U.S. Export Controls:  Bush May Ease Restrictions on High-Performance Computers

By David Ruppe

Global Security Newswire

U.S. President George W. Bush is considering an executive order to greatly relax restrictions on exports of U.S.-made, high-performance computers (HPCs) to countries that could use them to develop nuclear weapons and other military advances.

Proponents of the move contend the spread of advanced computer technology is uncontrollable, and so U.S. companies should not be held back.  Critics disagree, saying the proposed relaxation could greatly harm U.S. national security.

The most powerful computers are, in principle, already available to all but a handful of designated rogue states—but for many countries only if approved after a U.S. review for national security implications.

The new regulations would eliminate that review on the latest generation of commercially available computers for more than 40 “Tier 3” countries of proliferation concern, including Pakistan, India, Russia, Israel and China, which are known or are believed to have nuclear weapon programs.

The Commerce Department, with input from the Pentagon and other agencies, is responsible for restricting licenses of HPC exports that might be used to build weapons of mass destruction or otherwise be detrimental to U.S. national security interests.

Under the new regulations, exports of computers capable of performing 190,000 million theoretical operations per second (MTOPS) would no longer require an export license or U.S. scrutiny for those countries.  The previous threshold was 85,000 MTOPS, set by former President Bill Clinton just before he left office last January.

The average desktop computer operates at around 1,000-2,000 MTOPS.  A joint Defense-Commerce Department study several years ago found that nuclear blasts could be simulated with computers performing at between 10,457 and 21,125 MTOPS.

The decision regarding HPC exports will be made “by presidential action,” said Catherine Willis, a spokeswoman for the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Export Administration, which throughout the Clinton administration was an aggressive proponent of relaxing HPC export controls.

International Reaction

The control relaxation plan was discussed with other friendly and allied governments at a recent arms control cooperation meeting in Vienna, where, according to one Pentagon source, it was coldly welcomed.

“Some of the allies asked, what’s the strategic rationale?  They were very cynical in their treatment of the U.S. proposal,” said Peter Leitner, a strategic trade adviser in the Pentagon, speaking as an independent expert and longtime critic of executive branch export control relaxation polices.

“There has been zero strategic analysis. It’s all based on economic objectives,” he said.

Some Security Implications

Computer experts say the more powerful a computer is in terms of the number of operations per second it can perform, the more precisely and rapidly it can perform a simulation.

“When you have a large computer, you assume you have a lot of memory. You essentially will be able to solve more challenging problems,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer science professor at the University of Tennessee.

In practical terms, it could help countries more quickly and accurately develop nuclear weapons, according to Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in Washington. “My impression is there are not too many limits on what you can do.”

Higher-powered computers can improve modeling and simulation of nuclear weapons and the dispersal of chemical and biological agents in the atmosphere, said Leitner.

The proposal is “so massively bizarre … it’s during a war with the threat of [weapons of mass destruction] ... And what is the best way to have a clandestine WMD program?  Modeling and simulation,” he said.

Foreign governments also could use high-performance computers to break secret U.S. military encryption more rapidly and easily, said Stephen Bryen, founder and former director of the Pentagon’s technology control office, the Defense Technology Security Administration.

“What you’re getting into is machines that can crack almost any code, and that affects our eyes and ears,” he said. “It makes, for example, our fleet operations in the Pacific more vulnerable.”

Futile to Control a Widely Available Technology

Proponents of easing controls maintain that advanced HPC technology is becoming so widely available around the world it would be futile to try to prevent countries from acquiring it by limiting U.S. exports.

“Dramatic technological advances, globalization, and increases in foreign competition have made it unrealistic for the United States to think it can control access to computing power,” said the Computer Coalition for Responsible Exports, which represents leading U.S. computer companies, in a statement earlier this year.

CCRE Communications Director Jennifer Greeson suggested critics of the proposed control loosening are out of step with the national security community consensus in Washington.

“More and more members of the national security community have come to the conclusion that controlling commodity-type systems like the ones we’re talking about, that are essentially used for business processes and payroll calculations, do not pose a threat to national security interests,” she said, citing two think tank studies and a Pentagon report.

