The American Connection to Soviet Microelectronics

Ever since the cold war of the late 1940s, the US, joined at times by Europe, Canada and Japan, has sought to restrict sophisticated technology with military potential from reaching the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. Despite such efforts, the US has not been completely successful in achieving the goal of limiting or eliminating the flow of militarily valuable data and products from West to East. The Soviet bloc has been able to acquire advanced technologies from the West in various ways—by espionage and entrepreneurship, as exemplified in Pentagon accounts of Vax 11/782 mini‐computers and an array of microelectronics, seismographs and lasers shipped illegally to Warsaw Pact countries through a variety of real and phony companies in Europe and elsewhere. For all the horror stories of spying and smuggling, there have been virtually no instances of scientists and engineers defecting or emigrating to contribute to Soviet military R&D. That is why a case involving two American electrical engineers is so interesting. It is a conspicuous example of technology transfer that, as it happened, lifted a corner of the shroud of secrecy that long concealed military research in the Soviet Union.