To the Editor:

I subscribe almost fully to what Carl Gershman says in his article, “Selling Them the Rope: Business & the Soviets” [May]. My only reservation is that I do think that, if intelligently handled, U.S. foreign trade could be made an instrument for inducing the Soviets to behave, or at least to behave better than they have in various areas of the world. To a certain degree, it could also be made an instrument for humanizing their own system. I simply do not see why we should help their economy, while on every front, whether in the Near East or in Africa, they keep trying, and openly so, to make our life, not to mention that of the people concerned, more difficult. What the article does not say is that we also help the Soviets indirectly by our credits to the East European Communist regimes, e.g., Poland; this in turn relieves the Soviets of considerable strain on their own economy, and strengthens the local Communist governments as well. All in all, some future historian will undoubtedly see it as sheer madness, this helping of a regime which is doing everything to harm our interests all over the world without trying at least to make it moderate its behavior.

Adam B. Ulam
Russian Research Center
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

Carl Gershman’s generally excellent piece is a real contribution to the question of U.S.-USSR economic relations. . . . But a few observations are in order to qualify and broaden the scope of Mr. Gershman’s analysis.

1. In view of developments since 1975, some doubt must attach to the USSR’s interest in massive credits by the U.S. or the West generally. In 1975, the Soviet trade deficit with the West exceeded $4 billion, and the even larger deficit of its East European satellites with the West was close to $5 billion, for a total in excess of $9 billion. Rapidly growing trade with the West in the 1970’s increased the hard-currency debt of the Soviet bloc to over $45 billion. . . . Subsequent trade figures demonstrate clearly a decision on the part of the East to spur exports and curb import growth so as to reduce trade deficits with the West. . . . By 1978, the combined Soviet bloc had achieved a balance in its trade with the rest of the world.
2. The USSR and its satellites have leaned heavily on countertrade (the “compensation agreements” Mr. Gershman describes) to insure their ability to pay for needed imports with current and future exports. . . . Thus, if the (ironically) financially conservative Soviet Union wishes to avoid adding to its hard-currency debt position, it will strive to finance its desired imports from the U.S. primarily with the hard currency it can earn by sales to the U.S. and by compensation agreements, and not by going further into debt.
3. The U.S. (and Western) disadvantage in strengthening the Soviet military-industrial complex does not tell the entire story of the pros and cons of technology transfer. Helping the Soviet Union at least partly to overcome its economic inefficiency and lagging economic growth has also helped it to satisfy consumer demands better than it otherwise could, while still maintaining desired levels of investment and military expenditure. It has thus helped stave off a growing consumer dissatisfaction and possible political unrest.

Moreover, our easy policy of technology transfer, particularly in the oil exploration-extraction field, will help the Soviet Union retain the dominance over its East European satellites it might otherwise lose. It is not the USSR, as Mr. Gershman erroneously says, which will become a net oil importer in the mid-1980’s, but rather the Soviet bloc as a whole. The USSR’s export surplus will become very tight. It will not be able to meet the needs of the other bloc members and still have enough left over to sell to Western European countries in quantities sufficient to earn the hard currency it needs to finance its own essential imports. This inability to satisfy the minimal oil needs of its satellites could increase tremendously the centrifugal forces already evident in relations between the Soviet Union and its satellites and could be a political calamity for the Soviet Union. Providing the USSR with oil-drilling technology, therefore, could make the key difference in enabling the Soviet Union to keep its restive satellites in line.

I am not sure I agree completely with Mr. Gershman that under no circumstances should we transfer to the USSR technology that contributes even indirectly to its military might. But it does seem to me an eminently sound policy position to link significant U.S. technology transfers to significant political concessions and behavior on the Soviet side.

Louis J. Walinsky
Cohasset, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

The disgraceful eagerness of American businessmen to sell their technology to the Soviet Union described by Carl Gershman is more than simply a matter of shortsighted greed: it reflects an even more disturbing similarity of perspectives that is emerging between Soviet officials and American executives.

American businessmen have a closer working relationship with their Soviet counterparts than almost any other group in American society. While overt anti-Semitism has diminished within the American business community, both Soviet officials and American managers correctly perceive their respective Jewish communities as the major obstacle to improved “cooperation” between them. Corporate lobbying against administration and congressional attempts to link U.S. foreign economic policy with human-rights considerations has been strongly influenced and guided by Soviet political officials. Indeed, the business community has firmly displaced the Left as the most important focus of Soviet penetration into American society, The rapport between American executives and Soviet officials has been aided by the fact that they both manage relatively authoritarian bureaucracies and are uncomfortable with social and intellectual criticism.

