Swimming with the coelacanth: the UK and export controls of technology and knowledge in the Cold War

ABSTRACT

Export controls, such as through the lists of embargoed goods drawn up by the Co-ordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) from the 1950s until the 1980s, were a means by which the West sought to put economic and strategic pressures on the communist East. This paper explores a tension within the historiography of Cold War export controls provoked by the recent scholarship of Mario Daniels and John Krige, who place knowledge control as a central aim, by focusing on the perspective of the UK to the US-led system. The paper argues that British companies, civil servants and politicians worked within the export control system established by the United States but strained against its restrictions on trade; that the UK nevertheless had to balance a host of other demands, including encouraging trade, preservation of sterling, regulation of transborder movement of goods, widely understood; and that while the UK recognised the framing of export controls as a matter of knowledge control, the framing was not central to the complaints made against the system.

KEYWORDS:

• export controls
• Cold War
• technology
• United Kingdom

Introduction

This paper engages with John Krige’s most recent major project, a study of the history of export controls from the perspective of the sharing and denial of knowledge and know-how. In Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America, co-authored with Mario Daniels, Krige argues that US-led export controls have not only been largely overlooked by historians of various stripes, but were a key tool in managing relationships with the Soviet Union and China in particular, and furthermore, have ‘profoundly shaped the global sharing of science and technology’.¹ Only by becoming permanent measures under the Cold War, and within a remarkably static system and within the same aim of preserving US technological leadership and containing communism, export controls have shifted from an emphasis on regulating trade to a deeper emphasis on regulating knowledge. While Daniels and Krige rightly say that theirs is a study of the importance of transnational and international regulation, it is nevertheless a study based primarily on US documents and concentrates on describing and understanding the US view. But the UK's history of export controls suffers from the same patchy neglect of historians as Daniels and Krige note in the US case, with the notable exception of the scholarship of Frank Cain.²

This paper draws on the UK's primary sources to recover the view from the UK of the processes and history analysed by Daniels and Krige. How was the extension of US power through export controls viewed from one of the US’s closest allies? Were export controls for the UK primarily a matter of national security and foreign policy (as Daniels and Krige state of the US case) or of trade? Did the UK follow the US in viewing regulation of knowledge as central, or was this only a preoccupation of the US (Daniels and Krige call the US the ‘only state’ to do this)? The US approach to export control led to extraterritorial interference, but did this interference upset British nationals or policy? By answering these questions, this paper moves to engage with one of Krige’s other central historiographical claims: the importance and consequence of US hegemony in matters of post-war science, technology and policy.

National security and export controls in the United States

Daniels and Krige’s Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America charts the development of the American export control system from the 1940s up to the early 2020s. While the system has undergone changes, their central claim is that it has become as much about the regulation of knowledge as the regulation of the flow of goods, all within a framing of national security. As they put it, ‘the control of intangible knowledge and know-how was the most important function of export controls’.³

Export controls present a complex field for the historian, or indeed anyone, to grasp; as Daniels and Krige lament: ‘the regulations and their implementation are very technical, vexingly nuanced and often contradictory’.⁴ Export controls have sat alongside, have interconnected with, but in the end are different from, regimes that regulate intellectual property (notably the patent system), the enforcement of military secrecy through classified secrets, and the wider governmental policies that direct or release international trade. Furthermore, export control has largely functioned through the drawing up of long lists of goods for which export is either prohibited or licensed in varying ways. Such lists are not only technical and subtle but also change, often on an annual cycle.

Nevertheless, it is Daniels and Krige’s thesis that export controls have a hitherto overlooked importance in the recent history of the global circulation of technology and ideas. Specifically, as the control of technology moved out of the World War Two regime of denying Allied technical resources to Germany and Japan into the Cold War, the reasoning behind the controls shifted from a concern over goods to a concern over knowledge and data. The ‘main goal’ might have remained ‘to deny [competitive rivals to the United States] – be they allies or enemies – substantial technological advantage as best one can without harming national exports’, and therefore also, in Krige’s sense, hegemonic. But from the 1950s, and especially so in the 1970s and 1980s, national security was seen as being particularly threatened by the export of the embodied knowledge within goods. An advanced technology could be gained by an adversary if the knowledge was transmitted, either through personal contact (as always important in tacit knowledge skills) but also potentially reverse engineered if the goods came into possession.⁵ Control of knowledge flows therefore became of immense and strategic importance and would be regulated to American advantage through export controls. The emphasis on knowledge in Daniels and Krige’s argument distinguishes their work from other historiography. Cain, for example, in his thorough examination of export controls mentions ‘know how’ only in passing and does not make it central to his analysis.⁶

The key stages in the development of the system of export controls in the United States were as follows. Export controls were introduced by the Trading with the Enemy Act (1917) during the First World War, subsided in the interwar years, but were rebuilt as the Second World War approached, starting with the Neutrality Act of 1935.⁷ Postwar, the Export Control Act of 1949 extended export controls during peacetime, now aimed at the Eastern bloc, and had astonishing range and power, the letter of the law granting, as Daniels and Krige note, the US President the authority to ‘prohibit or curtail the exportation … of any articles, materials, or supplies, including technical data’.⁸ The supposedly emergency measure was confirmed during, and would remain in place after, the Korean War. Also, in 1949, under American leadership, an international anti-communist export control mechanism was established, the Co-ordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, or COCOM.⁹ The United Kingdom, unsurprisingly, was a member.

COCOM was the core of Western export control but was always beset by tensions. For the Pentagon and hawkish elements of Congress, the overriding aim was to contain and indeed combat communism. The long list of goods embargoed for trade with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and even longer lists for China (the so-called ‘China differential’), were designed with this purpose. But western European countries had a history of trade with Russia, and post-war conditions made this trade more tempting and even necessary; Britain, for example, needed Soviet timber for housing, and could offer in return machinery and imperial commodities in a trade that did help protect sterling.¹⁰ The tension was managed by a system of exemptions. Typically, a western European firm would seek an exemption from COCOM restrictions, making an argument that downplayed or denied the strategic significance of the goods; the US in turn would monitor and typically attempt to deny the exemption. The result was rising dissatisfaction.

