Center Decries Latest Evidence Of Commerce’s Reckless Technology Decontrol Decisions

The Center for Security Policy today learned that the Commerce Department has decided to decontrol yet another strategic technology for export to the Soviet Union and its allies. As it has done repeatedly in recent months, Commerce acted to remove existing export controls on polysilicon — a key ingredient in the manufacture of computer chips, semiconductors and microprocessors — citing "foreign availability."

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director, said, "The Commerce Department’s decision to decontrol polysilicon technology — coming as it does on the heels of similar actions with respect to powerful computers and wire-bonders — will do grievous harm to American and Western security. Like the earlier decisions, it is based upon flagrantly deficient assessments of foreign availability; as with the previous cases, evidence to the contrary supplied by experts in the Defense Department and U.S. intelligence community was disregarded."

Gaffney added, "By combining its access to Western polysilicon technology with sophisticated computers and wire-bonders, the Soviet Union will be able to correct one of its most pressing military deficiencies — the lack of an adequate and competent microelectronics manufacturing base. In other words, taken together, these three decontrol decisions represent a wholesale transfer of ‘dual use’ technology of potentially enormous strategic significance."

In an analysis released today, entitled Why Does the U.S. Want Moscow to Have a State-of-the-Art Microelectronics Industry?, the Center notes that the sort of piecemeal approach to decontrolling such strategically sensitive technology seemed explicitly ruled out in commitments made to the Senate last fall by Under Secretary of Commerce Dennis Kloske prior to his confirmation.

The Center believes that Kloske’s broken promise and the dangerous hemorrhage of vital Western technology that is occurring partly as a result warrant urgent congressional review and corrective action. This is particularly imperative given that Congress may well need to consider the additional defense costs likely to arise as a result of this reckless technology security policy — costs that may be unsupportable at even the present budget levels, to say nothing of those likely to be available after additional cuts are made.