Ironically, as American businesses have become more ideologically rigid on domestic issues, they have become more “liberal” on foreign-policy matters—the precise opposite of the 60’s, when corporate liberalism at home was accompanied by inflexible anti-Communism abroad. . . .

David Vogel
Stanford University
Stanford, California

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To the Editor:

One can only infer from the title of Carl Gershman’s article that trading with the Soviets means helping them do us damage. This is nonsense for several reasons.

1. Trade, by implication, is mutually beneficial (or two sides would not engage in it).
2. According to businessmen now trading with Moscow, there is nothing the Soviets buy or could buy from us that they could not obtain elsewhere—either in Europe or Japan. So why should we turn over this business, relatively modest though it is, to our competitors?
3. The Jackson-Vanik amendment’s only consequences were to reduce Jewish emigration sharply for a number of years. This emigration has quietly risen again and is now averaging about 4,000 a month. Thus, there is no reason not to extend most-favored-nation status to the Soviet Union as well as to China, since it is clear that making trade harder does not make life easier for the citizens of totalitarian countries.
4. Commercial relations may not “promote détente,” to use Mr. Gershman’s phrase, but trade does increase contacts between Russians and Americans, and in the long run a world in which we are better acquainted is likely to be a safer one.
5. Finally, trade is non-ideological. It is usually, as I have said, mutually beneficial. Above all, it is “normal.” So if we lower our sights from détente (which is too often confused with entente) and agree that “normalization” is a more realistic as well as a sane objective in U.S.-Soviet relations, then the argument for encouraging trade strikes me as conclusive.

William Attwood
Newsday
Garden City, New York

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To the Editor:

Carl Gershman’s article concerning the advantages and (mostly) disadvantages of U.S. trade with the Soviet Union is simultaneously stimulating and alarming. While insightful in many of its historical perspectives, Mr. Gershman’s analysis unfortunately reflects much of the myopia which has traditionally constricted American thinking about trade issues. . . . He also errs in frequently sacrificing a careful weighing of the facts in favor of dramatic hyperbole.

Thus, to repeat, as Mr. Gershman does, Lenin’s dictum on “selling the rope” (“the bourgeoisie will supply us with the rope . . . [with which] it will hang itself”) lends it an automatic credibility that I am sure Mr. Gershman would not attribute to Lenin’s pronouncements on subjects such as war (a product of imperialism); Communism (“Soviet power plus electrification”); or the role of bureaucracy in the modern service state (a job to be filled by “any cook and chimney sweep”). More specifically, such a perspective ignores the fact that, as innumerable studies show, much of the “rope” gets lost, stolen, spoiled, or misapplied in ways that Lenin never envisioned in the halcyon days of the 1920’s.

What is most striking is not the USSR’s thirst for Western technology, but rather its inability to replicate this technology, to improve upon it, or even to utilize it with maximum efficiency (unlike, for example, the Japanese). Two examples will suffice to make the point. The importation of Western-built automobile plants has not enabled the Soviet Ministry of Automobile Industry to revolutionize its production processes. Negotiations for additional plants of the same type are currently under way. The same holds true for the importation of phosphate fertilizer and ammonia plants from Japan.

Secondly, by Mr. Gershman’s own admission (and correctly so), the USSR remains chiefly an exporter of raw materials, not finished goods, machine tools, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, or the like. Some three decades of “technology absorption” (as documented in comprehensive studies such as that by Anthony Sutton) have yet to enable the USSR to generate anything even approximating the level of purely commercial competition that the Japanese economy yielded after only fifteen years of technology imports from the West. . . .

There are, however, far greater deficiencies—I am tempted to say “dangers”—in the kind of argument Mr. Gershman makes. This is true if only because the Export Administration Act of 1969 comes up for review by Congress this fall, and views such as those advanced by Mr. Gershman are likely to have an attentive audience among U.S. policy-makers. . . . Mr. Gershman describes the issue as if the United States could (and should) act unilaterally and effectively either to expand or contract trade with the Soviet Union (and, one would assume, with the Communist bloc in general—although the case of the People’s Republic of China does not seem to fit so neatly). But this is decidedly not the case.

