Virtual Reality: Desktop Bomb Devising

The U.S. government always had held that the spread of nuclear weapons could be slowed by clamping down on exports of American supercomputers. But now, the Clinton administration has decided that overregulation of one of America’s flagship exports only hurts U.S. businesses and no longer is useful for nuclear non-proliferation efforts.

Predictably, the congressional and academic non-proliferation communities promptly criticized the administration’s decontrol of most computer exports. But this time, President Clinton is right.

Computer manufacturers survive by keeping costs low, and the best way to lower unit costs is to increase production runs. That means selling the best machines, which can make more than 10 billion additions per second, to U.S. allies and selling the second-best machines to most of the rest of the world with a minimum of red tape.

Today’s supercomputers are irrelevant to nonproliferation efforts because today’s nuclear weapons are based on old technology, the principles of which have been well-understood since 1945.

When the first nuclear weapons were designed under the Manhattan Project, “computer” was the job title for the Army technicians and project scientists’ wives who performed calculations with mechanical adding machines, 5-by-7-inch cards and IBM tabulating machines which were programmed by plugging wires from socket to socket, just as telephone operators once did. The weapons built in 1945 worked, and so did the next several generations of bombs designed on computers less powerful than the first programmable calculator.

As the need for newer, smaller, lighter and more efficient nuclear weapons grew, so did the need for computer-based assistance for weapons designers. New models of “fast” computers were sped to weapons labs and to code breakers at the National Security Agency.

IBM’s “Stretch,” the first true supercomputer which went to Los Alamos, N.M., in the early 1960s, was famous for using the first hard drives with platters several feet across and magnetic heads the size of golf balls. “Stretch” enabled weaponeers to produce prototypes of the compact warheads for Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Yet, “Stretch” was less powerful than a 1987 IBM PS/2 desktop computer with an Intel 80286 microprocessor and a full complement of memory. The IBM PS/2 is what Saddam Hussein’s nuclear scientists used to design Iraq’s bomb.

Nuclear weapons and computers have developed almost in parallel, from the “Fat Man” dropped on Nagasaki and the hand-cranked calculators of Los Alamos to the tank-car-sized hydrogen bombs of 1954 and the immense, if not very powerful, computers of that era.

The amazingly compact warheads of today that can be stacked 10 to an MX and 12 to a Trident missile probably were designed using less-powerful machines than the Cray X-MP supercomputer of 1988, which rarely was exported - and only to our closest allies.

Today, the full equivalent of the Cray X-MP is a familiar fixture in thousands of American homes and offices: the 100 MHZ Pentium-based computer with eight megabytes of memory, a one-gigabyte hard drive and multimedia - the machine featured in your local computer-store ads. It costs less than $2,500 with a color monitor and printer and is available to anybody who hasn’t maxed-out his plastic cards. Add $500 worth of mathematics software, and you, too, have the computer power to design atomic weapons.

Exports of the fastest Pentium-based computers were controlled until last week, but it was foolish to try to stem the flow of “commodity” computers, made from cheap and standard parts which can be assembled by neighborhood dealers. Any nation wanting the computational capability available only to the United States when our newest nuclear weapons were designed merely had to call the corner computer store. The diplomatic pouch courier was - and is - available to any country with representatives at the United Nations, including the most worrisome potential nuclear proliferation threats: North Korea, Libya, Iran and Iraq.

Preventing the export of computers made sense 10 or 15 years ago, when the “commodity” computer did not exist and the only computers powerful enough for efficient bomb design were both very large and very expensive. Today, computers remain vital for nuclear weapons design, but all the power needed to devise a bomb sits on my desktop in my 3-year-old “antique” 486 machine.

The Clinton administration’s excellent decision to free American computer and chip manufacturers from unproductive export regulations recognizes the computer world as it is.

And the decision should be good for American jobs and American diplomacy since we now can become reliable suppliers of the computers that nations need for their economies - not their weapons - but cannot build for themselves.

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