Russia Depends On China And The West For Its Weapons

2025-05-13 08:12:02

(MENAFN- Asia Times)

Forty years ago I led a small experts team to Paris. We arrived at Terminal 2 early in the morning, hauling a 12 inch by 12 inch wood box that was about five or six feel long. At the Customs desk the agent asked us what was in the box. We said,“Russian sonobuoy.”

“Bien sûr,” said the inspector, and we were on our way downtown.

The reason we took the Sonobuoy was to show our colleagues at the Coordinating Committee on Multilataeral Export Controls how the Russians were copying US technology. COCOM was the multilateral organization, founded in 1949, to regulate sensitive exports to the USSR and others such as China.

In the mid-1980s, in the middle of the Soviet arms build-up, our goal was to try and cut off Soviet access to US technology, especially computers and microelectronics. The Russian sonobuoy, which had been recovered at sea, contained printed circuit boards stuffed with microchips that were copies of integrated circuits made in America, right down to the fact that the US company logo was faithfully reproduced on the chip's internal circuitry.

A Russian sonobuoy found on the beach in Cornwall, UK .Photo:

At the time it was our opinion that the Soviets did not really have an independent microelectronics capability but its silicon industry, centered in a town called Zelenograd to the north of Moscow (then a closed city), was told to copy American electronics, rather than design its own components.

A window into Russian chip manufacturing. Photo: Press Service of the Department of Investment and Industrial Policy of the Moscow Government

We also viewed electronics as an essential force multiplier: computerized weapons were better able to find and destroy targets than traditional weapons. All of this was before the age of drones, or even smart weapons. Even so, it was an impressive leap for weapons technology.

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