WASHINGTON, Jan. 10 (Kyodo) -- The U.S. government said Wednesday it will ease
export controls on U.S. high-performance computers, eliminating licensing
requirements for shipments to such destinations as South Korea, other Asian
nations and Latin American countries.
The move reflects the ever-increasing availability of high-performance computers
worldwide, which in turn reduces the ability to limit their acquisitions by
potentially unfriendly countries, the White House said in a statement.
''The ability to control the acquisition of computational capabilities by
controlling computer hardware is becoming ineffective and will be increasingly
so within a very short time,'' it said.
But the United States will continue to control national security and
proliferation-related software, it added.
Under the new policy, the U.S. government will change its current four-tiered
country system for controlling high-performance computer exports, created in
1995, to a three-tiered system.
As a result, countries categorized in Tier 2 -- South and Central America, South
Korea, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Slovenia and most of Africa
-- will now be combined into Tier 1, making it possible to export the computers
to these destinations with no prior government review.
Tier 1 countries are Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New
Zealand, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Brazil.
Exports to Tier 3 countries, such as India, Pakistan, Russia, China, Vietnam and
nations in Central Europe will require no special licenses if the computers
perform below 85,000 million theoretical operations per second (MTOPS), up from
the current limit of 28,000 MTOPS.
But there are no planned changes for Tier 4 countries, and the U.S. will
maintain a virtual embargo on computer hardware and technology exports to those
destinations, the White House said.
Tier 4 countries are Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Cuba, Sudan and Syria. |