Henshaw has identified three theories that have been presented by commentators for what motivated the West to implement these export control policies.¹¹ The first, offered by Gunnar Myrdal and Gunnar Adler-Karlsson, argues that West European allies were pressed by the United States into cooperation by the implicit threat of the denial of aid.¹² The second, offered by Anthony Sutton, argues that the most significant factor in the post-war development of the economy of the Soviet Union was the absorption of skills and technology sourced from the West, and Western allies lacked resolve to stop, and indeed turned a blind eye to, this impact.¹³ The third theory points to different interests and aims within the US government, some favouring coercing allies, others not.¹⁴

But the United States placed greater emphasis on national security over trade compared to its Western allies. The United States therefore insisted on controls not only over export, but re-export of American goods, and its European allies chafed and complained at this extraterritorial influence.¹⁵ Crucially, however, the central importance of national security was not, say Daniels and Krige, just about denying communist countries the latest technology, the postwar export control system was ‘institutionalised to defend this lead’, at the expense of communist foes and Western allies alike.¹⁶ For decades, however, the overall structure of export control that sought ‘strategic asymmetry through technological predominance’ remained the same, despite some liberalisation during détente, redoubling after the Bucy report of 1976, retrenchment during the heightened Cold War of the 1980s, and emerging worries about first Japanese competition in the 1980s and 1990s and later, Chinese growth in the 2000s.

The UK experience of export controls, 1939–1964

How were export controls developed in the UK? The wartime legislation that controlled exports, specifically, the Import, Export and Customs Powers (Defence) Act of 1939 remained in place into the 1950s, even as the targets of controls shifted from saving shipping space and foreign exchange in the fight against Nazi Germany to the denial of technology to communist countries, including China from 1949.¹⁷ By the 1950s the primary purpose of the control of exports was understood as ‘preventing the sale of strategic goods to Eastern Europe and China’.¹⁸ Political, as opposed to strategic, embargoes were later introduced for specific countries (such as Indonesia, South Africa, Rhodesia in the 1970s). However, in practice, it had also been used for a quite bewildering range of subsidiary purposes, including intervening in balance of payments (controlling the export of goods purchased with dollars in particular), ‘the consolidation of scarce materials’, the retention of works of art and antiques deemed to be of national importance, restricting the export of live horses on humanitarian grounds, restricting export of other animals (cattle, sheep, swine) to keep in line with meat export policies, restricting export of some kinds of textile machinery to keep trade unions happy, and further meat export restrictions to satisfy agreements with Australia or because of subsidy rules.¹⁹ The categories of concern remained largely unchanged over post-war decades.²⁰ Trans-shipment was also watched and controlled. As we can see, for the UK, export controls might, like the US, be about national security but it also had many other purposes in mind.

Some technologies were more sensitive than others. Aircraft and electronics, as we will see, were especially so.²¹ The control of the exports of ships was considered to be ‘strategic in purpose’, primarily the ‘control of the transfer of types of ships to countries in the Sino/Soviet bloc in order to keep in line with general Government policy on exports to countries behind the Iron Curtain’, and secondarily to regulate export of surplus war material’.²² Nevertheless, there was an awareness in Whitehall that technological change meant that the lists of controlled items had to be adapted. For example, the control of arms and ammunition ‘in “normal” times’ was regulated by legislation dating from 1879 and 1921, in addition to the emergency rules of 1939, and ‘because of technical changes in the last 20 years’, one civil servant noted in 1958, ‘it would clearly be rather a different matter from the control exercised before the war … [Our] control in future will need to go beyond “conventional” weapons, and I imagine will include all sorts of things used in atom bombs and rockets’.²³

Nuclear materials, therefore, were of special concern.²⁴ Nuclear weapons were surrounded by official secrecy. Export controls mattered more for the greyer areas – because of dual-use, and developing commercial markets – of radio-isotopes. Radio-isotope materials were produced by the UK Atomic Energy Authority (primarily at Harwell), refined and packaged by quasi-commercial outfits such as the Radiochemical Company at Amersham, and their export controlled, for two stated reasons:

1. To fulfil our obligations to COCOM, an international Committee of Western Countries concerned with preventing exports of certain strategic materials to the Sino-Soviet bloc

2. To prevent the supply to countries outside the Sino-Soviet bloc of certain materials and equipment which could be used in the production of atomic weapons, either altogether or unless supply was subject to safeguards to prevent use for military purposes.²⁵

Examples of early post-war radioactive export controls include ICI’s stocks of heavy water (from Norsk Hydroelectric) in 1949, thorium exported to Australia, Belgium, Hong Kong, India and Spain in 1948 (altogether about ten tons, about a sixth of US exports over the same period), a kilo of uranium acetate to Southern Rhodesia in 1950, but also beryllium, bismuth, cadmium, radium, other uranium compounds, zirconium, and the moderating materials graphite and hydrogen peroxide.²⁶ Many more substances were added as reactors produced more and more isotopes for different commercial and other uses. In 1950, the policy was to refuse applications to export atomic materials to Eastern Europe, to allow in general ‘applications to export to the USA and the “white dominions”’, and to consider all other applications ‘on their merits’, with decisions depending on ‘political standing of the country, the size of the order, and the purpose for which the equipment was required’.²⁷ Interestingly, even in the case of the communist East, quantity mattered (at least until rules were changed): ‘there is likely to be no objection to, say, 500 gms of thorium nitrate required for analytical purposes being exported to Eastern Europe; on the other hand 500 kilos would probably be refused’. At the same time, officials in the UK noted that the ‘US view was rigidly opposed to export of even the smallest quantities of thorium to Eastern Europe or China’.²⁸

It was far from straightforward deciding how export controls should apply to isotopes. Was an isotope to be considered a natural, semi-manufactured or manufactured good? Were stable but manufactured isotopes different from radio-active ones? How radio-active should an isotope be to trigger concerns – five clicks of a Geiger counter, or a hundred? wondered one official.²⁹ What about isotopes that were built into manufactured instruments, such as artificially made radio-active calcium-45 used in thickness measuring gauges?³⁰ Such instruments formed an export business that the UK was hoping to grow, and again this trade interest was what caused tension when it conflicted with the national security interest, strongly pushed by the United States. ‘It has long been the view of this Office – and indeed of the Official Committee on Atomic Energy’, noted a Board of Trade official in 1955, ‘that isotopes should be decontrolled, but for political reasons it has been found advisable to retain the existing controls’, ending controls ‘would enable British firms manufacturing instruments not subject to control except for the isotopes they embody, to compete in all foreign markets’, and would be in accordance with the UK Board of Trade’s aim ‘towards the relaxation of controls wherever possible’.³¹

As watched from Whitehall, by the Board of Trade, Colonial Office and the Foreign Office, export control policy and practice were shaped by the category of country, of which the most concerning were, first, communist countries, second, colonies and former colonies, third, flashpoints such as those in the Middle East, and finally special cases such as Spain and South Africa. Even in colonial contexts, the UK had to respond to changes in US practice. For example, in the 1950s vital supplies to Jamaica, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaya were disrupted by restricted American supplies as well as shortages at home. In Jamaica, the major item was carbon steel pipes and tubes needed for rolling stock, marine equipment, breweries, distilleries and sugar factories, while streptomycin was needed in the hospitals and polytetra-fluoroethylene (Teflon), for which a spin-off of the American firm DuPont, Inc. was the sole source, was required for laboratory tables and the sugar industry.³² For Hong Kong, where trade was ‘at a low ebb owing to the Colony’s own restrictions on strategic commodities’, not least to communist China, the scarce commodity was carbon black, needed for a range of goods including paints, matches, printing and writing inks, and rubber tyres.³³

