Ed Markey: “I rise in favor of the Spence-Dellums amendment to this bill. Last fall, four supercomputers that are powerful enough to…”

“I rise in favor of the Spence-Dellums amendment to this bill. Last fall, four supercomputers that are powerful enough to design nuclear weapons were sold by an American company to the premier nuclear weapons facility in Russia--Chelyabinsk 70, a place whose very existence was top secret until the end of the cold war. The company said that it didn't know that the facility was a weapons lab, and that they had been told that the supercomputers would be used to forecast the weather. But the only clouds these computers will be modeling will be the mushroom cloud of a nuclear blast. In fact, after the sale was disclosed, Viktor Mikhailov, head of Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy, or Minatom, which controls the Nation's weapons labs, bragged that Russia had the supercomputers, admitting that they would be useful for mathematical modeling of nuclear blasts. The CEO of the American company had this to say: "It is possible we were duped." I guess so. U.S. law currently calls for an export license on these powerful supercomputers to be requested by the company seeking the license only if it is suspect that the intended recipient might be a suspicious customer. As the Russian case shows, this honor system method just isn't working. Other than the most infamous foreign weapons facilities, American companies often have no way of knowing which recipients are the weather forecasters and which are the would-be proliferators.”