349. Editorial Note
The annual review of trade restrictions toward the Sino-Soviet bloc by the 15-nation Coordinating Committee (COCOM) in Paris began on October 30. These consultations were expected to make minor adjustments which better reflected changes in technology in the Sino-Soviet bloc and to clarify some of the definitions of the 120 strategic items over which the COCOM countries exercised export control. During the course of the review, five items were deleted from the embargo list and five items, proposed by the U.S. Delegation, were added to the list as well as one item to the surveillance list. Forty-four items raised for discussion were either redefined or left unchanged after technical examination.
There were, however, five items in the field of electronics for which no agreement could be reached. Two of these—radio transmitters and communications, navigation, and radar equipment—were of particular interest to the United Kingdom. While the United States was unprepared to remove these two items from the list, it did tentatively agree to redefining portions of their definitions. The three remaining items—radio communications equipment, line communications equipment, and communication cable—were considered by the United States to be of great strategic value to the Soviet bloc because of their application for peripheral early warning air defense and ground controlled interception systems. The United States believed the Soviet bloc, deficient in this technology, was engaged in a campaign to obtain it from the West.
Among the COCOM countries other than the United States there was widespread support for a proposal to export the three items as long as they would be put to nonstrategic use. The other participants at Paris suggested a plan whereby COCOM would be notified of the exportation of the items on an ex post facto basis. The United States opposed this proposal on the grounds that it would be interpreted so loosely that there would be little meaningful control over the equipment. The U.S. Delegation proposed consultation prior to exportation of the three items and, if the COCOM members agreed that the exports met the criteria for nonstrategic use, then the items could be shipped to the Soviet bloc. Other participants at Paris opposed the U.S. suggestion on the grounds that the United States would object to most requests for exportation of these three items of electronic equipment.
In view of this basic disagreement, the COCOM members agreed to postpone the enactment date of the 1959 list from January 1 to February 1, 1960. In the interval, there was some expectation that a compromise could be worked out. The United States used this interval to strengthen its position among certain COCOM members—Turkey, [Page 777] the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada. As a result, the discussion at Paris failed to resolve the impasse. Although the United States was prepared to relax controls on the two items of particular interest to the United Kingdom, the French Delegation insisted on a settlement on the three remaining items as the price for its acceptance of the compromise on the first two. The United States was unprepared to accept the French conditions. Because COCOM procedures required unanimous agreement to change existing definitions, all five electronic items therefore remained on the embargoed list. (Department of State, Current Economic Developments, No. 590, February 2, 1960, pages 4–6)