As the very existence of CoCom [the international body which regulates the export of strategic items to Communist nations] makes clear, trade controls, restraints, or embargoes on the part of the West are effective only to the degree that they are multilateral and accepted by all partners (the NATO nations, minus Iceland, plus Japan). But the fact is that today the United States stands in proud—and largely ineffective—isolation in its opposition to more normal trade relations with the Communist bloc. . . . My own work, as well as that of some of my colleagues, indicates that neither our Western European allies (government and business included) nor Japan shares our belief that trade issues and political issues either should or can be successfully “linked.” In line with the traditional distinction that nations have made between “high foreign policy” and “low foreign policy,” the nations of Western Europe and Japan argue that economic issues and diplomatic issues should be weighed separately and on their own merits. . . . From the perspective of our Western allies, experience indicates (with, of course, the kinds of exceptions that exist everywhere) that the trade guidelines inherent in “good” commercial behavior are, by and large, adequate to prevent the transfer of technology to erstwhile competitors or enemies, be they capitalist or Communist. And their reading of the Soviet economic situation suggests that the obstacles internal to the economy of the USSR are quite sufficient to prevent any substantial or rapid diffusion.

From a political perspective, therefore, any forthcoming unilateral attempt by the United States to impose new trade restraints or a more “rigorous control policy” on CoCom (to quote Mr. Gershman) would invite disastrous conflicts within an alliance which is already badly frayed over a number of issues. . . . By pressuring the Europeans to accept further restrictions on their trade with the East . . . we may simply reinforce the claim of those on the Left that behind the thin veneer of “national security” to which the U.S. government frequently appeals lies nothing more than naked, economic self-interest and the exploitation of our allies.

For the Japanese case, the scenario is even more gloomy. We cannot simultaneously demand “voluntary” restraints from Japan on its exports to the West and stricter controls on its exports to the Communist bloc without setting in motion those same forces of protectionism, ultra-nationalism, and militarism which brought the world to the brink of disaster only a few decades ago. It is from this perspective, I would argue, that Mr. Gershman’s whole approach to the problems of East-West trade and export controls is not only wrong but politically dangerous. It is to be hoped that broader visions will prevail—at least before Congress acts next year.

Stephen Sternheimer
Boston University
Boston, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

There can be no quarrel with the present U.S. policy of denying the USSR any technology that directly enhances its military capability. Carl Gershman urges, however, that we move well beyond that and strive to withhold any “technology transfers which contribute in any way at all to the Soviet Union’s military and industrial strength.” A proposal that drastic requires a more searching evaluation than Mr. Gershman provides.

One must suppose that he assumes the benefits that policy would confer on the U.S. to be very large, and that there are no serious costs to the U.S. in implementing it. If so, I believe he is wrong on both counts. He exaggerates the extent to which the U.S. can influence the size of the Soviet military effort by our trade policy; and he understates the costs—political, diplomatic, and economic—that we would bear in trying to implement it. Let me sketch out a few reasons for my view:

With respect to the benefits:

1. The gains that the USSR enjoys today from imports of advanced technology are much smaller than in the 1930’s. At that time it was often a choice between an imported automobile plant or no automobile plant at all. Today it is a choice between a more efficient Italian plant or a less efficient Soviet-built plant. Imported technology serves today primarily to reduce costs and is in no sense essential.
2. Soviet dependence on Western technology is further reduced today, relative to the 1930’s, by the Soviets’ full access to the technology of other Communist countries, notably East Germany and Czechoslovakia. It is significant that the Soviets experienced their highest postwar growth rates in the 1950’s when they imported virtually no Western technology, though they are not likely to attain those growth rates again with or without Western technology.
3. The poor performance of the Soviet economy in generating its own technological innovation greatly diminishes the net productivity of imported technology installed in the USSR, and impedes the diffusion of that technology through the rest of the economy. No statistically discernible difference has been found between the productivity of foreign and domestic equipment operating in the USSR. Individual instances aside, the policy of technology import has not proven to be the deus ex machina upon which the political leadership has counted to reverse the decline in the rate of economic growth.
4. If the objective is to weaken the Soviet economy, there is no reason to limit the controls to technology, for everything the USSR obtains by importing presumably costs it less in resources than if it were produced domestically. In fact, a greater burden would be placed on the Soviet economy by denying the Soviets Western grain than by denying them technology, for Soviet agricultural productivity is probably lower, relative to the West, than industrial productivity. Moreover, if Mr. Gershman’s objection to the Kama River project is that it will produce some trucks for the military, he ought also to object to our grain exports because some of our grain is surely consumed by Soviet troops. Thus the concentration on denying technology exports, to the exclusion of other types of exports, diminishes the benefits to the U.S. of the proposed policy.
5. Even if the denial of Western technology were to succeed in further diminishing the Soviet rate of growth, it is not at all clear that the consequence would be a significant decrease in military expenditures, which amount to only 11-12 per cent of Soviet GNP. The military build-up of the past fifteen years has proceeded in the face of the steady decline in the rate of growth. Military prowess is one of the few genuine attainments of the Soviet regime, and if retrenchment is required, it is likely that the consumer rather than the military will bear the brunt of it. In fact, in the current Five-Year Plan even investment was cut back in order to maintain military expenditures.

