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Posted on 12/19/2001 11:38:09 AM PST by LarryLied

U.S. President George W. Bush is considering an executive order to greatly relax restrictions on exports of U.S.-made, high-performance computers (HPCs) to countries that could use them to develop nuclear weapons and other military advances.

Proponents of the move contend the spread of advanced computer technology is uncontrollable, and so U.S. companies should not be held back. Critics disagree, saying the proposed relaxation could greatly harm U.S. national security.

The most powerful computers are, in principle, already available to all but a handful of designated rogue states—but for many countries only if approved after a U.S. review for national security implications.

The new regulations would eliminate that review on the latest generation of commercially available computers for more than 40 “Tier 3” countries of proliferation concern, including Pakistan, India, Russia, Israel and China, which are known or are believed to have nuclear weapon programs.

The Commerce Department, with input from the Pentagon and other agencies, is responsible for restricting licenses of HPC exports that might be used to build weapons of mass destruction or otherwise be detrimental to U.S. national security interests.

Under the new regulations, exports of computers capable of performing 190,000 million theoretical operations per second (MTOPS) would no longer require an export license or U.S. scrutiny for those countries. The previous threshold was 85,000 MTOPS, set by former President Bill Clinton just before he left office last January.

The average desktop computer operates at around 1,000-2,000 MTOPS. A joint Defense-Commerce Department study several years ago found that nuclear blasts could be simulated with computers performing at between 10,457 and 21,125 MTOPS.

The decision regarding HPC exports will be made “by presidential action,” said Catherine Willis, a spokeswoman for the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Export Administration, which throughout the Clinton administration was an aggressive proponent of relaxing HPC export controls.

International Reaction

The control relaxation plan was discussed with other friendly and allied governments at a recent arms control cooperation meeting in Vienna, where, according to one Pentagon source, it was coldly welcomed.

“Some of the allies asked, what’s the strategic rationale? They were very cynical in their treatment of the U.S. proposal,” said Peter Leitner, a strategic trade adviser in the Pentagon, speaking as an independent expert and longtime critic of executive branch export control relaxation polices.

“There has been zero strategic analysis. It’s all based on economic objectives,” he said.

Some Security Implications

Computer experts say the more powerful a computer is in terms of the number of operations per second it can perform, the more precisely and rapidly it can perform a simulation.

“When you have a large computer, you assume you have a lot of memory. You essentially will be able to solve more challenging problems,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer science professor at the University of Tennessee.

In practical terms, it could help countries more quickly and accurately develop nuclear weapons, according to Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in Washington. “My impression is there are not too many limits on what you can do.”

Higher-powered computers can improve modeling and simulation of nuclear weapons and the dispersal of chemical and biological agents in the atmosphere, said Leitner.

The proposal is “so massively bizarre … it’s during a war with the threat of [weapons of mass destruction] ... And what is the best way to have a clandestine WMD program? Modeling and simulation,” he said.

Foreign governments also could use high-performance computers to break secret U.S. military encryption more rapidly and easily, said Stephen Bryen, founder and former director of the Pentagon’s technology control office, the Defense Technology Security Administration.

“What you’re getting into is machines that can crack almost any code, and that affects our eyes and ears,” he said. “It makes, for example, our fleet operations in the Pacific more vulnerable.”

Futile to Control a Widely Available Technology

Proponents of easing controls maintain that advanced HPC technology is becoming so widely available around the world it would be futile to try to prevent countries from acquiring it by limiting U.S. exports.

“Dramatic technological advances, globalization, and increases in foreign competition have made it unrealistic for the United States to think it can control access to computing power,” said the Computer Coalition for Responsible Exports, which represents leading U.S. computer companies, in a statement earlier this year.

CCRE Communications Director Jennifer Greeson suggested critics of the proposed control loosening are out of step with the national security community consensus in Washington.

“More and more members of the national security community have come to the conclusion that controlling commodity-type systems like the ones we’re talking about, that are essentially used for business processes and payroll calculations, do not pose a threat to national security interests,” she said, citing two think tank studies and a Pentagon report.

A Center for Strategic and International Studies report released in June recommended ending performance-based hardware controls on computers and microprocessors. It suggested strengthening controls focused on the users and purposes of the equipment and finding new ways for the U.S. military to use information technology. Click here to read CSIS report.