In the Middle East, export of aircraft and ships was already controlled, as it was for other countries. However, arms exports contributed to the UK balance of payments, and substantial orders were taken. Examples of big ticket items in 1956 included a £55,000 Westland helicopter and £15,200 of ICI-manufactured smokeless powder for Saudi Arabia, £55,000 for Marconi radio equipment for an airport in Syria, £156,359 of military gear (including radars) for the Lebanese army, £180,258 for 150 tons of ammunition for the Arab Army in Jordan and £3 million for three Britannia aircraft for Israel.³⁴ But following Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal in late July 1956, and in the face of United Nations assembly resolutions calling for suspension of delivery of military goods, a cascade of new export controls was implemented. Existing export licences were revoked for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Yemen and Syria, including six Meteor fighters for Israel, and two Vampire trainer aircraft destined for Syria, while 50 Land Rovers for Iraq in the process of being loaded onto ships were urgently reviewed.³⁵ For the time being, arms exports to Jordan and Iraq were allowed to proceed freely.³⁶ (The Israeli ambassador in London complained about a situation in which the Soviet Union supplied arms to Syria and probably Egypt, and the UK to Jordan and Iraq but not Israel.) Nor were the export control issues provoked by Suez confined to matters of arms to the Middle East, as other countries experienced supply shortages in ‘raw and semi-processed materials’ (primarily oil and derivatives), and demand for them rose at the expense of domestic industry, so consideration had to be given to restricting exports of these goods too.³⁷ With the Israeli-French-British military intervention in Egypt so spectacularly stopped by President Eisenhower’s refusal to support it, the Suez Crisis has been often viewed as the moment Britain’s status as a Great Power evaporated. To use Krige’s terms, we might expect American hegemony to now be fully evident, including in influence over UK export control policy. But it is noticeable that the revocations of licenses were made in the light of national calculations and international UN pressure.

After Suez, more general contingency plans were drawn up concerning export control procedures that would be implemented in the event of a crisis. Some goods would be ‘subject to immediate and automatic embargo’.³⁸ This list included, obviously, military items such as aircraft and aircraft engines, arms, missiles and munitions, and noxious gases, but also a diverse array of enabling equipment such as certain machines tools and electronics, kino-theodolites, photographic instruments, cables ‘buoyant or near buoyant’, tyres and vibration testing apparatus. Other goods would be ‘considered for possible embargo’ by a working party ‘within twenty-four hours of the declaration of a crisis’, including ‘military goods … without a sharp edge’, goods with a dual-use of ‘normal civilian and military application’ (such as radars), and goods that would be deemed ‘military only if destined for miliary consignees’.

One challenge that did not trigger the contingency plans, but would repeatedly become the context for future export control issues, was the Union of South Africa’s departure from the Commonwealth. In the 1950s, South Africa had followed the UK’s guidance on international technology export controls. For example, after the establishment of COCOM, Pretoria sought advice from London. ‘They have found difficulty in building up [a picture of export control system]’, noted a civil servant in the Commonwealth Relations Office in 1955, ‘and ask whether we could supply them with a complete set of the Regulations in force at present in the United Kingdom. They are also interested in the means by which the United Kingdom Government employs to bring the requirements of these Regulations to the notice of commerce and industry generally’.³⁹ In 1960, a whites-only referendum in South Africa supported leaving the Commonwealth. Friendly advice ended, but export of technology to South Africa would become increasingly fraught.

So far I have reviewed the policies for UK export control. For some goods and destinations, exporters had to seek licences, while for others, export might be prohibited altogether. But what was the actual practice? Policy was the responsibility of the Board of Trade while enforcement was in the hands of Customs & Excise. Clearly, the government was not very joined up, since in 1953 a Board official confessed to the Customs man that:

You will recall that I mentioned to you recently that apparently certain prosecutions were undertaken by your Department against firms or individuals for taking or attempting to take export controlled goods out of the country without the necessary export licence. I did not question this action but I felt that if the alleged offence stemmed from an order signed on the authority of the President of the Board of Trade then we ought to know something about it. … The first information [in one case] I had about this I gleaned from the newspapers. … can we make some arrangements whereby we come into the picture at some stage?⁴⁰

Thereafter, Customs & Excise reported cases to the Board of Trade more regularly, and these reports, along with other sources, help paint the picture of what breaches took place. Many of these, perhaps most, concerned not technologies but precious gems and metals. Diamond smuggling was especially prominent, and had little to do with Cold War national security concerns, if at all.⁴¹ Likewise, the contested export of fine arts (such as the Rolls Park portrait of William Harvey in 1962⁴²) and the transport of horses across the Northern Irish border did not trouble global geosecurity. The 1953 case of the export of 1,845 tons of anti-submarine and anti-torpedo netting at first glance seems more concerning, but the destination of this material was Franco’s Spain and the war-surplus ex-admiralty metal traded as scrap.⁴³ An export license for Australian monazite (a source of thorium, rare earth metals and uranium) was refused in 1950 to a British firm ‘on security grounds’ since it might be re-exported to Austria.⁴⁴ In this case, the fear was of helping commercial competition, as it was known that an Austrian was seeking gas mantle ‘equipment and “know-how”’.

Cases involving attempted export to countries in the so-called Sino-Soviet bloc included £237,000 worth of copper to Poland in 1956, a shipment in the same year of radio valves that was destined for Antwerp but diverted to Macao, and scrap also going to Poland in 1960.⁴⁵ The number of cases that touched on national security are few. A complex case that began in 1953 concerned three drums of ‘gun metal valves’ uncovered in Grangemouth; further investigation found a series of exportations heading to Metalimpex of Budapest, plus forgery of paperwork.⁴⁶ Yet despite the East European destination, it was probably a case of scrap merchants cutting corners. If an anomalous case of export of radar apparatus, ground-to-air communications equipment, and electronics to Cuba in 1960 can be set aside,⁴⁷ perhaps two cases can be classed as the control of export strategic materials to the Sino-Soviet bloc. The first, from 1957, involved the export to Hungary of a ‘super-fine alloy used in the manufacture of radio valves and X-ray tubes’; the firm Tetra Engineering Co. Ltd., its director and engineer were fined.⁴⁸ The second, from 1959, involved materials for naval diesel engines, ‘classed as goods of a strategic nature’, which ‘found their way to China’; the firm, Porn and Dunwoody (sic), was fined £3000 plus costs.⁴⁹