With respect to the costs to the United States of imposing a policy of technology controls:

1. It would require us to exert strong diplomatic, political, and economic pressures on other industrial nations to join with us; not only our NATO allies, but also countries like Japan, Sweden, and Switzerland. All these countries are much more dependent on foreign trade than we are, and the loss of foreign markets imposes greater hardships upon them. It was precisely those bitter controversies over export controls that led to the eventual dismantling of past controls. Mr. Gershman writes that “the relaxation of U.S. controls . . . is a major reason for the diminishing effectiveness of CoCom.” He has it backward; it was the growing ineffectiveness that led to the relaxation. NATO can ill afford the strains that would follow upon our effort to reimpose our views on this matter upon them.
2. One of the negative effects of our earlier export controls was to support the Soviets’ efforts to minimize the relations between other Communist countries and the West and increase their dependence on the USSR. In today’s polycentric Communist world, we should strive to support the efforts of the Soviet satellites to achieve greater independence from the USSR in their foreign, domestic, and military policies. If we sell them technology, know-how, licenses, and so forth that we deny to the USSR, the greater will be the Soviet demands upon them to transfer that technology covertly to the USSR, and the more frequent our collisions with them on this matter.
3. Trade with the USSR is no exception to the general rule that both partners gain from trading. One of the costs of the policy of technology controls is to reduce the volume of trade and therefore of real income in the West, with possible increases in unemployment. The West would feel the effects of a decline in Soviet exports of oil, timber, manganese, and chrome.
4. The wider the net of trade restrictions, the larger the governmental administrative apparatus. Among the costs are increased governmental intervention in commerce; conflict within government and between government and industry over export licenses; and the increased cost of trade in general. We know from the experience of the postwar years that there were very few technologies and very little technological knowledge that the Soviets were not able to acquire illicitly through third and fourth countries. The tighter we wish the control system to be, the larger the international inspection operation we will need to maintain it and the greater the potential for conflict with other sovereign nations.

The implication of this evaluation is that we should continue to allow the Soviets to import any technology that does not directly enhance their military power. The view one takes of that prospect depends upon one’s assessment of the larger military-political balance. In my judgment, Soviet policy today is in a shambles. The Soviets lost almost all the sources of influence around the world that they once hoped to have. Their technology is nowhere in demand. Their arts, their political system, their claim to social justice, attract few adherents around the world. Their economy has lost its dynamism and is no longer a model for the Third World or anywhere else. After having transferred a huge volume of their own technology to China, they succeeded only in converting that vast neighbor into their fiercest enemy. They have lost the ideological leadership of the Communist movements around the world. They confront mounting ethnic tensions within their own country and the loyalty of their East European allies is very much in doubt. They have succeeded in establishing a presence in a few weak countries from time to time, but they have been ignominiously evicted from others. It is ironic that they have only one major source of influence left—military prowess. They have, in addition, one minor advantage: the ability to acquire from the West technology superior to that which they can produce themselves. That should be small comfort for all that they do not have.

By contrast, the U.S. remains in a much stronger position of power and influence around the world in all the respects that the USSR is not. We do a lot of things well, but there are some things we aren’t able to do so well. One of them is economic warfare. That is why I believe it is better to let the Soviets continue to enjoy one of the few advantages they have in international affairs, rather than try to patch up that small leak when we are not very good at that kind of plumbing.