A Center for Strategic and International Studies report released in June recommended ending performance-based hardware controls on computers and microprocessors.  It suggested strengthening controls focused on the users and purposes of the equipment and finding new ways for the U.S. military to use information technology.  Click here to read CSIS report.

Because smaller-scale HPCs can be linked together to make more powerful ones, it is a waste of government resources to hold back the more powerful models, Greeson said.

They “are essentially commodity items that someone in another country could surpass the restrictions by clustering lower-powered computers together and downloading computing power literally off the Internet, and by remote access, simply sending the problem off to a supercomputer center to have it calculated.”

MTOPS Matter

Milhollin disagreed, saying increased access to more-powerful U.S.-made HPCs would help the Tier 3 countries develop computing power much more quickly.

“It makes a big difference what you start scaling with.  If you started assembling groups of computers operating at 190,000 [MTOPS] it would be much faster than if you started assembling groups of computers starting at 85,000,” he said.

The University of Kentucky’s Dongarra said it is advantageous to build a system using higher-powered computers, as opposed to scaling together many lower powered computers.

“It’s always easier with fewer.  When it becomes more, it complicates things,” he said.

CCRE’s Greeson said national security interests are protected, since U.S. controls over sensitive software remain in place, such as “controls over more advanced, specialized systems, military applications, submarine detection [and] special algorithms.”

Where are HPCs Today?

Bush’s decision comes as high-performance computer power is rapidly advancing, especially in the non-Tier 3 world:  the West, Japan and South Korea.

“We have this incredible situation where the performance of the computers we use is doubling every year and a half,” said Dongarra, who compiles twice yearly a list of the top 500 supercomputers around the world.  Click here to read the list.

Ranked first on the most recent list, released Nov. 10, is Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s ASCI White, at roughly seven trillion operations per second.  Number 500 is the Environmental Protection Agency’s Cray computer, which can perform 94,000 operations per second (see GSN, Dec. 3).

Complicating export control efforts, very advanced HPCs can and are being used today by nonmilitary concerns such as banks, telecommunications firms, insurance companies and universities for weather research centers, the list shows.  Ranked 25^th is the investment company Charles Schwab, 46^th is State Farm (insurance) and 118^th is Bayer AG (pharmaceuticals), all with computers rated above 250,000 operations per second.

But that is mostly in the West. Only two computers in China, a traditional country of concern for national security reasons, made the list.  Both are of U.S.-origin:  Number 434 on the list is a Hewlett-Packard owned by the Finnish engineering company Kone Cranes with a speed of 99,900 million operations per second, and number 471 is a Hewlett-Packard owned by an undescribed entity, Jiangxi Beijing, rated at 99,200 million operations per second.

The list also says that U.S. companies Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Cray, Intel, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, are by far the dominant suppliers of the most advanced computer systems worldwide, with a few Japanese companies having a relatively tiny share of the market.

That indicates that the United States could successfully control the access Tier 3 countries have to more powerful computers, said Leitner.

“We have an infinite ability to control access in exports. There is no foreign availability,” he said.  “The Japanese on this issue are much more conservative than we are.”

Clinton Administration Legacy

A White House decision favoring loosened controls would add to a string of HPC export control relaxations by President Clinton during his two terms.  Those decisions were encouraged by the computer industry and were also criticized by some in Congress on national security grounds.

In his most significant action, on Jan. 19, one day before he left office, Clinton relaxed the Tier 3 license threshold from 28,000 to 85,000 MTOPS.

When Clinton took office in 1993, the United States controlled computer exports up to a capacity of 12.5 MTOPS and China was believed to have no high-performance machines.  It has since imported hundred from the United States.

Clinton also last year eliminated the distinction between Tier 3 military and civilian importers of U.S. high-performance computers.

“It means that overtly military sites in [the countries] can get computers up to this limit with no government scrutiny,” said Milhollin.

Eliminating the licensing requirement for higher-level computers also means the higher-level computers can be retransferred anywhere in the world without U.S. knowledge or control over the end-user, said Leitner.

“There [would be] no restrictions on re-exporting these things. If they don’t require a license, they don’t require restrictions on re-exporting.”

