The Costs of Export Controls

If there is a key word in the United States in the late 1980s, it is "competitiveness." It's a word that's used in many contexts to mean many things. In his new book The Technical Enterprise (Ballinger, 1986) Herbert Fusfeld discusses how social, economic and political pressures like the drive for competitiveness are at work in shaping the technical system today. In this adaptation from the book, he describes the practice of using export controls to keep technological advances from potential adv

Written byHerbert Fusfeld

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There is little quarrel with the intent of export controls. Common sense indicates that no great social or intellectual purpose is served by shipping a device for undersea detection of submarines or a laser-guidance system for missiles to the Soviet Union. Those are the easy decisions. The issues quickly become more complex when the question is one of selling landing systems for Soviet airports that embody advanced memory chips available in Europe, exchanging technical data between American and Soviet metallurgists, or (as recently happened) refusing permission for technical personnel from NATO countries to attend a professional meeting on advanced optical systems.

Any restriction on linkages within the technical enterprise weakens the effectiveness of the overall system. Thus, a deliberately restrictive policy should be based on careful analysis of the local gain or loss from the restrictions.

First, the objective of export controls should not be to keep important technology from ...

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