India a target of U.S. high-tech export control

By Brahma Chellaney

NEW DELHI (JP): U.S. statecraft has fashioned export controls as an integral component of national security.

Throughout the Cold War, restrictions on technology flow were justified by Washington as essential to the containment of the East Bloc.

Since its end, U.S. diplomacy has initiated a partnership between the West and the East on technology controls, leaving some major developing economies like India at the receiving end.

The new U.S.-led Wassenaar cartel symbolizes this East-West partnership as well as American success in turning export controls into an instrument of international security without UN sanction.

It is this success that emboldens Washington to continue to tighten and enlarge technology controls, as illustrated by the recent curbs on computer exports that target, among others, India because of its continued rejection of the US nuclear nonproliferation regime.

Although justified in security terms, export controls have acquired an increasing economic dimension, encompassing technologies at the heart of commercial competitiveness.

The technological revolution has picked up such momentum since the 1980s that commercial innovations are now driving military modernization.

America's unrivaled conventional military might derive largely from civil technology advances. The ongoing revolution in military affairs (RMA) is also a product of these new realities, which have seen the production and supply of advanced technologies shift from the governmental to private sector.

With nearly all advanced technologies now having civil and military applications, the concept of "dual-use" technologies has lost much of its relevance, although U.S. policymakers continue to raise it to gain legitimacy for their export controls.

Washington has employed the expanding scope of the Pentagon's Militarily Critical Technologies List (MCTL) -- which includes new technologies of industrial production -- as the basis for broadening national and multinational export controls.

This approach coincided with the advent of the Information Age and new commercially developed technologies, such as parallel computer architecture, data fusion, sensors and signal processing, machine intelligence and robotics, lasers, high- definition imaging, and advanced energy devices.

The U.S.-Indian nonproliferation differences mirror the intense struggle between one country's determination to control the spread of advanced technologies to help safeguard its own national security, and another nation's resolve, also rooted in national-security considerations, to build and maintain technological independence.

Denial of advanced technology to India remains an important U.S. objective, even as greater access to the Indian market is sought for American goods and services.

It is partly because of export controls that the process of "globalization", predicated on the open movement of goods, services and capital but not of technologies to manufacture those products and provide those services, holds far-reaching ramifications for India.

As a major target of US-inspired export controls, India today lacks access to leading-edge technologies critical to its rapid civilian modernization.

Occasionally, export controls take the form of sanctions, such as the U.S. action in choking off civilian space cooperation with India.

At times, U.S. diplomacy has persuaded other nations to deny India specific technologies, such as the 1993 Russian action in breaking a binding contract for supply of cryogenic-engine technology even though it has no application in missile development.

The centrality of export controls, sanctions and embargoes in American foreign policy has been underlined by a U.S. National Association of Manufacturers study which lists punitive actions against 35 countries between 1993 and 1996 alone.

If one excludes the handful of nations branded as "rogue" states and slapped with blanket technology embargoes, few countries today face the sustained brunt of U.S. technology controls as much as India.

India's penalties began when it spurned the 1968 Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT), spiraled when it conducted a nuclear test in 1974, and scaled new heights after the end of the Cold War.

Even if India does nothing, it will continue to incur mounting damages in the years ahead.

In contrast, the other two principal non-NPT signatories, Israel and Pakistan, have come out better.

Israel, in fact, has been rewarded with U.S. nuclear-weapons technology and continuing missile assistance as epitomized by the Arrow program.

Pakistan mocked the export controls by first smuggling in Western nuclear items and then receiving nuclear and missile assistance from China in what former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has called the geopolitical containment of India.

The new U.S. restrictions on export of the lower end of high- performance computers mark a reversal of the liberalized trade rules in this sector introduced earlier by Washington.

The fresh controls should be seen against the "dramatic increase," in the words of former U.S. Commerce Under-Secretary Jeffrey Garten, in unilateral export controls in the past four years.

India was compelled to build its own supercomputer, Param, after being denied a license to import the second-rate Cray XMP- 14 model.

In contrast, to help build an East-West export-control partnership, Washington decontrolled the export of supercomputers and other high-tech items to Russia, China and Eastern Europe in 1994.

Then as part of the backroom big-power deal on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), China and Russia bought highly sophisticated US supercomputers.

The latest changes in the U.S. high-performance computing (HPC) policy, although the result of congressional action, are likely to hit India more than the other major countries placed third by Washington in its four-tier system.

The first tier, with full technology access, comprises America's close allies, while the fourth tier contains the alleged rogue states with zero access.

Although nuclear-armed Israel, China and Russia are also in the third tier with India, each of them has worked out special understandings and deals with Washington to the extent that American supercomputers have shown up in their weapons-related facilities with or without U.S. consent.

To encourage a Chinese test moratorium, for example, the United States had publicly offered advanced computer-simulation technology to Beijing.

The new HPC export rules, by imposing stringent safeguards and reporting requirements, will impede India's access to even low- grade supercomputers with speeds between two billion to seven billion theoretical operations per second.

The revised rules have to be seen in the context of the computer controls of the Wassenaar cartel, of which India is an important target.

By slapping controls on the export of machines capable of more than four billion calculations per second, the 33-nation Wassenaar regime has restricted India's HPC access internationally.

At a time when America is going in for tera-scale computing, or machines capable of trillions of calculations per second, it has contained India's access to far inferior machines.

Under the new U.S. rules, civil end-users in India will have to subject such machines, if they succeed in importing them, to on-site American inspections.

Ironically, the new rules became effective on February 3, the very day President Bill Clinton unveiled a $517-million program to build computers that could perform 30 trillion calculations per second by 2001 and 100 trillion by 2004. The announcement came as he watched a warhead-test simulation at the Los Alamos nuclear lab.

In addition to testing warheads through linked supercomputers performing up to 1.6 trillion operations a second, the United States is pursuing a nontransparent program involving live nuclear tests in Nevada at professedly subcritical levels.

If India does procure weapons and test its long-held nuclear capability, U.S. technology controls would have played no mean role in promoting such a course.

The controls have put India in a position where it stands damned whether it restrains itself or goes ahead.

Professor Brahma Chellaney is a strategic affairs specialist with the independent Center for Policy Research (CPR) think tank in New Delhi.