Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Lacelle who wrote (38732)	3/16/1999 10:56:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Careful for guilt by association, John. The history of proliferation policy is nutso, of course. Remember the long running yearly certifications that Pakistan, officially, wasn't a proliferation threat? On China, they got a lot of smart people, and the supercomputers that the bomb labs did all the fancy development on weren't any more powerful than a run-of-the-mill PC these days. Maybe not totally run-of-the-mill, but I've been pricing out a toy "supercomputer" with ~1000 mips, 1 gig memory, 50 gig disk, maybe $3k or so in parts. I'm not sure what year the bomb lab Crays would have hit that level, no earlier than mid-80s I'm sure. The best hope we have for China is that they haven't shown much interest in devoting U.S.- scale resources to defense, much less Soviet-scale. I wish national interest had a bigger role in our China policy than commercial interests, but that's not the way our government works, unfortunately. There's a funny disconnect here. It may become fashionable to view China as a threat here, but China views us mostly as a market, like Japan before them. Getting a coherent policy out of the current toxic political environment is not likely, I'd say.