Mr. Gershman should not quote Lenin on matters in which that gentleman has proven to be a poor prophet. It is now sixty years after the Russian revolution and the Soviets have not yet succeeded either in hanging the bourgeoisie or even in producing their own rope.

Joseph S. Berliner
Russian Research Center
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

In his interesting article, “Selling Them the Rope,” Carl Gershman quotes me out of context. He writes: “In our own time, it is widely believed that trade, in Daniel Yergin’s words, ‘draws the Soviet Union into the community of advanced industrial nations.’” Mr. Gershman then goes on to write: “The view that trade will lead to liberalization in Russia is partly based on the not illogical belief that exposure to the West will encourage the development of Western norms and values in the USSR.” In my April 1977 article in Foreign Affairs, I had specifically dissociated myself from the view Mr. Gershman attributes to me. Two sentences before the sentence Mr. Gershman quotes, I had written that trade “is no guarantee against conflict, nor is it likely to generate any dramatic changes in the Soviet political system.”

Daniel Yergin
Harvard University
Boston, Massachusetts

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Carl Gershman writes:

I want to thank Adam B. Ulam, Louis J. Walinsky, and David Vogel for their generally sympathetic remarks about my article. But several points raised in their letters deserve clarification.

First, while I fully agree with Mr. Walinsky that the Soviet Union’s projected oil shortage could weaken Soviet control over its East European satellites (which now import about 1.5 million barrels of Soviet oil daily), I was not in error in writing that the USSR itself, and not the Soviet bloc as a whole, could become a net importer of oil by the mid-1980’s. The 1977 CIA report on the subject predicted that by 1985 Soviet oil output would drop to 8-10 million barrels a day, while its domestic consumption would rise to over 10 million barrels a day. Since this projection takes an even dimmer view than Mr. Walinsky does of the USSR’s oil-production capabilities in the 1980’s, it strengthens his point about the political consequences within the Soviet bloc of the oil shortage.

Second, I agree with Mr. Ulam that trade, “if intelligently handled,” could be a means of influencing Soviet behavior. The Jackson amendment, which I endorsed in my article, is one attempt to use trade in this way. Another source of leverage, so far unexplored, is the Soviet Union’s growing dependence on U.S. agricultural products. Indeed, it is a reflection of the present sad state of American foreign policy that we are prepared to let a threatened Nigerian oil embargo influence our policy in Africa, while we do not even consider threatening a grain embargo against Moscow as one means of restraining its behavior in Africa.

What I specifically opposed in my article—and here I disagree with Mr. Walinsky—is trying to purchase Soviet moderation with technology that would strengthen the USSR militarily. Even if this policy could work in the short run, which I doubt, it is a form of “deterrence” which in the long run would do us in. It seems a hard enough job to alert the nation to the problem of technology transfers to the Soviet Union, to identify the technologies which must be controlled, and to develop an effective means of implementing such a policy without also tying controls to shifting Soviet tactics. Either we should seek to control the transfer of technology, or we should not. If it is a carrot-and-stick policy we want, we have other carrots and larger sticks.

The difficulty of simply establishing the need for a policy of controls is amply demonstrated by the letters of William Attwood, Stephen Sternheimer, and Joseph S. Berliner. From his letter, one would not know that Mr. Attwood had read my article at all. He simply repeats the standard arguments favoring U.S.-Soviet trade as if he were reciting a litany. Points 1, 2, and 4 of his letter were dealt with at length in my article, so I won’t spend time on them now. His swipe at the Jackson amendment (point 3) is largely gratuitous. I defended it only parenthetically, by way of distinguishing between its commendable intent to buy people’s freedom and a policy which seeks to control the transfer of technology. I might say, though, that in opposing the Jackson amendment on the grounds that it makes life harder for Soviet Jews and dissidents, Mr. Attwood is being disingenuous. He cares about trade before people, and he should say so. Andrei Sakharov recently defended the Jackson amendment as an effective “lever for influencing the emigration policy” of the Soviet Union and as a symbol which “vividly embodies the will of the American people to defend human rights the world over.”

