Design H bombs with Dell PCs - US military

Kenneth Bacon was responding to a question at a press briefing yesterday about why the US was increasing the speed of computers that could be exported to Red China.

He said: " Right now you have to have a license to export a computer faster than 6,500 MTOPS to a military buyer in China, or a license to export a computer faster than 12,300 MTOPS to a civilian buyer in China. Those limits are about to increase to 12,500 MTOPS for military buyers, and 20,000 MTOPS for civilian buyers in China. That will happen in August; August 15th those limits will increase."

The fastest computer the US has ever licensed for export to Red China was at 31,000 MTOPS and used for weather forecasting, Bacon claimed.

He said the news had to be put into context. "Most of the nuclear weapons in America's arsenal today could be designed with the types of computers, high-level computers, you could buy at CompUSA.

"There's been such a dramatic improvement in computational speed and power that you can design nuclear weapons today with the type of desktop you might buy over the Internet from Dell Computers or an IBM or any other type of commercially available in-your-home-type computer that we all use on a daily basis."

He also said that clustering and parallel processing through linking smaller machines gave countries big computing abilities anyway.

Intel's Itanium would give even better results, he said, meaning that there was a degree beyond which computers could not be controlled. He said nothing about operating systems. µ

You can find the whole of the fascinating press conference here. µ