ABSTRACT
Concerned with the continuing military build-up in the Soviet Union, American policy makers, officials, and observers began to take a closer look in the 1980s at the military implications of East-West trade and technology transfer. The Reagan administration argued that the Soviet military effort was benefitting significantly from the acquisition of US and Western technology. Following the Report on the Export of US Technology by the Defense Science Board in 1976, an effort was undertaken in the United States to develop an export control approach that would concentrate on underlying technology rather than end products. Congress endorsed the critical technologies approach to export controls in the Export Administration Act of 1979. After considerable effort, the US government published an initial list of critical technologies in October of 1980 in the Federal Register. This list represents the militarily critical technologies that Department of Defense felt should not be exported to potential adversaries or non-Coordinating Committee countries.
