| Summary/Abstract |
How dangerous could a single U.S. high performance computer in Soviet hands be? In the 1970s, this became a crucial and highly controversial question of U.S. national security export control policy. In the détente years, U.S. companies sold some of the most powerful civilian high performance computers (HPCs) in the world to the Soviet Union. These computers played an outsized role in the U.S.-Soviet relations of the 1970s. There was hardly a summit, or even a plain working meeting between U.S. and Soviet diplomats, which did not touch on HPCs. Indeed, they were a crucial strand in the story of the rise and fall of détente that historical research has so far largely overlooked.
|