Sam Gejdenson: “Mr. Chairman, we have a very clear situation here. We have lived through it before. The Defense Department at one time…”

“Mr. Chairman, we have a very clear situation here. We have lived through it before. The Defense Department at one time told American manufacturers of machine tools, you cannot export these, the quality is too good. Do you know what happened several years later? The Defense Department said, we want to get Japanese machine tools because they are more precise than American machine tools. This country does not live at the bottom of technology. If we are going to build the last decade's technology, it is going to come from lots of places around the globe. So this is not as if we are hampering just a few little sales at the top. What we are doing is killing the future of our technical ability. Why? We have been successful as a Nation, not because we have put an iron curtain around our technology understanding that today it is easier and easier to copy it. What we have done is profited off those systems and then developed the technology that has kept us ahead. Now, COCOM is gone. We have a new group. We are not quite sure what they are doing in Wassenegger. But every time we had a restriction, guess what, the Germans, the French, the English, the Japanese, they sold better stuff than we had. If we think Siemens and Olivetti and Japanese and French and English companies are going to be impressed by the action on the floor today, they will.”