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Bush is just being realistic with computer exports. I used to work with SUN and I can tell you that the banned computers were getting shipped to China and Russia with no difficulty anyway. Companies in legal export countries would buy the equipment and then resell it to the banned countries.

The government was always giving SUN a hard time but there was nothing we could really do about it. The US trade restriction laws are not recognized and can't be enforced in many countries.

Besides, anyone with modest technical skills can put together clusters of off-the-shelf Linux PC-based clusters and make a supercomputer. These supercomputer clusters are cheap and excellent for intensive computation - like weapon design.

These trade restrictions are nothing more than "feel-good" BS. They may have had some value when you had to go to companies like CRAY to buy a super computer but not with today's technology.

It may not be inposible to stop the technology from getting to Chinese hands...but we are not supposed to make it easy. We arent talking about them making ships or tanks ... this is neuclear weapons we are talking about. Every day that it takes them to get a rocket to maker orbit , or a nuclear weapon to function is one day closer for us to get SDI to make all that obsolete. Come on ... this isn't hard to understand...