If prosecutions were few, there were nonetheless plenty of cases which fell into greyer areas. There were also cases which the UK deemed legal and therefore escaped prosecution, but against which the US objected, such as the cases of civil aircraft and infrared cells to Poland in 1959.⁵⁰ Cain, who has paid particular attention to cases in which COCOM exemption was sought from the 1950s to the 1970s, presents quite a catalogue of British trade goods whose export was opposed by the US, including jet engines to the Soviets and aircraft to Czechoslovakia (1947), copper cable (1953) and tractors (1956) to China, trawlers to the Soviet Union (1953), Terylene to Poland (1959), a telegraph link between Leningrad and Helsinki (1961), and computers to Russia (1961, 1968, 1970–1972) and China (1965, 1966).⁵¹ Other cases pre-emptively questioned in London can be found in the archives. For example, a 1961 application to export under licence grinding machinery for making turbine blades for aircraft production, was notable not only as trade with Egypt only 5 years after Suez (not apparently a concern) but also because ‘in view of Russian influence in Egypt and the many Russian technicians reported to be there, it seems likely that the Russians would have plenty of opportunity of examining the machine’.⁵²

In summary, in the first two decades after the end of World War Two, the UK joined the international (primarily COCOM) system of Cold War containment of strategic goods through export controls, but it also had a host of other measures and justifications for regulation. In practice, most of the recorded prosecutions in cases of export control were not of strategic goods. Strategic goods, on the other hand, were regulated by the COCOM mechanisms, and British firms often ran up against US opposition. It was in this context that the UK prime ministers, such as Harold Macmillan in 1959, began entertaining the idea of leaving COCOM.⁵³

The UK experience of export controls, 1964–1980

The Labour administration under Harold Wilson, which came to power in 1964 inherited the export control system of strategic goods. Legislation enabled the issuing of Strategic Goods (Control) Orders, documents laid before Parliament, which contained lists of embargoed goods, and the same information was promulgated to traders via publications such as the Board of Trade Journal. While the system was not changed radically, strains became apparent, especially from the late 1960s, as the drive of exports of UK high technology conflicted with American aims to contain and prevent the export of such goods to the communist East.

A Strategic Goods (Control) Order had been issued in 1961 and would be replaced in 1967, reflecting changes made at COCOM.⁵⁴ As an indication of the scale and scope of the embargoed goods, the Board of Trade Journal in 1966 publication broken down into munitions (with 20 further categories, from small arms to devices capable of measuring the speed of sound in water), atomic energy (41 categories, from fissionable materials to process control instrumentation), and industrial lists (over 10 groups, over 240 sub-categories, from grinding beds to synthetic films for dielectric use), filled 15 pages in fine print.⁵⁵ The prohibited countries were Albania, Bulgaria, China, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Mongolia, North Korea, North Vietnam, Poland, Romania, Tibet and the USSR. In case there was any doubt, the following instruction was printed in bold:

Manufacturers are reminded that the purpose of these strategic controls will be defeated if technical information or technical know-how concerning embargoed equipment is revealed to the above countries. Great care should therefore be taken to prevent this happening. A particular danger arises when technicians or students from these countries are visiting or are being trained at British factories.⁵⁶

In other words, as we would expect from Daniels and Krige’s argument, the central concern had become the flow of knowledge, including ‘know-how’ or tacit knowledge.

But national industrial strategies and commercial pressures meant that companies, especially in electronics and computing, sought to export to the communist countries, and in doing so strained the COCOM system.⁵⁷ Ferranti, for example, had sold an Argus 500 computer to Czechoslovakia for £18,000 and in 1969 signed contracts with the Czech Institute for Industrial Management and Automation for marketing orders the company hoped would exceed £250,000 in value; in 1971 Ferranti sought to export an integrated circuit manufacturing plant ‘and the transfer of know how’ to Poland.⁵⁸ Meanwhile, the French submitted proposals to COCOM to allow the company Compagnie internationale pour l’informatique (CII) to export and indeed manufacture its computers in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Rumania. In the latter case, France had proceeded without COCOM approval.⁵⁹ In the UK, and indeed France, competition with American computer companies, notably IBM, and with each other, was driving the formation of national champion computer manufacturers. In 1968, ICL had been formed, a single company made from mergers of nearly all British computer manufacturing concerns.⁶⁰ In France, CII had been the product of a national industrial strategy, Plan Calcul, prompted in part by American denial of IBM computers to assist the French H-bomb programme. For companies such as ICL and CII, overseas sales were important. ‘The Americans are particularly sensitive on computers’, summarised one official; European technology, such as computers, might contain American vital components, while computers were the general-purpose machines essential to high-speed computation and modern bureaucracy.⁶¹

In 1968, ICL had sales to the Soviet Union in its sights, and Wilson’s UK government, specifically, the Ministry of Technology, was determined to help.⁶² The Soviet Union aimed to install 32,000 computers by the mid-1970s but lacked the industrial capacity to produce them all, or even one suitable for Gosplan, the technical heart of the Soviet planned economy; hence, it looked for Western supplies. In winter 1969, John Wall, chair of ICL, paid what he considered to be a ‘brief but decisive visit to Moscow’; he ‘saw all the Ministers concerned with computer requirements of the USSR and the rest of Eastern Europe’, and informed the UK Minister of Technology, Tony Benn, that

We are now at the critical stage. If we succeed we can, I believe, persuade the Russians to base their new commercial computers (R Series) upon [ICL’s] System 4 and not upon IBM. We can also obtain substantial additional business – the figures we have put to the Soviet Government envisage orders of between £50/£100 million for the whole of Eastern Europe over the next five years.⁶³

However, for this to happen ‘we must get the … computers, one for Gosplan and one for the Institute of Automation, through the COCOM system’. American companies were both component suppliers (ICL computers used components from Motorola, RCA, Fairchild, Lockheed, Bryant and CDC) but also competitors. ‘It is of maximum importance’, Wall stated, ‘that IBM get no inkling of the present position, otherwise I am sure they will pull every string in Washington to delay the … licences’. Prime Minister Wilson agreed: ‘maximum pressure should be put on the Americans to approve these licences before Christmas, without, of course, revealing the full extent of ICL’s expectations since to do so might alert IBM’, and ‘if the US administration refuses to licence these [computers, a Cabinet committee] should meet to consider whether or not to go ahead with the export of the machines nevertheless’.⁶⁴ UK-US bilateral talks had allowed some flexibility in COCOM rules on computers, an agreement that said ‘the UK could continue to export all but the most powerful computers, but no computer technology or know-how, and that the USA would not try to frustrate the export to us of essential computer components’; but in practice ‘there was a wide divergence in interpretation of the provisions’.⁶⁵ Indeed, persuasion of the Americans to make an exception for ICL’s Gosplan computer would play on a judgment that the US would rather save the Western national-security-based general export control system than insist on its inflexible application, as telegrams to UK diplomats in Washington show.⁶⁶ Flexibility might also depend on relative technological leadership,⁶⁷ or suspected end-use,⁶⁸ or relative intelligence capability.⁶⁹ Such calculations show the extent and the limits of US hegemony.

