within the Soviet bloc. Its military uses include weapons fire direction, signal processing and analysis, and design and manufacturing of integrated circuits for the most advanced U.S. weapon systems. Several other large containers with similar equipment reached the Soviet Union.1

The VAX case dramatizes how the Soviet Union tries to gain Western high technology to strengthen Soviet military power. This Soviet effort poses increasing danger to the West in view of the deterioration of détente and the use of military force in Afghanistan and Poland.

Two specific trends heighten the urgency of tightening up on technology transfer. First, NATO has lost much of the technological edge needed to offset Warsaw Pact superiority in numbers of weapons and troops. The Soviet Union has made such great qualitative improvements in its forces that significant Soviet gains of Western technology could destabilize the military balance. Second, because technologies of commercial origin now provide the Western advantage in many kinds of military equipment and weapons, it is difficult for the free-market Western societies to control the technologies necessary to their national survival.

Russia Turns Westward

The Soviet government consistently has sought Western technology to modernize its national economy and military system. The Soviet Union (like its predecessor, the Russian Empire) has a large population, abundant natural resources, and a highly centralized government committed to rapid economic growth. The Soviets also have heavily emphasized military strength. They have done so to maintain autocratic government within their own country and to project Soviet power in Europe and, more recently, globally. This military focus now blurs the distinction between civilian and military authority and programs.2

In contrast, Western nations have had more

diversified and productive economies, more rapid technical innovation, and more highly skilled work forces. Because of the greater role of private enterprise and more pluralistic societies, Western governments have tended to separate East-West trade from strategic considerations. They have been less sensitive than the Soviets as to how trade might strengthen a potential enemy.

Several historical examples show how Russian leaders have tried to reduce the Western technology edge. More than two centuries ago, Emperor Peter the Great (1682-1725) used Western experts plus his own personal familiarity with European factories and shipyards to reform the Russian army and to build the first Russian navy. Peter's victory over Sweden at Poltava in 1721 guaranteed Russia's "window on the West" on the Baltic Sea and made Russia a European military power. More recently, Russia's first major drive for industrialization, which began in the 1890s, relied heavily on Western investment and Western construction.

Following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Soviet government offered large financial incentives to gain advanced Western knowhow and equipment. During Stalin's First Five-Year Plan (1928-33), for example, American firms built, or helped to build, the steelworks at Magnitogorsk in the Ural Mountains, the largest steel complex in the world and a replica of the United States Steel plant in Gary, Indiana; the Dnieper River Dam in the Ukraine, the keystone in the development of Soviet hydroelectric power; the automobile plant at Gorki, east of Moscow, modeled after Ford Motor Company's River Rouge plant; and several large chemical plants.

The West helped to arm Soviet Russia as well as to industrialize it. In the case of aviation, the German aircraft manufacturer Junkers modernized a prerevolutionary plant at Fili, near Moscow. At an air base at Lipetsk, south of Moscow, German and Russian engineers collaborated, and German and Russian pilots trained together. During this period between

the two world wars, the Soviet Union also imported military aircraft from Britain, France, Holland, Italy, and Sweden.3

Western nations also transferred "dual use" technologies, that is, those with military as well as commercial applications. The Soviet Union used fertilizer plants supplied by the West to produce explosives, machine plants to produce gun barrels, and tractor and automobile factories to produce tanks and armored vehicles. In 1933, the American who served as chief engineer of the Soviet All-Union Construction Trust stated that every tractor plant "is, of course, a tank factory and [every] automobile plant a factory which may at any time produce mobile artillery." Another American engineer reported that in all of the Soviet plants that he visited, at least one department was closed; he noted that he would periodically discover "parts, materials, shells, and acids" with no relation to normal production.4 According to recent émigrés, the Soviet Union still maintains separate military sections in major manufacturing plants."

Western Policy

on Technology Transfer

Through most of this period, Western governments tolerated or even promoted extensive transfer of technology to Russia. While Western leaders recognized that they were strengthening a state with the population and natural resources to become the dominant military power in Europe, this strategic insight was outweighed by more immediate economic, political, and military calculations. Governments and businesses alike profited from trading Western equipment and technology for Russian raw materials and energy resources. Moreover, the shifting system of alliances associated with balance-of-power politics kept Russia an actual or potential ally of one or more Western

states.

Because Europeans assumed that Russia would always lag behind them technologi

cally, they saw the Russian army as a horde of brave but poorly equipped peasant soldiers rather than as a potentially modern military force. Even after 1917, European governments feared Communist-inspired revolutions more than the Red Army. Such attitudes help explain why most European military observers believed that Germany would defeat Russia after the June 1941 German invasion.

The rapid growth of Soviet military power after World War II shattered Western complacency about the transfer of strategic technology. The United States and its European allies reversed their earlier policies and prohibited the sale of military equipment to the Soviet Union. They also embargoed certain commercial goods and technologies that would strengthen Soviet war-making capabilities. To administer this embargo, they established the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM), located in Paris and now consisting of most NATO members (all except Iceland and Spain) and Japan.

During the détente of the 1970s, COCOM and individual Western countries loosened controls on dual-use (commercial/military) technologies. U.S. and West European political leaders hoped that an expanding East-West trade would strengthen those groups in Soviet politics associated with consumer goods and foreign trade and, in so doing, weaken the military-heavy industry complex.

