Computing power falls into hands of U.S. foes

By Reuters June 7, 2001, 6:35 p.m. PT

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-6220387.html?tag=prntfr

WASHINGTON--Computing power dwarfing that used to build the most advanced weapons is now available to foes of the United States, making computer-hardware export controls a waste of time, a panel of senior national security figures has concluded.

In a report to be released on Friday, the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies says standard laptops typically now outpower the vaunted supercomputers of 10 years ago.

Far from the highly specialized research tools they once were, computers should no longer be considered as enabling nuclear weapons, missiles, submarines and other military applications but should simply be seen as commodities, according to the center's study.

The report is based on the findings of a 28-member bipartisan commission co-chaired by two former CIA directors, James Schlesinger and R. James Woolsey, and two former senior Pentagon officials, Joseph Nye and retired Adm. William Owens.

"Military applications do not need powerful computers," said John Hamre, deputy defense secretary under former President Bill Clinton and now the center's president.

Hamre is to present the study at a Capitol Hill news conference with Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser to President Bush's father, former President George Bush.

The report says the United States designed and built its weapons with computers slower than today's standard desktop units.

"Computing power is considerably less important for building modern weapons than is the ability to integrate materials, manufacturing equipment and technology," it says.

The study urges the United States to scrap its 1990s-vintage export-control yardstick, based on the millions of theoretical operations per second, or MTOPS, carried out by a computer's microprocessor brain.

"The problem is that the supercomputer of 1990--a computer then manufactured only in the dozens of units--had by the year 2000 become the laptop manufactured in the hundreds of thousands," it says.

To illustrate the huge surge in computing power, the report says that the U.S. Navy's $80 million EP-3E surveillance aircraft--the type involved in a midair collision off China's coast on April 1--has workstations running at 24O MTOPS.

By contrast, a Dell Computer Inspiron 800 laptop, costing about $2,600, features an Intel Pentium 3 chip capable of 2,333 MTOPS, or nearly 10 times as many operations, according to the Computer Coalition for Responsible Exports, a Washington-based trade group.

Lockheed Martin's F-22, the most advanced U.S. fighter, was designed on a 958 MTOPS Cray supercomputer, with roughly one-quarter of the power packed in mass-produced Pentium chips, according to the report.

A key goal of the Cold War's multilateral export control system was to prevent the Soviet Union from using Western-made computers for battle-management purposes such as air defense, anti-submarine warfare and the processing of satellite data.

There is no convincing strategic or nonproliferation rationale for continued control because there is little consensus between the United States and its allies on potential threats, the report said.

Also undermining U.S. export controls have been expanded access to computing power through networked systems, the development of a global manufacturing base for information technology, and the decline of multilateral cooperation on nonproliferation and security, the center said.

Story Copyright © 2001 Reuters Limited

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-202-6220387.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), June 08, 2001