Mr. Attwood’s last point, that “trade is non-ideological,” is a normative judgment, not a description of reality. It reveals an attitude of total naiveté concerning the Soviet Union, where nothing is non-ideological, whether it be history, science, literature, art, music, news reporting, or sports. The Soviets have never hesitated to use trade for political purposes, as when they cut off credits to Yugoslavia and China following the break with these countries, or when they stopped buying wool from Australia after it had given asylum to a Soviet official. They also have not hesitated to use politics to promote trade, as their détente policy demonstrates. As long as the Soviet regime uses trade as a political instrument both to strengthen its rule domestically and its military power, we cannot have normal trade relations. It is a dangerous delusion to believe otherwise.

Like Mr. Attwood, Mr. Sternheimer does not see any danger in transfering advanced technology to the Soviet Union. In emphasizing that the Soviet Union will never be as serious an economic rival as Japan, he demonstrates only that he misses the whole point of my article. The Soviet challenge is not economic and never will be as long as the Soviet Union is a totalitarian country. The challenge is military and strategic. After sixty years of importing sophisticated Western technology, the Soviet Union is a minor trading power. But it is arguably the strongest military power in the world today, requiring the very countries which provide it with advanced technology to devote an inordinate part of their resources to their self-defense.

Mr. Sternheimer shows not the least bit of concern over this. Instead, he is alarmed at the unlikely prospect that Japan will become ultra-nationalist and militarist if we seek its cooperation in an effort to prevent the flow of militarily significant technology to the Soviet Union. I suggest that Mr. Sternheimer stop fighting World War II and face up to the real dangers at hand. His complacency in this regard is evident in the view that “the trade guidelines inherent in ‘good’ commercial behavior are, by and large, adequate to prevent the transfer of technology to erstwhile competitors or enemies, be they capitalist or Communist.” Why lump together all countries, when the issue is the Soviet military threat to the West? And what conceivable evidence is there that “‘good’ commercial behavior” is an adequate means of controlling the transfer to the Soviet Union of technology that could enhance its military capability? Since my article appeared, it has been disclosed that IBM computers at the Kama River truck plant are being used to produce military vehicles. According to a report in the New York Times (June 18, 1979), U.S. military officials also “contend that Moscow has used American seismic equipment to enhance its anti-submarine warfare potential and that American machine tools for producing precision ball-bearings have probably helped Soviet engineers to develop multiple warheads for new intercontinental missiles.” We can expect new and probably more disturbing disclosures of this kind in the future.

Mr. Berliner says he favors denying the USSR technology that would “directly” strengthen its military capability. But it is clear from his letter that he defines “directly” in the narrowest sense and would favor, for example, providing the USSR with technology that would enable it to meet its energy needs during the next decade. Mr. Berliner correctly states that the view one takes on the question of controlling technology transfer to the USSR “depends upon one’s assessment of the larger political-military balance.” By his own admission, therefore, his position on trade is determined by his assessment of the Soviet threat to Western security, which he simply dismisses. The USSR, he writes, has only one major source of influence, military power. But presumably this has little to do with “the larger military-political balance” which in Mr. Berliner’s view vastly favors the U.S. His treatment of trade issues is marked by similar wishful thinking.

Mr. Berliner minimizes the benefits the Soviet Union receives from trade with the West, and overstates the costs to us of trying to implement a policy of technology controls. Regarding the benefits:

