JHENDLER@BBNA@sri-unix (06/24/82)
Another example of the high technology smuggling was discovered during the Yom Kippur war between Egypt and Israel. The Israelis captured a large number of soviet made missiles, and discovered that the guidance systems were made by Texas Instruments. However, things are tighter now than they were then. The government's restrictions (Called the "Bucy laws" after TI president J. Fred Bucy) severely limit what technology is allowed out of the US. We recently had a long battle with TI management over whther some of our natural language group could go to the COLING (Computational Linguistics) conference in Praque. We were finally allowed to go, once it was determined that the Russians would have very little use for an English language syntactic parsing scheme, but I think the unwillingness of US business to send people to Iron Curtain countries is becoming manifest. Their unwillingness to sell chips, etc. to the Russians is even starting to overcome their greed for the Russian marketplace. -Jim Hendler Texas Instruments, Dallas. -------
Jim@sri-unix (06/28/82)
I am glad that some of our capitalists are getting their act together and denying the Soviets some of the fruits of our labors. However, people should remember that there is a lot of difference between the Soviets knowing that something works, knowing how it works, having a working model, and developing the capability to manufacture and maintain that product. The conflict we have here is mainly in the first and second areas, ie the research phase (I know of no one who seriously advocates us becoming a supplier of the Soviets or building high-tech plants for them, although some of our Western European "allies" come close). In particular University research meant for publication probably should not be restricted by the government, since the incremental benefits the Soviets gain are far outweighted by our gains in promoting a free flow of information throughout the community. The same sort of issues surface when discussing links between Universities and industrial research labs. As for the distinctions between military and non-military technology, they are only really possible in those last two stages - and even here, commercial technology can often be easily adapted to military ends. Although a blanket ban is not justified, completely free trade is hardly possible either. Jim -------