Why Does The US Want Moscow To Have A State-Of-The-Art Microelectronics Industry?

Yet Another Dangerous Decontrol Action

The Bush Administration has decided to decontrol next week yet another sensitive dual-use technology: polysilicon. Polysilicon is an essential ingredient used in the manufacture of computer chips. When it was discovered in the early 1980’s that the Soviet Union’s requirements for polysilicon — some ninety percent of which are associated with its military — vastly exceeded supply, the United States and its partners in the Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) agreed to deny Moscow access to high grade polysilicon and the means to produce it.

This effort has thus far paid off handsomely. In part, thanks to the resulting intensified polysilicon shortfall, Soviet computer chip technology is estimated to have fallen five or more years behind that of the United States. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that Moscow’s inability to deliver large quantities of high-grade chips to the defense sector has made the USSR’s ambitious military buildup more technically problematic and costly.

Unfortunately, as with earlier decontrol actions involving advanced personal computers and wire-bonders, the decision to decontrol polysilicon technology was predicated on flawed Commerce Department assessments of the "foreign availability" of such technology to the Soviet Union. As also occurred in the previous cases, Commerce brushed aside expert opinion in the Defense Department and the U.S. intelligence community that reached a contrary conclusion, i.e., that the USSR and its allies do not currently have an indigenous capability or other, non-COCOM sources to manufacture or acquire polysilicon sufficient to meet its needs.

Taken together, these decontrol actions offer the Soviet Union an opportunity to acquire a state-of-the-art microelectronics manufacturing capability. With unbridled access to a variety of sophisticated computers compatible with automated work-stations, precision wire-bonders for wiring circuits on microprocessors and other devices, and the means to produce polysilicon for high-quality wafers and chips, a key facet of the Soviet industrial base could be transformed.

The Soviet Military Will be the Beneficiary

So sophisticated are the technologies involved and so backwards is the non-military sector of the Soviet economy that the obvious immediate beneficiary of an up-to-date microelectronics manufacturing capability is certain to be the relatively modern defense industrial base.

What is more, the Kremlin’s military clearly has requirements for the products of such a revitalized industry. New generations of Soviet tactical and strategic weapons, aircraft, missiles, ships, radars and command, control and communication systems — to name but a few — will rely heavily upon computer chips, microprocessors and semiconductors fabricated with heretofore controlled Western technology.

A Decision With Extraordinary Strategic Significance

The decision to enable the Soviet Union to obtain a comprehensive microelectronics manufacturing capability is, to put it mildly, one of extraordinary strategic significance.

In the first place, enabling the Soviets to give their weapons greater accuracy, reliability and robustness has clear military implications. The potential for cost-avoidance and cost-reduction inherent in the technologies being decontrolled can also have great significance for the Soviet armed forces in a period of ostensible budgetary austerity.

What is more, selling the Soviet Union technology that is of such obvious relevance to the military means that the USSR’s limited hard currency resources are likely to be squandered on purposes directly contrary to U.S. strategic, political and commercial interests. At the very least, Western efforts to encourage genuine economic reform and democratic institutions by supplying appropriate civilian technology will be impaired as the cash with which it can be procured becomes unavailable.

Where Is Kloske?

One would think that the Commerce Department would be sensitive to these strategic implications — if not to those of a military character, at least to those that are likely to reduce opportunities for other, more prudent, American business sales there. Commerce’s sanguine attitude toward the consequences of a hemorrhage of U.S. microelectronic manufacturing technology caused by its piecemeal decontrol decisions is the more remarkable given the role played in these decisions by Dennis Kloske, Under Secretary of Commerce for Export Administration. Prior to his confirmation by the Senate last summer, Kloske tried to allay the concerns of a number of Senators about the process by which decontrol actions were being handled. In a letter to one of them, Senator Malcolm Wallop (R-WY), dated 6 September 1989, Kloske wrote:

The Bush Administration faces a dual challenge: The formidable threat posed by the Soviet Union and the formidable economic challenge poses by the rapid proliferation of high technology around the world. Both challenges must be addressed simultaneously. The loss of technology to the Soviet bloc is the foremost export administration challenge. I share your view that great care must be exercised to continually weigh commercial considerations against our overriding national security goals. National security must be the major factor because commercial benefits can be trivial compared to the cost to the West’s security that could result if our technology advantages are jeopardized….I will work closely with my counterparts in the Department of Defense and other cognizant agencies to ensure that an effective and fully consultative interagency process is established….

It is my desire to create a forum representing the best technical expertise contained in the U.S. Government which would provide Commerce with timely information crucial to its export control responsibilities. Representatives to this forum would include top technical experts from the Department of Defense, the national laboratories and the intelligence community. This forum of experts would serve as an advisory body to guide U.S. export control and decontrol efforts. Such guidance, I believe, would solve the narrow case-by-case export control process which does not reflect a cohesive approach to national security. We must not approach the export control streamlining process on an ad hoc basis but, rather, with a clear understanding of the broader national security interests that must be protected. (Emphasis added.)

Now that Kloske is in charge of the export administration process, Commerce’s continuing disregard of the advice of technical experts from the Defense Department and the intelligence community is astonishing. One can only conclude that Kloske dissembled when he promised the Senate that he would create an interagency mechanism for eliciting and incorporating such experts’ views so as to avoid the sort of problems that arose in the initial computer decontrol case. More troubling still, it is now evident that — despite his commitment to have decontrol decisions made on a strategic basis rather than on an "ad hoc" one — Kloske apparently has no intention of imposing such discipline on the Commerce Department or the foreign availability process it runs.

Congressional Oversight Is Urgently Required

The Center for Security Policy believes that Congress must take an urgent and rigorous look at the risks to the national security inherent in the Bush Administration’s approach to technology security. The failure of a senior Commerce Department official to honor undertakings made to the Congress; the absence of an effective mechanism for ensuring that Commerce’s findings of foreign availability are based on fact, not on wishful thinking or artifice; the lack of an appreciation of the dangerous consequences for American strategic interests of mutually reinforcing decontrol actions — these are among the issues that require immediate review.

The Center notes, moreover, that at a time when the Armed Services Committees and others are scrutinizing the defense budget for places where further reductions might be made, Congress would be well advised to examine with care the additional defense burden that will be imposed if the United States is obliged to compensate for improvements made to Soviet military capabilities by the ill-considered decontrol of sensitive American and Western dual-use technologies.