In 1970, the US vetoed the ICL sale of two more computers to the Soviet Union, destined for the Institute of High Energy Physics at Serpukhov, on the basis of their US-made components, a decision the Daily Express editorialised as ‘intolerable’.⁷⁰ Prime Minister Heath personally appealed to Nixon in a manner that underlined the UK’s subordinate position:

I recall your saying to Henry Kissinger at Camp David that although the United States might not want or be meaning to export such computers, such an item of trade meant much more to the smaller British economy than to the American economy, and you would therefore look favourably at this project when it came before you.⁷¹

Nixon relented, although the reply to Heath’s urgent telegram only came two months later.⁷² Cain credits Heath’s ‘triggering of the President’s memory’ as crucial to the decision.⁷³

Frustration among firms with COCOM had been building up. There was a general problem and more specific problems. ‘With the rapid growth of technology’, noted a Treasury official of the general problem, ‘goods of civil application come increasingly within the scope of the embargo, and the Government are under pressure from industry to bring the Lists up to date’.⁷⁴ A specific problem concerned electronics. Post-war major innovations, such as the silicon transistor in the 1950s and integrated circuits in the 1960s, entered the list embargoed, and as they were built into more and more goods, so these goods came under export control. The glacial change of COCOM lists favoured American businesses. ‘If the present process of making minor adjustments to lists continues’, went one complaint, ‘integrated circuits will be included when they are as common as lamps or other everyday commodities’.⁷⁵ The UK trade body, the Conference of the Electronics Industry, intensified lobbying of the Board of Trade, as well as of the ministers for defence, technology and the Foreign Secretary, in 1967; its view ‘was that the embargo list should be scrapped’.⁷⁶ Its members were ‘anxious that [any review] should result in a list which represented real strategic needs and that the issues were not distorted by the aims of American companies to secure commercial advantage by maintaining items on the list until such time as they were organised to exploit the market of Eastern Europe’.

Nor was electronics the only problematic sector. There was also the suspicion that American companies had ‘poached’ a contract that otherwise would have gone to the UK aircraft company Fairey after it had been referred to COCOM, a case in which civil servants were accused of behaving as if this was a ‘gentle game of cricket’, and not a business with American and French commercial ‘enemies’.⁷⁷ While the US administration eased export controls in 1970,⁷⁸ by 1971, in the light of American refusal to allow Ferranti to build its chip factory in Poland, a decision that, the firm said, might lead to its abandoning production of micro-electronics (and the subsequent loss of 1,500 jobs in Lancashire), there was talk of ‘collapse’ of the COCOM system.⁷⁹

‘The Americans look upon us’, said a British official, ‘as their most reasonable “adversary” in COCOM’.⁸⁰ Indeed, the nations had different objectives. ‘Our aim’, wrote a British official, in revising COCOM lists

is to secure the fullest possible opportunities for our exporters, subject only to overriding strategic considerations. Although the political interests of other countries, (notably the USA and Japan), will probably prevent our getting as much freedom as we should like, it is nevertheless to our interest to keep COCOM in being as an alternative to a general free-for-all among our competitors. In these circumstances, the only hope of progress is to review the COCOM Lists with the aim of getting rid of as many items as we can which are not of strategic importance.⁸¹

What was wrong with a free-for-all? ‘In a free-for-all situation the desire of British industry to out-bid overseas competitors in Eastern markets would lead to substantial differences between United Kingdom commercial and security interests and make it very difficult to administer a fair licensing system over those goods still subject to domestic strategic controls’, noted another official, adding ‘we cannot assume that others would be as scrupulous as ourselves’.⁸² COCOM negotiations followed a well-worn pattern. European allies would press for relaxations to favour exporting businesses. The US, anticipating this, would adopt an exaggeratedly tough opening position, seeking to strengthen and lengthen the COCOM lists. The US attitude towards COCOM ‘veers dangerously near the concept of economic warfare’ (as opposed to the merely defensive justification the UK found reasonable): the US argued, for example, that Soviet incapacity to mass produce reliable equipment meant that high-end computers, for example, had to be expensively made internally; relaxing Western export control would enable the Soviets to make up this military ‘shortfall’; forcing the Soviets to spend was what made it close to economic warfare.⁸³ And the US had the upper hand. US firms were the greatest source of requests for exemptions from COCOM restrictions.⁸⁴ The US government could choose to relax constraints on specific items if it wished, as it did with Intelsat earth stations for China and the Eastern Bloc in 1971 (while objecting to the sale of Rolls-Royce military-grade Spey engines in 1973).⁸⁵ Or it could use the prevalence of American electronic components to enforce constraints. Heath worried that electronic components in Concorde would prevent potential sales to China.⁸⁶ The delayed sale of the ICL computers to the Serpukhov institute, enabled, as noted above, only after a personal appeal from the Prime Minister to the President, came with strings attached: that the UK ‘should support continuation of “tight controls” on computers and technology during the coming COCOM List Review’.⁸⁷ Minor gains in foreign trade were bought by conceding to US hegemony in the control of ‘know how’ in the name of national security.

In summary, the UK felt caught in an inferior position by the net of COCOM rules and regulations. As Christopher Ewart-Biggs, the British Chargé d’Affaires at Paris stated:

Anyone reading this lucidly explained but complicated story must ask themselves whether the game is worth the candle or whether we are in the presence of a kind of bureaucratic coelacanth kept alive by the Americans. … [The] Soviet Union already has the potential to do us fatal damage – all we are doing in COCOM is making it marginally more expensive for them.⁸⁸

Conclusion and UK experience of export controls after 1980

This paper can be thought of as exploring a tension within the historiography of Cold War export controls. Cain, in his study of European responses to the trade embargo, primarily the COCOM system, led by the United States, demonstrates in case after case that the export control system that sought to deny strategic goods to communist powers conflicted with the economic necessity felt within European countries, the UK included, to continue trade with the East. Three decades into the Cold War, the system designed by the Americans seemed inflexible and living beyond its time – a living fossil, like a coelacanth. But for Cain, control of knowledge per se was not central to his analysis. Daniels and Krige, on the other hand, argue that control of knowledge was central and strategic for the United States, primarily to deny advantage to the communist East but also as an expression of American hegemony, a phenomenon Krige elsewhere argues was co-produced with European elites and had scientific knowledge at its heart.⁸⁹

Through fresh archival research discussed throughout this paper I can offer answers to the questions posed in the introduction, but also comment on the historiographical tension. As close allies, British companies, civil servants and politicians worked within the export control system established by the United States but strained against its restrictions on trade. This pattern confirms Cain’s overall picture. Export controls, for the UK, may have shared the framing of national security, but, as I have shown, responded to a host of other demands, including encouraging trade, preservation of sterling, regulation of transborder movement of bullion and precious gems (and indeed livestock), and managing relations with an increasingly postcolonial international system. This baroque variety is not stressed by other historians. Third, the UK did recognise the framing of export controls as a matter of knowledge control, as perhaps most clearly exemplified by the bold printed statement on the lists of embargoed goods, the key paper technology of the system, that the ‘purpose of these strategic controls will be defeated if technical information or technical know-how concerning embargoed equipment is revealed’ to communist countries. I find support, therefore, for one half of Daniels and Krige’s main argument; the second half, that this control was hegemonic is only partially endorsed: the system was followed but arguments made in the UK against it did not, significantly, place knowledge control as the issue.

