Why is the Carter Administration shoring up Communist dictatorships with American aid, loans, and shipments of strategic military and industrial materials, while the people who live under Communism are risking their lives to escape? The message that comes out loud and clear from the Vietnamese boat people is, “It is better to die at sea than to live under the Communists.”
The Carter Administration recently pledged, through the person of Vice President Mondale, to give Red China $2 billion in U.S. commercial credits to accelerate trade, plus an offer of technological help to build hydroelectric plants. It is hard to see why Red China is any more worthy a beneficiary of such generosity from the American taxpayers than, say, the Chrysler Corporation.
An internal memorandum circulated within the Carter Administration, which has only recently come to light, shows how the Carter Commerce Department pushes for technology trade with the Soviet Union even though it knows that such trade assists the production of missile launchers.
This revealing memorandum was headed “Computer ($6.1 million) for Soviet Truck Plant (ZIL) (OC DOC. 5643).” Explaining that “a quarter of the 200,000 trucks ZIL produces annually goes to the military, including 100 missile launchers,” the State and Commerce Departments nevertheless urged approval of the shipment of the $6.1 million computer on the spurious grounds “that 100 missile launchers out of a 200,000 vehicle annual production in small, and that the remaining trucks for the military are basically no different from heavy duty civilian trucks.”
The Kama River truck plant, the largest truck plant in the world, has been the subject of controversy ever since it was first proposed to be built with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of U.S. technology. The Soviet trade promoters in the Commerce Department have consistently claimed that the plant would not be used for military purposes.
One really has to be living in a make-believe world to pretend that a substantial part of our trade with the Soviet Union does not have military uses. Computers, ball-bearing machinery, chemical processes, and all kinds of industrial know-how flow in a steady stream from the United States to the Soviet Union.
In order for such materials to leave our shores destined for the U.S.S.R., they must pass the test of the Export Administration Act of 1969, which prohibits the sale of goods or technologies abroad “which would make a significant contribution to the military potential of any other nation or nations which would prove detrimental to the national security of the United States.”
The internal Carter Administration memorandum quoted above shows how lightly this responsibility weighs on the conscience of the Secretary of Commerce. When the Commerce Department certified that missile launchers and military vehicles pass the law’s test, they made a farce of the law.
Among the military vehicles produced at the Kama River plant are armored personnel carriers and assault vehicles. The acting director of the Office of Export Administration testified in May that diesel engines from the Kama River plant had also shown up in the Communist Warsaw Pact armies.
The Soviet Union would not be such a military threat today if the U.S. Government had not sent the Russians U.S. technology to solve their technological problems, credits to solve their financial problems, and grain to solve their agricultural problems, and then engaged in a cover-up at home to prevent the American people from knowing what they are involuntarily financing.
It now looks as though Communist Russia, which has so stifled production that it cannot even feed its own people, is heading into another period of grain shortages. This presents a tremendous opportunity for the United States to let natural causes slow down the tremendous Soviet buildup of weapons of mass destruction. Let the Soviets devote their energies to trying to feed their people, instead of to building nuclear weapons with our technological, trade, financial, and agricultural help.
