Computers, Clinton and Congress

July 18, 1999

UNITED NATIONS -- For over a year, firm and compelling evidence has detailed a hemorrhage of US classified nuclear data to communist China. Congressional committees, the major media, and even the Clinton Administration agree that there was a serious and sustained espionage effort by Beijing to pilfer, plunder or purchase American high technology.

Thus even in this anesthetized age of "so what," both political parties should be bristling at the Clinton Administration's latest commercial caper which will allow the sale of high speed computer chips to China and Russia!

Once again the State and Defense Departments seem to have been snookered by the Commerce Department. The Administration whose motto seems "let's make a deal" seems, in its ongoing partnership with computer manufacturers (read campaign contributors), allowed what is described as archaic American legislation to lapse so that we may now market even more sophisticated computer technology to communist China--not to mention Russia and Pakistan, in other words Proliferation international!

Not letting a big dollar deal get in the way of national security, the Clinton team has in its inimitable way restated its tried and true mercantile mantra--the technology is available anyway, its fast obsolete, and if we don't sell it, somebody else will.

While many of the traditional Cocom restrictions and rules banning hi tech exports to select security risk states are no doubt outdated and can be passed in a nanosecond by fast paced technology, there's an innate stupidity --in willfully supplying sensitive technology to those who may very well deploy it in less than predictable ways.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to ascertain that modern missiles are computer based, driven and targeted. By allowing known proliferators to perfect their otherwise crude products, we are in effect helping potential adversaries hone their weapons.

In an age when many Americans seem perfectly willing to sacrifice Second Amendment rights and penalize gun manufacturers for the presumed end use of the weapons, it would seem as logical to at least query what the end use effect of multiple warhead ballistic missiles--with U.S. computer guidance--would have on American cities?

Naturally we will not willfully sell the proverbial chip which would target the missile, yet it takes little imagination that with the staggering dual use potential of even some of the more advanced computer games, such chips have military electronics applications.

Communist China has increasingly focused on computer electronics. In the wake both of the Gulf War and Kosovo, the PRC has refocused its efforts for the pilfering, perfection and purchase of military electronics. Hong Kong's respected South China Morning Post reported that Beijing has allocated $1 billion for a plethora of projects under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The paper reported "The Academy is completing a series of research projects with military civilian applicability that has major significance for national security." PRC President Jiang Zemin has pressed for the results to be applied in weaponry. Naturally such visible programs don't reveal Beijing's huge "black budget" for science and technology.

Fully aware of the military potential of what is being sold, let's not be so ignorant as to allow the continued hemorrhage of such high technology under the guise of business and usual.

Given the clear and present danger posed by the pending computer exports, Congress should act with alacrity to stem this technological tide lest we become threatened by a crisis of our own making.

John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues who writes weekly for World Tribune.com.