I will finish by giving an overview of what happened next. From the 1970s onwards, UK policy on export controls continued to be powerfully shaped by US-led demands. In 1976, the influential Bucy report, requested, sponsored and distributed by the Department of Defense and the work of a team of IT businessmen and defence administrators led by a Texas Instruments, Inc. executive, argued that export controls had to focus even further on restricting the export of know-how, to both enemies and allies, in order to preserve US technological leads. One outcome was the closer control of a ‘Militarily Critical Technology List’. The scholar of export controls, Michael Mastanduno, as noted by Daniels and Krige, later ‘interviewed British officials and found little support for either the Bucy report or the “critical technologies” approach’.⁹⁰ But, and this is my main finding in relation to Daniels and Krige’s thesis, the UK was always more constrained and conflicted than the US, and could not simply restrict know-how on the basis of Cold War strategy.⁹¹ This conflict can be seen clearly in a telling response to a request from the Office of the High Commissioner for Australia for advice on ‘whether the export of technical data (blueprints, designs, etc) is subject to export licensing controls’.⁹² Reflecting on the request, a DTI official distinguished between ideal and real practice:

I am attaching a suggested form of draft reply which represents a somewhat idealistic view of the controls and relates to the original purpose … which was not to arm a potential enemy. Many of our controls have a purely political basis and it is not easy to present these complex political issues …⁹³

Indeed, the list of types and reasons for control was long, and reflected a mixture of strategic and, perhaps more often, political choices, including security of arms, conservation of scarce materials, humanity towards animals, exchange controls, preservation of national heritage, observance of GATT rules, trade embargoes against states such as Rhodesia, and arms embargoes for countries such as Cyprus, Taiwan, Portuguese overseas territories, South Africa, Spain, South Vietnam, and partial arms embargoes for Greece, Middle Eastern states, Nigeria, and even the United States during the Vietnam War.⁹⁴ In the 1980s, these choices became further strained as the UK government more vigorously championed arms sales. ‘All applications for the export of defence and internal security equipment’, FCO instructions read in 1986, ‘should therefore be approved unless there are compelling reasons for not doing so’.⁹⁵

Furthermore, in crucial sectors of technology, UK manufacturing capacity was falling behind to the extent that the country was no longer at the negotiating high table. A case in point was supercomputers. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, ICL’s most powerful mainframes were comparable to IBM’s. In the early 1990s, the United States and Japan negotiated export control rules; the UK and other European countries were merely consulted.⁹⁶ For high-end computers, the UK had become very much rule-followers not rule-makers. It did not matter much to the UK when Clinton later decided to greatly reduce supercomputer processing speed restrictions.⁹⁷

In 1990, after years of pressure from allies, the United States agreed to a relaxation of COCOM rules and lists, and the system ended 4 years later. But the end of the Cold War did not mean the end of export controls. The Wassenaar Arrangement, like COCOM, a voluntary export control regime, was founded in 1996, and the more specific Missile Technology Control Regime (founder members including the US and UK), was formed in 1987 and grew as attention turned to states such as Iraq and Libya. Indeed, by some distance the biggest controversy in the history of UK export controls was in this context. The engineering firm Matrix Churchill exported machine tools to Iraq, having been given permission by the Ministry of Defence (a permission the Ministry later denied giving). The trial of Matrix Churchill directors collapsed in 1991; while the Minister of Defence admitted he had been ‘economical with the actualité’ in Parliament. The subsequent Scott Report (1996) into the affair was savage. He cited years of legislative irregularity, lack of ministerial accountability, and jeopardies of justice caused by non-disclosure of government documents at trials.⁹⁸ Scott can also be read as a statement of the lack of attention given to the history and practice of UK export controls, a lack this paper has tried to remedy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Daniels and Krige, Knowledge Regulation, 18.

2. Cain, Economic Statecraft during the Cold War.

3. See note 1 above.

4. Ibid.

5. See note 1 above.

6. Cain, Economic Statecraft during the Cold War, 89, 128, 146 (and in the last instance in a quotation that notes the relative unimportance of knowledge).

7. Reed, “The United Kingdom’s New Export Control Act of 2002 and Its Possible Impact on United Kingdom Universities and Academic Freedom,” 199.

8. See also: Mastanduno, “Trade as a Strategic Weapon.”

9. Førland, Cold Economic Warfare.

10. Cain, Economic Tradecraft during the Cold War, 186.

11. Henshaw, The Origins of COCOM.

12. Adler-Karlsson, Western Economic Warfare 1947–1967; and Henshaw, The Origins of COCOM, 17.

13. Sutton, Western Technology; and Henshaw, The Origins of COCOM, 18.

14. Henshaw cites Michael Mastanduno, “Trade as a Strategic Weapon,” as an example of this third position.

15. Daniels and Krige, Knowledge Regulation, 35, 127.

16. Ibid., 41–2.

17. The 1939 Act was supplemented by two Orders under Defence Regulations 1946 and 1955, the first issued in 1953 made ships over 500 gross tons require a license to visit China or North Korea, the second issued in 1951 required import certificates, further limited goods to the Eastern Bloc and China, and requited licenses from the Admiralty for ship building. Parliamentary debates of 1939 show that the 1939 act was motivated by saving shipping space and foreign exchange, see: UK National Archives (henceforth NA) BT 246/38. “Appendix C. Import, Export and Customs Powers (Defence) Act, 1939,” n.d.

18. NA BT 246/38. Cabinet, Economic Steering Committee. Sub-committee on the removal of quantitative restrictions and tariff policy, “Note by the Board of Trade,” December 1955.

19. NA BT 246/38. Cabinet, Economic Steering Committee. Sub-committee on the removal of quantitative restrictions and tariff policy, “Note by the Board of Trade,” December 1955.

