Unscientific ban

If there was a Kafka Prize to be given away it would be very hard to decide which of two US government departments was the more deserving. As the name might suggest, the award would be made for bureaucratic rules or practices that do most to offend common sense. Among the many candidates all over the world, the US Department of Commerce and the Department of Energy have the edge because their reach is global. Each has been outdoing the other in implementing the Clinton administration8217;s non-proliferation policy in ways that expose its absurdities. The DoE8217;s latest prize-winning bid invites attention. It has decided for reasons that are quite irrational to ban eight American physicists from attending an international conference at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. The TIFR is among 200 or so other Indian scientific and industrial organisations on the US government8217;s watch-list of entities associated with the weapons programme.

The ostensible object of drawing up the list was to monitorpossible transfers of sensitive technologies by making special import applications obligatory for the named entities. Scientific exchanges at international conferences were not considered to fall in the category of sensitive exports until someone at the DoE became creative. The upshot is scientists from institutions funded by the DoE are denied the opportunity to interact with their counterparts in Mumbai. However, unless the DoE intends to model itself on the old KGB, its scientists will be free to rub shoulders with Indian scientists at international meets in Geneva or Prague or Tokyo. This kind of silliness will anger scientists everywhere and very likely lead many in the US to demand an end to it.

As for the Department of Commerce, it has covered itself with glory particularly in the area of permitting exports of sensitive missile technology to China. These have assumed such proportions over the years that, according to critics in the US, they amount to a breach of national security. Although Commerce8217;sostensible purpose is to promote commercial satellite industry and business, some of the technologies exported have military uses and may already have been put to such use. For Commerce it would seem, this is all in a good day8217;s work. But when President Clinton studies a report from the US Congress on the subject, he will not need to be reminded of concerns regularly expressed within his own government about Chinese transfers, in turn, of missile technology to other countries such as Iran and Pakistan. The Kafkaesque story here is about how the Department of Commerce manages to further the interests of American businessmen by creative reinterpretation of dual-use technologies. It is not that it treats the issue as irrelevant. What it does is alter the end-use of technologies in its books depending on the destinations to which they are being exported. Much has been said about the US government8217;s double-standards and policy failures in the areas of non-proliferation. Now new evidence is becoming available aboutthe levels of irrationality in its bureaucracy.