Safeguarding Détente: U.S. High Performance Computer Exports to the Soviet Union
Mario Daniels · Diplomatic History · 2022
How dangerous could a single U.S. high performance computer in Soviet hands be? In the 1970s, this became a crucial and highly controversial question of U.S. national security export control policy. In the détente years, U.S. companies sold some of the most powerful civilian high performance computers (HPCs) in the world to the Soviet Union. These computers played an outsized role in the U.S.-Soviet relations of the 1970s. There was hardly a summit, or even a plain working meeting between U.S. and Soviet diplomats, which did not touch on HPCs. Indeed, they were a crucial strand in the story of the rise and fall of détente that historical research has so far largely overlooked.1 U.S. presidential administrations from Richard Nixon-Henry Kissinger to Jimmy Carter saw HPCs as highly attractive tools to shape their détente policies. Indeed, they were perfect objects of techno-diplomacy. The Soviets urgently wanted HPCs in order to participate in the unfolding global revolution of computerization. Having entered this field rather late, the Soviet Union had, since the late 1960s, intensified its efforts to catch up with the West. The Soviets hoped that computers would assist in the modernization and rationalization of economic planning and industrial production.2 The fact that computers had been developed in the West first and foremost as a military technology made the dangers of falling behind even clearer.3 This Soviet need represented a marvelous opportunity for U.S. diplomacy. In the 1970s, the United States was still the hegemon in the field of large computer systems.4 This position made computers an ideal bargaining chip for a carrot-and-stick strategy of linkage.5 The sale of computers to the Soviet Union could also yield potentially large economic benefits to U.S. companies in the grave economic crisis of the 1970s. The U.S. trade deficit was ballooning, and the worried U.S. public increasingly interpreted it as an expression of U.S. decline.6 Selling technology to the Soviets appeared to be a possible remedy for these negative trends. The Western Europeans, also hit by economic crisis, saw it similarly.7 Even though their HPCs were less advanced than their U.S. counterparts (and the Soviets therefore preferred to buy from the United States), a vigorous intra-West competition for the emerging Soviet market put pressure on U.S. companies.