ABSTRACT
The American action was aimed at stopping or retarding the controversial Soviet export gas pipeline to Western Europe. The Soviets reacted to the American ban with loud defiance, vowing to defeat the embargo. However, the lack of a Soviet response may reflect uncertainty at higher levels over the priority to give to gas development in the second half of the 1980s. The Soviet machinery industry in 1982 had experience in building gas-turbine compressors for gas pipelines. The American embargo may thus have produced the opposite of what it sought, but it provides us in the process with a valuable case study of Soviet technological politics and decision-making. Such cases demonstrate a new that Soviet technological problems are not due primarily to lack of knowledge or skill or even industrial capacity, and consequently the bottlenecks yield in fairly short order to a massive application of political priority.
