Clinton/Gore on export controls

[Dave Banisar <banisar@washofc.cpsr.org>]

------ Forwarded Message
       E X E C U T I V E   O F F I C E   O F   T H E   P R E S I D E N T



                             THE WHITE HOUSE

                      Office of the Press Secretary
______________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                          February 22, 1993     

	
                         REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
                          AND VICE PRESIDENT TO
                        SILICON GRAPHICS EMPLOYEES
	
                             Silicon Graphics
                      Mountain View, California    


10:00 A.M. PST
	
....


(All sorts of higly intereresting but ultimately irrelevant to this list's 
purpose deleted)
	
	
	THE VICE PRESIDENT:  Let me start off on that.  As you may know, 
the President appointed as the Deputy Secretary of Commerce John 
Rollwagon who was the CEO at Cray.  And he and Ron Brown, the Secretary 
of Commerce, have been reviewing a lot of procedures for stimulating U.S. 
exports around the world.  And we're going to be a very export-oriented 
administration.
	
	However, we are also going to keep a close eye on the legitimate 
concerns that have in the past limited the free export of some 
technologies that can make a dramatic difference in the ability of a 
Gaddafi or a Saddam Hussein to develop nuclear weapons or ICBMs. 
	Now, in some cases in the past, these legitimate concerns have 
been interpreted and implemented in a way that has frustrated American 
business unnecessarily.  There are, for example, some software packages 
that are available off the shelves in stores here that are, nevertheless, 
prohibited from being exported.  And sometimes that's a little bit 
unrealistic.  On the other hand, there are some in business who are 
understandably so anxious to find new customers that they will not 
necessarily pay as much attention as they should to what the customer 
might use this new capacity for.  And that's a legitimate role for 
government, to say, hold on, the world will be a much more dangerous 
place if we have 15 or 20 nuclear powers instead of five or six; and if 
they have ICBMs and so forth.
	
	So it's a balance that has to be struck very carefully.  And 
we're going to have a tough nonproliferation strategy while we promote 
more exports.
	
	THE PRESIDENT:  If I might just add to that -- the short answer 
to your question, of course, is yes, we're going to review this.  And let 
me give you one example.  Ken told me last night at dinner that --he 
said, if we export substantially the same product to the same person, if 
we have to get one permit to do it we'll have to get a permit every time 
we want to do the same thing over and over again.  They always give it to 
us, but we have to wait six months and it puts us behind the competitive 
arc.  Now, that's something that ought to be changed, and we'll try to 
change that.
	
	We also know that some of our export controls, rules and 
regulations, are a function of the realities of the Cold War which aren't 
there anymore.  But what the Vice President was trying to say, 
and he said so well -- I just want to reemphasize -- our biggest security 
problem in the future may well be the proliferation of nuclear and 
nonnuclear, like biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction to 
small, by our standards, countries with militant governments who may not 
care what the damage to their own people could be.  So that's something 
we have to watch very closely.
	
	But apart from that, we want to move this much more quickly and 
we'll try to slash a lot of the time delays where we ought to be doing 
these things.
	

.....

(even more material deleted)



                            END10:41 A.M. PST

------ End of Forwarded Message

If anyone is interested in the whole conference, I weill put it up on the 
CPSR Internet Library at cpsr.org /cpsr/clinton.


Dave