Conrol Freaks

Export licensing hurts American companies and doesn't improve national security.

John J. Miller from the June 1999 issue

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The White House has been reluctant to address this matter because it worries Congress won't sit still. China is a major vulnerability for the Clinton administration. From the 1996 campaign finance scandals to the latest spy revelations from Los Alamos, the Democrats don't have much political capital to burn if Republicans start pointing fingers. The White House would prefer to have computer companies lobby Congress for a few months, meet privately with congressional leaders sometime this summer, and beat this fall's deadline by quietly agreeing to ignore the 180-day waiting period.

Yet this would merely solve a short-term problem and put off another reckoning. Technology will begin to push against a new set of Mtops thresholds before long. A better idea is to scrap the current regulations and adopt a relative standard that forbids the export of any supercomputer--defined as one of the 1,000, 2,000, or 3,000 most powerful machines in use at any given moment. This solution would represent a permanent fix that allows American companies to sell mass-market products but also forbids the latest technology from reaching the hands of Kim II Sung in North Korea.

What the country most needs, however, is a noisy debate over the interplay of technology, trade, and national security. The United States lives in a world made more dangerous by technology. At best, unilateral export controls will only slow the rate at which potential enemies can acquire powerful computers. At worst, they will deny American companies an important source of revenue without also improving Americans' safety.

The Chinese government will ultimately get the computers it wants, and there's little the U.S. government can do to stop it. Better to think about how to deal with those systems once they're in place--by building an anti-ballistic-missile system, for example. Rather than deny the inevitable, we should prepare for it.