Because smaller-scale HPCs can be linked together to make more powerful ones, it is a waste of government resources to hold back the more powerful models, Greeson said.

They “are essentially commodity items that someone in another country could surpass the restrictions by clustering lower-powered computers together and downloading computing power literally off the Internet, and by remote access, simply sending the problem off to a supercomputer center to have it calculated.”

MTOPS Matter

Milhollin disagreed, saying increased access to more-powerful U.S.-made HPCs would help the Tier 3 countries develop computing power much more quickly.

“It makes a big difference what you start scaling with. If you started assembling groups of computers operating at 190,000 [MTOPS] it would be much faster than if you started assembling groups of computers starting at 85,000,” he said.

The University of Kentucky’s Dongarra said it is advantageous to build a system using higher-powered computers, as opposed to scaling together many lower powered computers.

“It’s always easier with fewer. When it becomes more, it complicates things,” he said.

CCRE’s Greeson said national security interests are protected, since U.S. controls over sensitive software remain in place, such as “controls over more advanced, specialized systems, military applications, submarine detection [and] special algorithms.”

Where are HPCs Today?

Bush’s decision comes as high-performance computer power is rapidly advancing, especially in the non-Tier 3 world: the West, Japan and South Korea.

“We have this incredible situation where the performance of the computers we use is doubling every year and a half,” said Dongarra, who compiles twice yearly a list of the top 500 supercomputers around the world. Click here to read the list.

Ranked first on the most recent list, released Nov. 10, is Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s ASCI White, at roughly seven trillion operations per second. Number 500 is the Environmental Protection Agency’s Cray computer, which can perform 94,000 operations per second (see GSN, Dec. 3).

Complicating export control efforts, very advanced HPCs can and are being used today by nonmilitary concerns such as banks, telecommunications firms, insurance companies and universities for weather research centers, the list shows. Ranked 25th is the investment company Charles Schwab, 46th is State Farm (insurance) and 118th is Bayer AG (pharmaceuticals), all with computers rated above 250,000 operations per second.

But that is mostly in the West. Only two computers in China, a traditional country of concern for national security reasons, made the list. Both are of U.S.-origin: Number 434 on the list is a Hewlett-Packard owned by the Finnish engineering company Kone Cranes with a speed of 99,900 million operations per second, and number 471 is a Hewlett-Packard owned by an undescribed entity, Jiangxi Beijing, rated at 99,200 million operations per second.

The list also says that U.S. companies Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Cray, Intel, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, are by far the dominant suppliers of the most advanced computer systems worldwide, with a few Japanese companies having a relatively tiny share of the market.

That indicates that the United States could successfully control the access Tier 3 countries have to more powerful computers, said Leitner.

“We have an infinite ability to control access in exports. There is no foreign availability,” he said. “The Japanese on this issue are much more conservative than we are.”

Clinton Administration Legacy

A White House decision favoring loosened controls would add to a string of HPC export control relaxations by President Clinton during his two terms. Those decisions were encouraged by the computer industry and were also criticized by some in Congress on national security grounds.

In his most significant action, on Jan. 19, one day before he left office, Clinton relaxed the Tier 3 license threshold from 28,000 to 85,000 MTOPS.

When Clinton took office in 1993, the United States controlled computer exports up to a capacity of 12.5 MTOPS and China was believed to have no high-performance machines. It has since imported hundred from the United States.

Clinton also last year eliminated the distinction between Tier 3 military and civilian importers of U.S. high-performance computers.

“It means that overtly military sites in [the countries] can get computers up to this limit with no government scrutiny,” said Milhollin.

Eliminating the licensing requirement for higher-level computers also means the higher-level computers can be retransferred anywhere in the world without U.S. knowledge or control over the end-user, said Leitner.

“There [would be] no restrictions on re-exporting these things. If they don’t require a license, they don’t require restrictions on re-exporting.”

Greeson said the MTOPS measurement of computing power is not a good way of determining the national security implications of a computer export, and said a better measurement needs to be developed. Higher-performance computer exports, however, should not be held up until that happens, she said.

“By that point in time, we could have missed [the opportunity to export] two or three generations of technological advances.”

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