20. NA BT 246/150. “Note on export licensing control,” July 24, 1968, is a concise summary.

21. See Engel, “We are not concerned,” for how aircraft export control strained US-UK relations. See below for electronics, especially computers.

22. NA BT 246/38. “Working Party on Emergency Legislation (Economic Controls). Memorandum by Ministry of Transport & Civil Aviation,” September 24, 1958.

23. NA BT 246/38. Hughes to Speed, 30 April 1958.

24. Hecht, in “The power of nuclear things”, reminds us that this “specialness” of the nuclear, what she calls “nuclearity” could vary according to context.

25. NA BT 246/132. Minutes, Atomic Energy Authority’s export licences, August 11, 1961.

26. NA EG 1/142. “Exports of thorium nitrate required for gas mantle manufacture. Period 1.1.48 to 31.12.48,” 1949.

27. NA EG 1/142, Charles, “Control of export of atomic energy materials,” January 20, 1950.

28. NA EG 1/142. Minutes of ELC, “Restriction of exports of thorium salts,” July 3, 1950.

29. NA EG 1/142. Coward to Frost, May 13, 1958. Rather bizarrely, it was imagined that exporters might artificially irradiate chemicals in order to get round bans, if a special case was made for radio-isotopes: “we still think that the danger is that substances (especially certain chemicals) which are embargoed may be irradiated for a short time in order to export them without licence to strategically undesirable destinations, and we are unable to think of a definition which would distinguish between such substances and genuine radio-isotopes”. Ridley to Frost, August 11, 1958.

30. NA BT 246/132. Marshall to Galaud, September 21, 1955.

31. NA BT 246/132. Marshall to Galaud, July 11, 1955.

32. NA CO 852/1143. Wilson to Dawson, February 24, 1949. “Table III. Historical supply position of commodities for which there are requirements from the US,” 1952.

33. NA CO 852/1143. “Table I. Requirements of scarce materials by quarters. Country; Hong Kong,” 1952.

34. NA BT 246/100. Tables, “Saudi Arabia”, “Syria”, “Lebanon”, “Jordan”, “Israel”, all 1956.

35. NA BT 246/100. Note, by M.H.M. Reid, October 31, 1956. Elkington to Hughes, November 14, 1956. “Exports of arms to Israel and the Arab countries,” undated (1956).

36. NA BT 246/100. Hughes to Elkington, November 9, 1956.

37. NA BT 246/100. Committee on Raw Materials; Suez Working Party, “Implications for OEEC countries of the present raw materials supply situation,” November 27, 1956.

38. NA BT 246/45. Ministry of Defence, Arms Working Party, “Procedure on imposing an export ban,” October 26, 1959. See also BT 246/103, “Ministry of Defence. Arms Working Party. Procedure on imposing an export ban. Note by the Chairman,” February 13, 1957.

39. NA BT 246/44. Bury to Bartlett, August 31, 1955.

40. NA BT 246/108. Elkington to Blake, January 20, 1953. He continued: “when asked about the facts I have to make the weak confession that I know nothing about offences committed against the provisions of Board of Trade Control Orders.”

41. In twelve cases across 1949 to 1954, seven involved diamonds and four gold, and some had a mixture including platinum (bars, wire and sheet), sterling, dollars, travellers’ cheques. Penalties ranged from fines to two years in prison. NA BT 246/108.

42. Now held by the National Portrait Gallery, the c.1627 portrait, attributed to Daniel Mytens, of the physician who discovered the circulation of blood, had been at Rolls Park, Essex, and exported without licence. Bought by a Dr. Prinzmetal, in ignorance, the other men and companies involved were fined £1,050 plus costs. “Pertinax”, “Without prejudice”, 979. See the portrait here: https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitExtended/mw02970/William-Harvey.

43. NA BT 246/108. Order 79,166/52, instituted against Household Machines Export Ltd, Chiva Lerer and Adolf Gerson, September 2, 1953.

44. NA EG 1/142. Comerton to Bick, May 18, 1950.

45. “£36,000 bail in the ‘copper plot’ case,” Evening News, 18 May 1956. BT 246/108. Smith to Cornell, April 5, 1956. “Extract from Metal Bulletin 28.6.60,” 1960.

46. NA BT 246/108. Smith to Elkington, 7 May 1956.

47. NA BT 246/125. “Applications and enquiries for non-Group I goods referred to the Arms Working Party during 1960,” 1961. The licence applications are not marked refused, although a further case of jeeps transshipped from West Germany to Cuba was refused.

48. “£4,575 fines in export case. Special alloy sent to Hungary,” The Times, January 10, 1957. The alloy was ‘Vacon’. The alloy was imported from West Germany but diverted to Hungary from either Antwerp or Rotterdam.

49. NA BT 246/108. “Extract from Evening Standard (page 7) dated 26th June 1959.” The materials were roller bearings, initially ordered by the Engler firm of Zurich, made by Korody Marine Corporation of California, and sent to Rotterdam and then China via Gdynia in Poland. The QC for the defendants said that once “they found out something was wrong, they told lies because they did not want their American suppliers to get into trouble”. “‘Strategic goods’ went to China,” The Times, January 27, 1959.

50. Daniels and Krige, Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America, 129.

51. Cain, Economic Statecraft during the Cold War, 17, 51, 57–58, 85, 94, 99, 100, 118, 121, 123, 128, 158–161.

52. NA BT 246/125. Cornell to Fish, April 4, 1961. “As however that aspect arises in respect to all exports of embargo list items to Egypt (and some other destinations), and as the item is not on the list because of ‘know-how,’ I am inclined to dismiss it from consideration of this case.” In 1960, licenses were granted for exporting radar equipment, Marconi radio spares, radio valves for Egypt and Syria; one request for “tractors and semi-trailers to carry Russian tanks” in Syria was, perhaps unsurprisingly, turned down. NA BT 246/125. ‘“Applications and enquiries for non-Group I goods referred to the Arms Working Party during 1960,” 1961.

53. Cain, Economic Statecraft during the Cold War, 94, 187.

54. Statutory Instruments, 1967 No. 983. Emergency Powers. The Strategic Goods (Control) Order 1967 removed controls from some items (such as electric generators, various metals and alloys, and also, interestingly, “equipment for processing silicon or germanium”) and imposed them on extra items (including neutron generator tubes, Hall effect magnetometers, high speed photographic apparatus, photomultiplier tubes, transistors, and many others).

55. “Consolidated list of goods subject to strategic embargo,” Board of Trade Journal (August 19, 1966), pp. ii-xv.

56. “Consolidated list of goods subject to strategic embargo,” Board of Trade Journal (August 19, 1966), p. ii.

