Exports that don't compute. (Correction, Please!).

ITEM: President Bush "allowed U.S. companies to sell high-speed computers to countries such as Russia, China and India, easing a Cold War-era ban designed to halt the spread of nuclear arms," reported Reuters for January 3rd. Larger computer manufacturers "have opposed the limits. They point out that the United States has restricted its exports, but other countries have not."

CORRECTION: In the case of exporting technology that could be used for advancements in nuclear armaments, the president knows of the potential harm. Indeed, just a few weeks earlier, he vowed to "toughen export controls." At the Citadel on December 11th, Bush told the cadets: "Together, we must keep the world's most dangerous technologies out of the hands of the world's most dangerous people."

Making supercomputers available to China, for example, makes that nation more dangerous, as was noted in 1997 by former DoD and State Department officials before the House Subcommittee on International Security. Officials expressed dismay that the Chinese Academy of Sciences had been sold a supercomputer faster than two-thirds of those available to the U.S. Defense Department. It has since been discovered that Beijing used those supercomputers "illegally" in nuclear testing.

Such supercomputers, say experts, are helpful in developing nuclear weapons with MIRVs -- multiple, independently targeted re-entry vehicles -- as well as in information for biological warfare. Communist China has just been upgraded as a nuclear threat to the U.S., according to the latest National Intelligence Estimate. And the threat is enhanced in part because of MIRVs, built with the assistance of U.S. technology.

As William Schneider Jr., former Under Secretary of State, testified in 1997: "In the end, allied nations in Asia will face China's armed forces able to field advanced military capabilities in significant numbers because of manufacturing technology provided from the U.S. civil sector."