Books in Brief: Techno-Bandits

Techno-Bandits, by Linda Melvern, Nick Anning, and David Hebditch (Houghton Mifflin, 313 pp., $15.95)

Although title and dust-jacket conjure up expectations of a celluloid tale involving heroes and villains with the attributes of a combination of James Bond and Mr. Spock, in reality the key players are businessmen operating quietly in a grey area, attempting to circumvent governmental prohibitions on the sale of technological materials to the Iron Curtain countries. These men are not thieves, and it would certainly be stretching the word to call their acts “treasonous.” Usually, they simply purchase products available to any U.S. resident and, through some manipulation, cause these products to be delivered, for a profit, to an Eastern-bloc purchaser. In many instances, there is no perceptible military significance to the product. Yet, it is true that transactions such as these provided the Soviet air-traffic-control system with an advanced device that played a critical role in the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Although American policy seems clear in this area—particularly under the Reagan Administration, which has stated its determination to halt what it considers a “hemorrhage” of technology—enforcement has historically been ineffectual and inconsistent. The agencies charged with such enforcement are understaffed and are often caught up in bureaucratic infighting. The authors, who are clearly knowledgeable in these matters, bring up a multitude of related problems for the reader’s consideration: among them the difficulty of persuading our Western allies to cooperate with us; our concern for the economic consequences to U.S. firms of restrictive sales policies; and the overriding issue of how you can limit the exchange of knowledge and still remain an open society. The writing in Techno-Bandits is sometimes disjointed and academic; yet, as an introduction to a difficult policy problem, this text succeeds.

BM

About the Author

Barbara E. McMullen

JM

About the Author

John F. McMullen

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Techno-Bandits, by Linda Melvern, Nick Anning, and David Hebditch (Houghton Mifflin, 313 pp., $15.95)

Although title and dust-jacket conjure up expectations of a celluloid tale involving heroes and villains with the attributes of a combination of James Bond and Mr. Spock, in reality the key players are businessmen operating quietly in a grey area, attempting to circumvent governmental prohibitions on the sale of technological materials to the Iron Curtain countries. These men are not thieves, and it would certainly be stretching the word to call their acts “treasonous.” Usually, they simply purchase products available to any U.S. resident and, through some manipulation, cause these products to be delivered, for a profit, to an Eastern-bloc purchaser. In many instances, there is no perceptible military significance to the product. Yet, it is true that transactions such as these provided the Soviet air-traffic-control system with an advanced device that played a critical role in the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Although American policy seems clear in this area—particularly under the Reagan Administration, which has stated its determination to halt what it considers a “hemorrhage” of technology—enforcement has historically been ineffectual and inconsistent. The agencies charged with such enforcement are understaffed and are often caught up in bureaucratic infighting. The authors, who are clearly knowledgeable in these matters, bring up a multitude of related problems for the reader’s consideration: among them the difficulty of persuading our Western allies to cooperate with us; our concern for the economic consequences to U.S. firms of restrictive sales policies; and the overriding issue of how you can limit the exchange of knowledge and still remain an open society. The writing in Techno-Bandits is sometimes disjointed and academic; yet, as an introduction to a difficult policy problem, this text succeeds.