Greeson said the MTOPS measurement of computing power is not a good way of determining the national security implications of a computer export, and said a better measurement needs to be developed. Higher-performance computer exports, however, should not be held up until that happens, she said.

“By that point in time, we could have missed [the opportunity to export] two or three generations of technological advances.”

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Al-Qaeda:  More WMD Documents Discovered

U.S. investigators discovered “significant” documents at Tarnak Farms near Kandahar, Afghanistan, while searching former al-Qaeda sites for evidence that the organization was building weapons of mass destruction, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday (Agence France-Presse I, Dec. 16).

U.S. officials will test items from the Tarnak Farms camp for traces of chemical, biological and radioactive material, Rumsfeld said.  Investigators had visited about 30 sites to test for such materials (see GSN, Dec. 14), U.S. General Tommy Franks said yesterday. He said that the list of sites to be inspected has grown to 50 sites partly based on information gleaned from Taliban and suspected al-Qaeda detainees.

“It is frightening,” Franks said, “Some of the information that we have gained would allude to perhaps—I don’t want to call them science projects—but would make reference to things like poisons, the building of explosives, some of these cookbooks that we have talked about before that talk about terrorist approaches to problems and how buildings can be destroyed, and so forth.”

Some pieces of evidence “suggest that [al-Qaeda was] trying, at least, to acquire these weapons of mass destruction, and that’s no surprise,” said U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (Kenneth Bazinet, New York Daily News, Dec. 17).

There is no confirmation yet that al-Qaeda had the means to create weapons of mass destruction, Franks said, adding he could not confirm reports that al-Qaeda had planned to detonate a bomb in London (Agence France-Presse II, Dec. 16).

In a former al-Qaeda house near Kandahar, a Portuguese journalist discovered a hand-written plan to detonate a car bomb weighing more than 1,000 pounds in the Moorgate area of London, the London Independent reported yesterday.  It was unclear whether al-Qaeda planned to execute the attack or whether the notes were only for training purposes, and there was no evidence of when the organization would have implemented the plan, the Independent said (Justin Huggler, London Independent, Dec. 16).

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Pakistan:  Two Nuclear Scientists Released

Two Pakistani former nuclear scientists under investigation for their ties to al-Qaeda were released Saturday in time for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, although reports conflicted on the details of their release.

Muhammad Asim Mehmood, son of Sultan Bashiru-din Mehmood, one of the detained scientists, said yesterday that Mehmood and Chaudry Abdul Majid, another scientist, had been released and declared innocent, the New York Times reported today.  According to previous reports, Pakistani authorities had already released the scientists once after their original detention and then detained them again for further questioning last month (see GSN, Nov. 26).

Pakistani authorities were unavailable for comment, according to the Times, and Muhammad Asim Mehmood said he did not know if U.S. authorities had been involved in the release and could not comment on any U.S. involvement in the scientists’ interrogation.  The scientists must report any of their movements outside Islamabad and are not allowed to speak to the media, the son said.

Mehmood said his father had met with Osama bin Laden in August (see GSN, Dec. 12) but only to ask bin Laden for funding for a university in Kabul.

“It’s true that he met with Osama,” he said, “but my father wanted to discuss setting up a polytechnic university.  He thought Osama might be the financier for it.”  U.S. authorities have said no evidence existed (see GSN, Dec. 10) to indicate the scientists provided useful nuclear weapons information to bin Laden (Douglas Frantz, New York Times, Dec. 17).

The Washington Post reported the release slightly differently.  Pakistani officials said the two scientists were released to spend Eid al-Fitr with their families, according to the Post.  “They have promised to return back to us soon after the Eid holidays,” said a Pakistani official.  They were not allowed to leave Islamabad, the Post reported.

The scientists said last month they had answered bin Laden’s technical questions about constructing weapons of mass destruction, Pakistani officials said, adding that the scientists’ information did not help advance any al-Qaeda weapons programs.  “The probe against these scientists is by no means over, but we are satisfied that their contact with bin Laden didn’t result in any improvement in al-Qaeda’s firepower,” said a Pakistani intelligence official (Kamran Khan, Washington Post, Dec. 16).

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