Foreign Policy Alert, No. 34, February 27, 1997
American Foreign Policy Council, Washington, D.C.
Foreign Policy Alert, No. 34, February 27, 1997
American Foreign Policy Council, Washington, D.C.
Summary. The same Silicon Valley supporter of the 1992 and 1996 Clinton-Gore campaigns who sold four supercomputers to a Russian nuclear weapons lab has also sold two machines to a nuclear weapons and missile research institute in the People's Republic of China. The sale was allowed to go through because the administration did away with key export controls as a political payoff to its campaign donors. The administration apparently approved the first sale in 1995.
The Issue. Beijing has a large-scale nuclear weapons program with a missile force capable of striking the western United States. In January 1996, the New York Times reported that a high-level Chinese official made a veiled threat that, if the United States came to the defense of Taiwan, Beijing might fire a nuclear missile at California. China is seeking to build a strategic missile force that can strike any point in the United States.
John Fialka of the Wall Street Journal reports today that Silicon Graphics, Inc., currently under investigation by the Commerce Department and the U.S. Attorney for selling four supercomputers to Russia's key nuclear weapons design lab at Chelyabinsk-70 (See Foreign Policy Alert No. 33, February 19), "has sold two similar computers to China's Academy of Sciences, which also conducts research into nuclear weapons and missiles."
The California company claims that the sales to Beijing were "in full compliance with U.S. export regulations." The administration apparently approved the sale of the first supercomputer in 1995. However, according to the Wall Street Journal, "the latest sale . . . in June 1996, was done without an export license."
"In January 1996, the Clinton administration began requiring licenses for the sale of supercomputers capable of two billion theoretical operations per second to foreign entities involved in nuclear weapons work. The Silicon Graphics model sold to the Chinese is capable of six billion theoretical operations per second--twice as powerful as the model sold to the Russians," Fialka reports.
Silicon Graphics, according to Fialka, claims that "the computer was ordered for civilian purposes, including weather forecasting, air pollution studies and 'natural resource prospecting and development.' However, Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project [on Nuclear Arms Control], based in Washington, which tracks the flow of weapons-related materials, said that various agencies of the Chinese academy also do design work for China's nuclear weapons programs."
Fialka cites a U.S. official as saying that U.S. export controls on supercomputers amount to a kind of "honor system." Silicon Graphics apparently had doubts about selling the machines to China in 1995, when it sold its first supercomputer the Academy of Sciences. "It didn't check on later sales, however," Fialka reports.
Silicon Graphics CEO Edward McCracken, who told the New York Times his firm might have been "duped" in its sale to the Russian laboratory, could not be reached for comment. McCracken is a Republican who gave money to the Clinton-Gore campaigns in 1992 and 1996.
Note: I have just finished reading Fialka's new book, War By Other Means: Economic Espionage in America (Norton, 1997). It is a first-class piece of journalism that, among other things, details Beijing's military high-technology acquisition operations in the United States.
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