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Bush asked to drop export controls on supercomputers

SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Tuesday, June 12, 2001

The Bush administration is again being urged to discard export controls on advanced computers.

A new report maintains that U.S. controls on computer exports are useless because software is no longer the key to integrate weapons systems. The report by the the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies asserts that standard laptops have more computer power than supercomputers of the early 1990s and can be used to operate weapons systems.

"Computing power is considerably less important for building modern weapons than is the ability to integrate materials, manufacturing equipment and technology," the report says. "The problem is that the supercomputer of 1990 Ñ a computer then manufactured only in the dozens of units Ñ had by the year 2000 become the laptop manufactured in the hundreds of thousands."

The administration appears to agree and is urging Congress to drop restrictions on export controls. This includes the classification of computers by millions of theoretical operations per second, or MTOPS.

The report said the standard is outdated. The future-generation F-22 fighter-jet was designed by Lockheed Martin 958 MTOPS Cray supercomputer. A Pentium 3 chip found in laptops priced at $2,600 has 10 times the number of MTOPS.

The leading opponents of the new approach have been Republican chairmen of key committees. But the shift to Democratic control has deprived the Republicans of much of their power.

The Washington center gathered a bipartisan commission to prepare the report. The panel included two former CIA directors, James Schlesinger and R. James Woolsey.

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