CONFRONTING PHOTONICS: Are controls on exports of high-power lasers hurting U.S. manufacturers?

摘要

It is a painful reality that nations must carefully regulate the export and import of certain "dual-use" technologies that could be used as weapons of war. While these regulations were intended to protect citizens, and are easily applied to items such as high-power lasers that carry intonations of "death rays," overwhelming industry feedback indicates that these regulations are doing little to prevent the very thing for which they were designed. At the end of the Cold War, the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Strategic Export Controls (COCOM) agreed that its East-West focus was no longer the appropriate basis for export controls, and decided to establish a new arrangement to combat broader risks to regional and international security related to the spread of weapons of mass destruction and their associated enabling dual-use goods and technologies. In 1996, 33 founding member states reached consensus on a new multilateral export control arrangement to be called the Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual Use Goods and Technologies (Wassenaar Arrangement or WA), which today includes 40 member states.