These hopes were misplaced. Instead, recent information suggests, increased trade between East and West helped to fortify the position of the Soviet military establishment. The Soviets continued to increase their military spending at an annual rate of 4 percent, while their economic growth declined to 3 percent per year during the second half of the 1970s and, still further, to 1 to 2 percent in the 1980s. Today, high technology goes overwhelmingly to the military and space sectors. This Soviet choice of priorities suggests that strategic and political competition, rather than commercial cooperation, will govern Soviet-Western relations

for at least the rest of the 1980s. Thus, Western nations must exercise caution in releasing advanced Western technology with possible military applications.

Threats to Military Stability

Two specific trends of the past decade strengthen the case for closer control of technology transfer to the East.

First, the Soviet Union has structured and modernized its military forces so that for the first time Soviet acquisition of Western high technology could tilt the military balance in the Soviet favor. During the past fifteen years, the Soviet bloc has improved its military position greatly vis-à-vis the West. The Warsaw Pact now outnumbers NATO by at least a 2:1 ratio in most major categories of tactical ground and air power. The Soviet Union deploys more land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) than the United States.

More disturbingly, the Soviets have reduced NATO's traditional lead in military technology, in part by outspending the United States on military research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E) every year since 1972. Currently, the Soviet Union spends nearly twice as much in this area as the United States. Soviet RDT&E is growing more rapidly than other Soviet military investments. The Soviet Union frees its nine defense-industrial ministries from bottlenecks that can throttle production in other ministries. It also allocates more and better laboratory equipment to militaryrelated than to nonmilitary research.8

Soviet investment in military technology is paying off. The Soviets now deploy tanks, artillery, attack helicopters, and ICBMs that equal those of the United States in technological sophistication. They are cutting the U.S. lead in various deployed weapon systems, such as fighter/attack aircraft, precision-guided munitions, antisubmarine warfare, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). They are superior in strategic surface-to-air

missiles, ballistic missile defense, and antisatellite warfare. They are equal in directed-energy (laser) technology and are spending much more than the United States in this field. According to Department of Defense studies, Warsaw Pact forces in the Central Region of Europe have improved their potential combat effectiveness by more than 90 percent from 1965 to the present, while NATO forces have improved theirs by less than 40 percent.10

This technological surge increases Soviet capabilities for a rapid offensive, or preemptive, attack. Improvements in tanks, self-propelled artillery, attack helicopters, and heavylift vehicles support a blitzkrieg ground force strategy in Europe. Moreover, the present generation of Soviet tactical aircraft is designed and equipped for offensive operations. While not as capable as the best Western fighters, their numbers and quality invalidate earlier assumptions of automatic NATO air superiority.

At the strategic level, the startling improvement in Soviet ICBM capabilities since the signing of the SALT I agreement in 1972 has made a successful preemptive strike against U.S. Minuteman ICBMs at least theoretically possible. The deployment of SS-18s and SS-19s virtually destroyed the strategic arms control process of the 1970s, which depended on the tenet of mutual assured destruction that neither superpower could develop a first-strike capacity. The increased accuracy of Soviet ICBMs has pushed the United States to plan deployment of the MX ICBM. It also has increased the responsibilities of the other weapons in the U.S. deterrent-penetrating bombers, longrange cruise missiles launched from stand-off aircraft, and SLBMs.

Finally, a Soviet breakthrough in directedenergy weapons could give the Soviets meaningful superiority in strategic defense and military use of space. Such a breakthrough would build on existing Soviet advantages in strategic surface-to-air missiles, ballistic missile defense, and antisatellite warfare.

These trends in theater and strategic weap

Emperor Peter the Great and Joseph Stalin both turned to the West for technologies needed to foster progress and modernization in Russia.

ons particularly affect Air Force missions. Western air superiority would be necessary to block a Warsaw Pact blitzkrieg attack. NATO's antiarmor doctrine requires the freedom to target air and ground-launched precisionguided munitions against the first and second echelons of a Pact offensive. Furthermore, the Air Force provides two legs of the Triad of U.S. strategic offensive forces (ICBMs, as well as penetrating bombers and air-launched cruise missiles) and most space and strategic defensive systems.

Changes in Military Technology

The second trend calling for tighter control of Western technology is the rapidly growing military importance of dual-use technologies. Increasingly, commercially focused advances in computers, microelectronics, composite materials, and other high technologies drive military modernization.

The Defense Science Board identified this problem nearly a decade ago. The influential 1976 Bucy Report on export of U.S. technology highlighted the potential military role of commercial computers. According to that report, the "mere presence" of large computer installations "transfers know-how in software" and "develops trained programmers" and other personnel. All of this can be "redirected to strategic applications."11

Microelectronics offers the best example of how commercial-origin technology can improve military performance radically. British Air Vice-Marshal Michael Armitage considers solid-state electronics one of four "real breakthroughs" in military technology during the past half century (the others being radar, nuclear weapons, and lasers). Air Vice-Marshal Armitage states that solid-state electronics is having a "revolutionary" impact on warfare of an "unusually pervasive and incremental kind." In his view, transistors and integrated circuits will make possible "entirely new efficiencies" in "almost all weapons systems."'12

Former Under Secretary of Defense (Research and Engineering) William Perry argues that the technologies of microelectronics and computers that were developed "primarily for commercial application" have shifted the focus of military planning from "delivery vehicles and explosive devices" to "improvements in sensors, control, and accuracy."13 Perry notes that the U.S. semiconductor industry finances nearly all of its research and development from commercial sales, yet it has provided much of the West's lead in computer- and microelectronicsrelated military systems. Perry cites the microprocessor as "essentially a commercial development," which, nonetheless, plays a "key role in the new generation of precision-guided munitions."14

Another example is the strategic cruise missile, now critical to NATO's theater and intercontinental nuclear deterrents. That weapon dates back to the 1950s (Navaho, Snark, and