S. HPC controls have received fairly little press scrutiny, perhaps because of the general unanimity of support for the changes among senior policy-makers during the Clinton administration and now the Bush administration.

When Bush notified the relevant congressional committees of his decision in a letter sent Dec. 28, he said the changes were made “based on the recommendation of the departments of State, Defense, Commerce, and Energy.”  Click here to read Bush letter.

Critics of the eased controls have charged that policy-makers have failed to inform themselves of their strategic implications.

“In hearings a couple of months ago, the [General Accounting Office] found that, contrary to a legal requirement, the Clinton administration never conducted national security analysis with regard to what they were decontrolling,” Senator Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), said last April.

A GAO analysis last March found Clinton’s January changes were “not adequately justified,” saying presidential reporting to Congress failed to “address all militarily significant uses for computers at the new thresholds and assess the national security impact of such uses, as required by law.”  Click here to read GAO report.

A joint 1998 Defense and Commerce Department-sponsored study estimated that militaries could perform three-dimensional modeling of submarines on computers at 75,000 MTOPS.

It said computers at 85,000 could perform some 300 to 500 militarily significant applications currently used by the Defense Department.

The Bush administration on Dec. 28 also provided Congress a report, which could not be obtained by press time, explaining its rationale for the changes.

The GAO analysis said the United States, as a result of the Clinton decision, would need to rely more heavily on U.S. computer vendors to know their customers, and whether they might use the technology for proliferation purposes. “Past evidence has shown this reliance may be misplaced,” the GAO said.

The GAO added that increased thresholds would also reduce U.S. information that might be useful for detecting patterns of proliferation activity, and end reporting requirements on how the computers are used.

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