Insult To Injury: Bush Adds High Technology To Rewards For Moscow’s Coercion Of Lithuania

The Center for Security Policy today expressed disbelief that — within the same week that the Bush Administration effectively rewarded Moscow for its economic crackdown with a new trade agreement — Washington is granting the Soviet Union massive new access to strategic technologies.

In a sweeping decontrol of forty militarily relevant technologies announced today, the Administration is permitting the Soviet Union to obtain highly capable computers, sophisticated machine tools and a variety of telecommunication, electronic and other technologies previously denied, lest they be applied to Soviet defense purposes. The technologies involved are of sufficient quality as virtually to ensure that their principal — if not their only — users in the USSR will be in the Soviet military industrial sector.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director, said, "It is high time that Congress provided some adult supervision over the Bush Administration’s systematic dismantling of vital controls governing the transfer of militarily relevant technologies to Moscow. The Armed Services and Intelligence Committees ought urgently to review this and previous Administration decontrol actions that will have severe consequences for American equities falling within the jurisdiction of those panels."

Gaffney added, "In the absence of such oversight, the Administration evidently intends to permit the Soviet Union to have unencumbered access, for example, to machine tools with capabilities comparable to those Toshiba illegally sold the USSR in the mid-1980s — an action that precipitated an appropriate firestorm from Congress and the American public."

The Center believes that, unless corrected, today’s action by the Bush Administration will have at least three dangerous results:

• It will greatly facilitate the Soviet military’s efforts to develop and manufacture its next generation of advanced weapon systems — efforts that show no sign of slowing, notwithstanding Moscow’s economic crisis and Gorbachev’s ostensible commitment to reducing the USSR’s military spending.

 

• Ironically, the infusion of Western technology enabled by this decision — and by other, recent Bush Administration export decontrol steps — will go a long way toward enabling Moscow to maintain a threatening, state-of-the-art defense establishment at substantially lower cost. This amounts, in effect, to a U.S. subsidy to the Soviet military.

   

• It will seriously erode the qualitative edge upon which U.S. and allied security has traditionally depended. The erosion of American leads of on the order of eight years in such sensitive fields as microelectronics and associated technologies, for example, will permit the Soviets to counter advanced American weapon systems far more effectively. These technologies will also greatly enhance the reliability of Soviet weapon systems, currently a major handicap for Moscow’s military machine.

 

• It will, in turn, add significantly to the costs involved in preserving the United States’ technological advantage in decisive military areas like anti-submarine warfare, low observable aircraft and precision munitions. As the Toshiba sale showed, those costs can be orders of magnitude greater than the investment required by the Soviet Union; for example, given an expenditure of a mere $18 million in Toshiba machine tools, the Soviet Union was able to impose a burden conservatively valued at $10 billion in degraded U.S. anti-submarine warfare capabilities.

The Center called on Congressional committees with oversight of defense and intelligence spending to convene urgent hearings aimed at assessing the magnitude of the adverse impact of the Bush Administration’s technology decontrol actions on both the national security and the federal budget. In any event, as with yesterday’s 73-24 Senate vote on the incipient U.S.-Soviet Trade Agreement, the Congress should demand that — at the very least — Moscow is unable to obtain this technological windfall even as it uses economic warfare against Lithuania.