The Soviet appetite for Western technology is staggering. The Soviets are gobbling up U.S. plans and plants as fast as they can, and our country is cooperating by sending free technical materials and factories and machines subsidized by long-term low-interest credits.
The Soviets, for example, persuaded the United States to sell them an astronaut’s space suit for $180,000. The space suit had cost the Americans $20 million to research and develop.
In 1972 the State and Commerce Departments granted an export license for the Centalign-B machine, and the Soviets ultimately imported 164. These machines are of critical importance in the manufacture of precision miniature ball bearings, which in turn are essential to the guidance mechanism used in ICBMs and MIRVs.
The Soviet Kama River truck plant, equipped with the world’s largest American industrial computer system, will ultimately have an annual production capacity of 150,000 to 200,000 ten-ton multiple-axle trucks. This is more than the capacity of the largest U.S. heavy-duty truck manufacturer.
Although the Kama plant will be capable of producing tanks, military scout cars, rocket launchers, and trucks for military transport, U.S. shipments to it were approved by U.S. authorities as “non-strategic.”
Soviet bloc governments have set up more than 800 joint manufacturing ventures with Western firms in the past decade. New plants in mechanical engineering, chemicals and transportation, account for two-thirds of the total. The Soviets have bought nearly 1,000 “turn-key plants,” that is, ready-to-go manufacturing facilities complete with training for technical staff.
Commercial transactions with Communist governments have been financed with Western long-term cheap credits similar to the economic aid given to underdeveloped countries. The U.S.S.R. has been running an annual $6 billion trade deficit with the West.
The General Services Administration recently supplied the Soviet embassy with an “Inventory and Summary” of some of the Pentagon’s most sensitive computer locations. The Soviet embassy merely requested it, and the GSA cheerfully complied.
As a result of an agreement between the United States and the U.S.S.R. to exchange “official” publications, the United States delivers more than 10,000 government documents each year to the Lenin State Library in Moscow, and the Soviets send a similar shipment to the Library of Congress.
It doesn’t take much knowledge of the two Systems to know that this exchange works to the immense advantage of the Soviets. The closed Soviet system simply does not make available sensitive information that is freely published in our country.
The Soviets have been notoriously weak in self-generated technological and industrial innovation. It is the essential but missing element in their plans for economic advance. When it comes to espionage and confidence games, however, the Soviets are innovative specialists.
Americans should realize that every exchange or commercial deal with the Soviets is, for them, an act of international politics. Their aim is not to widen the access of their people to consumer goods, but to pick our best brains, copy our techniques, and con us into financing the process.
Many people believe that without the use of American and British computers, precision instruments, and digital tools in the Soviet military-industrial complex, the U.S.S.R. could not be the military threat it is today in terms of nuclear devices and development of high-energy lasers.