57. See Cain, “Computers and the Cold War” for a detailed overview of computers and COCOM.

58. “Computers for Czechs,” The Times (March 19, 1969). NA T 312/3312. “Proposed export of integrated circuit manufacturing to Poland,” November 15, 1971. See also Cain, Economic Statecraft during the Cold War, 170.

59. NA T 312/3312. “Proposed French export of computer technology to Hungary,” undated (1969).

60. Martin Campbell-Kelly, ICL.

61. T 312/3312. “COCOM list review,” 1971. US components in European technology was a major headache for exporters. Another example would be the American components in the gas chromatographs Perkin-Elmer sought to export to China. In this case even after the US Federal government gave permission, the US company countermanded the order. NA BT 241/2357. Figg to Archer, May 7, 1970.

62. NA BT 241/2082. “Submission of proposed trade and licensing agreements between ICL and Eastern Europe,” June 25, 1968. A memorandum has been signed between Soviet, ICT and English Electric representatives in April; and Cain, Economic Statecraft during the Cold War, 129–132.

63. NA T 312/3312. Wall to Benn, December 8, 1969.

64. NA T 312/3312. Houghton to Smith, December 10, 1969. Approval for the Gosplan computer was subsequently given.

65. Talks had begun January 1969 and produced by June a Statement of Understanding, in which the US undertook “to consider favourably a small number which exceeded [COCOM] cut-offs” so long as diversion to military purposes was unlikely, none of the embargo parameters was greatly exceeded, there were “assurances of peaceful end-use,” the end-use was clearly related to the computer, and verification and reporting measures were in place. NA T 312/3312. “US/UK bilateral talks on computers. London, February 1970,” 1970. “COCOM: FCO letter of 21 May,” 27 May 1970.

66. As one official said: “we must play on their fears of undermining COCOM if they alienate foreign governments and industries.” T 312/3312. Telegram, FCO to Washington, 10 December 1969.

67. English Electric Valve Company’s export of Isocon valves to the Soviet Union was first blocked and then allowed after the Ministry of Defence calculated that research had led to military-use valves that were ‘more advanced’ than the ones being exported. NA T 312/3312. “Isocon tubes,” 10 February 1970. Ferranti’s case for exporting integrated circuit manufacture to Poland in 1971 was eased by the view that the methods were virtually obsolete in the West (although the Ministry of Defence sided with the American view of strategic risk).

68. The export of the British analogue computer HS7-6D to the Soviet Union was queried by the Americans because they were ‘concerned about end-use’. NA T 312/3312. Telegram, FCO to Washington, February 21, 1970. Likewise the sale of ICL 1906A computers to the Serpukhov nuclear science centre in 1971 depended on judgments of military connections.

69. Judgements about end-use for example depended on intelligence assessments, and as a British official noted, reflecting on COCOM, “we are seldom likely to win an argument with the Americans on an issue of pure intelligence, partly because their resources are so much greater than ours, and partly because their intelligence community tends to take a narrower view on these matters than ours.” NA T 312/3312. Combs to Harvey, May 21, 1970.

70. “A lesson to be learned,” Daily Express (December 14, 1970); and Cain, Economic Statecraft during the Cold War, 158–163, 160. Daniels, “Safeguarding Détente,” 760.

71. NA BT 241/2357. Telegram, Heath to Nixon, March 16, 1971.

72. NA BT 241/2357. Nixon to Heath, May 12, 1971.

73. Cain, Economic Statecraft during the Cold War, 161.

74. NA T 312/3312. Beavan to Jones, December 4, 1970.

75. NA BT 241/2082. “The strategic embargo,” June 27, 1968.

76. NA BT 241/2082. “Note of a meeting with Admiral Grant, Secretary of the Conference of the Electronics Industry,” January 25, 1968. The Conference of the Electronics Industry represented nine manufacturers’ associations, covering aerospace, electronics, valves, radio and scientific instruments.

77. NA BT 241/2082. Grant to McMahon, May 22, 1968. “One cannot help sometimes wondering whose side people are on! There is no doubt whatever that, in the business context, the Americans, French, etc, are our enemies and will seize every opportunity to get the better of us as a result of the ‘gentle game of cricket on the rectory lawn’ that our people seem to play.”

78. “US export controls now eased on 1,100 products,” Commerce Today (November 2, 1970), p. 37.

79. NA T 312/3312. Beavan, “Export of Ferranti micro-circuit equipment to Poland,” November 16, 1971.

80. NA T 312/3312. “COCOM list review,” 1971.

81. NA T 312/3312. Beavan to Jones, December 4, 1970. Japan opposed the “China differential,” a US insistence on a tougher line on China to balance any relaxation towards the Soviet Union.

82. NA T 312/3312. “COCOM list review,” 1971.

83. T 312/3312. “COCOM list review,” 1971. For economic warfare, see: Dobson, US Economic Statecraft, and for an earlier period: Sørensen, “Economic recovery versus containment: the Anglo-American controversy over East-West Trade, 1947–1951.”

84. Between 1971 and 1975 about 50 percent of the volume of Cocom exception requests (2178 out of 4423) came from the US, note Daniels and Krige, Knowledge Regulation, 173.

85. NA BT 241/2358. Telegram, August 14, 1973, objections to Spey sale. The case rumbled on under Wilson’s second term and Callaghan’s Labour government.

86. NA BT 241/2358. Bridges, “Foreign policy restraints on trade,” May 31, 1972, records many additional concerns of Heath’s, including what he saw as unwelcome restriction of: sales of arms to Greek police in Cyprus, arms to Portugal that might be used in Africa, frigates to Brazil, Vosper corvettes to India, and military equipment to Yugoslavia.

87. NA BT 241/2357. Telegram, Washington to Cromer, May 18, 1971, reports that this request for support was ‘specifically’ made by Nixon. Graham to Moon, May 19, 1971.

88. NA BT 241/2358. FCO, Diplomatic Report 478/73, November 13, 1973.

89. Daniels and Krige, Knowledge Regulation. Krige, American Hegemony, 3.

90. Mastanduno, “Trade as a Strategic Weapon”; Daniels and Krige, Knowledge Regulation, 188.

91. For this friction, see: Jackson, The Economic Cold War.

92. NA BT 246/150. Edwards to Relton, November 16, 1972.

93. NA BT 246/150. Whitby to Relton, November 24, 1972.

94. NA VT 246/159. “Note on export licensing control,” and secret annex “Export controls. Background note,” July 1968.

95. NA FCO 46/5473. “General considerations concerning the political approval for the export of defence and internal security equipment,” undated (1986).

96. NA FCO 98/4926. Hosker to Nunn, June 19, 1991.

97. Daniels and Krige, Knowledge Regulation, 366.

98. Report of the Inquiry into the Export of Defence Equipment and Dual-Use Goods to Iraq and Related Prosecutions (Scott Report).