1. Even if it were true that the primary benefit to the USSR of imported technology is reducing costs of production, this still means that we help the Soviets divert scarce resources to the military sector.
2. The USSR’s postwar economic growth did not take place without imported Western technology. As I noted in my article, U.S. Lend Lease shipments and the dismantling of German industry provided the Soviet Union with enormous amounts of advanced Western technology and equipment which were brought into full production in the 1950’s. But even if no Western technology had been imported after the war, the Soviet economy would have grown, since it was rebuilding from the war’s devastation. Moreover, Mr. Berliner overstates the advantage to the USSR today of access to the economies of East Germany and Czechoslovakia which are stagnating, in part because the Soviets have already milked them dry.
3. Mr. Berliner has no way of knowing if there is no difference between the productivity of foreign and domestic equipment operating in the USSR. How can he determine this, especially in military plants which are completely closed off to the outside world? Moreover, while the Soviets cannot easily diffuse Western technology throughout their economy, the sophistication of Soviet strategic weaponry and the growing evidence of the use of Western technology for military purposes indicate that the diffusion has been accomplished within the military sector, which is what matters most. Finally, Western technology may not reverse the decline in the USSR’s growth rate, but as Mr. Berliner admits, it does enhance economic efficiency, while the supply of capital goods on long-term credits provides the USSR with resources that it otherwise would not have.
4. In my article, I distinguished between technology and products, emphasizing that a control policy should seek primarily to prevent the flow of strategic technology to the Soviet Union. Grain does not fall into that category, and as I have already indicated, this is an area where a carrot-and-stick approach might prove effective in moderating Soviet behavior.
5. It is possible, of course, that the Soviets will starve their consumer sector further before they will cut military expenditures. But this is hardly an argument against forcing this choice upon them. Among the factors Mr. Berliner himself lists which diminish the Soviet threat are domestic failures and tensions which would be gravely aggravated by increased belt-tightening; witness Poland. Mr. Berliner conveniently emphasizes Soviet internal problems when it suits his argument and dismisses them when it doesn’t.

Regarding the costs:

1. I never said that it would be a simple matter to gain the cooperation of our CoCom partners in a policy of export controls, only that the problem was sufficiently important to warrant strong leadership by the U.S. Obviously if one has Mr. Berliner’s fanciful attitude concerning the U.S.-Soviet balance, it is not worth the effort. But I do not share his attitude here. In addition, we would not be asking our allies to enforce a trade embargo against the Soviet Union, only to cooperate in a policy of controls on key technologies and selected products. As I pointed out in my article, controlling technology transfers would have the effect of making the USSR less self-sufficient and therefore more dependent on the West for products. The result might actually be an increased volume of trade.
2. Soviet control over Eastern Europe depends essentially on force and to a lesser degree on economic leverage. To the degree that we weaken the Soviet Union, we loosen its control over its satellites; and as noted above, a Soviet oil shortage would also destabilize the Soviet bloc.
3. It is the export of technology, not its control, which increases unemployment in the West by creating competitors and encouraging self-sufficiency in the receiving country. Compensation trade is another drain on Western jobs. If the Soviets must turn to the West for oil and grain, among other things, they will have no choice but to export as much of their raw materials as possible.
4. An intelligently designed control policy, of the kind suggested by J. Fred Bucy, would streamline procedures by eliminating much of the time spent over performance specifications and end-use statements. But again, the cost in terms of bureaucratic interference in trade would have to be weighed in terms of the objectives to be achieved. Since Mr. Berliner does not think they are essential, he is not willing to pay any price to achieve them.

A last word concerning Lenin’s prophecy which both Mr. Berliner and Mr. Sternheimer think was erroneous. Lenin made his prediction about selling the rope at a time when the Soviet economy was in a state of total collapse. Industry was in chaos, foreign and Russian skilled workers had fled abroad, production had virtually ceased. The Bolshevik regime faced a crisis that could have been fatal to its survival. It was at this point that Western businessmen and technicians were called in to put the economy back on its feet. Since that time the Soviet Union has become the world’s mightiest military power which has, in the last four years alone, installed Communist regimes in seven countries, from Africa to the Middle East to Southeast Asia.

Throughout the decades since Lenin made his prediction, the West has supplied the Soviet Union with capital, technology, advanced equipment, and technical training which have been fed into the Soviet military machine. It is all “sheer madness,” as Adam B. Ulam says. But the process continues unabated and may speed up in the immediate future with the appointment of a businessman (former IBM President Thomas J. Watson) as Ambassador to Moscow. Lenin was wrong about many things, not least about the future of “socialism” in Russia. And while his prediction about capitalist assistance to Russia may not have been prophetic, since such assistance was going on for many centuries before the revolution, it was nonetheless correct.

Finally, I did not quote Daniel Yergin out of context. At several points in the article in question, he writes that trade will encourage liberalization in the Soviet Union. The political costs of trade to the Soviet Union, he writes, involve “some mild mellowing of the domestic political order.” Expanding economic ties, he adds, led to the Helsinki agreement which has had as its “most important” benefit to the West “a freer flow of communication.” In his concluding paragraph he states that “the Soviets are more likely to be responsive to Western concerns about human rights in the context of expanding economic relations.” If he feels he was wrong, there are more graceful ways to say so than to claim that he was misquoted.