One of the hallmarks of the Clinton administration's foreign policy has been the eagerness with which it allows American companies to export high- technology products that were once restricted for national security reasons. The Commerce Department's top export official, William Reinsch, aptly summarized the new mindset when he boasted to Congress, "Yesterday's adversaries are today's customers."
And how. It's true that most high-tech exports from U.S. companies have gone to allies, but 47 high-performance supercomputers have also been sold to China. The administration acknowledged this for the first time last year, under pressure from congressional Republicans. These computers -- some of which are the same as those used in the Pentagon's High Performance Computing Modernization Program -- provide the technological capability to help construct an array of new weapons systems, including nuclear weapons.
Reinsch last year defended the Commerce export policy, declaring that " there is a lot you can discover with prelicense checks. There is a lot you can discover just by wandering around a plant to determine the nature of their real business, which they may or may not want to tell you." Presumably so. But under recent questioning from Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, the administration has now acknowledged that no such effort was made to investigate how the computers would be used before they were shipped to China. And having neglected the pre-export investigation, the administration also failed to exercise its right to inspect how the 47 supercomputers are being used. All this is revealed in "The Proliferation Primer," a report released last week by the Republican members of Cochran's subcommittee.
We do know that one supercomputer was illegally diverted to a military facility -- that emerged last fall when congressional committees pressed the administration to investigate. But the other computers? Who knows? It's a sorry record of lackadaisical enforcement by the Clinton administration, and Congress should keep the investigative heat turned up.