------ Forwarded Message E X E C U T I V E O F F I C E O F T H E P R E S I D E N T THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary ______________________________________________________________ For Immediate Release February 22, 1993 REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT TO SILICON GRAPHICS EMPLOYEES Silicon Graphics Mountain View, California 10:00 A.M. PST .... (All sorts of higly intereresting but ultimately irrelevant to this list's purpose deleted) THE VICE PRESIDENT: Let me start off on that. As you may know, the President appointed as the Deputy Secretary of Commerce John Rollwagon who was the CEO at Cray. And he and Ron Brown, the Secretary of Commerce, have been reviewing a lot of procedures for stimulating U.S. exports around the world. And we're going to be a very export-oriented administration. However, we are also going to keep a close eye on the legitimate concerns that have in the past limited the free export of some technologies that can make a dramatic difference in the ability of a Gaddafi or a Saddam Hussein to develop nuclear weapons or ICBMs. Now, in some cases in the past, these legitimate concerns have been interpreted and implemented in a way that has frustrated American business unnecessarily. There are, for example, some software packages that are available off the shelves in stores here that are, nevertheless, prohibited from being exported. And sometimes that's a little bit unrealistic. On the other hand, there are some in business who are understandably so anxious to find new customers that they will not necessarily pay as much attention as they should to what the customer might use this new capacity for. And that's a legitimate role for government, to say, hold on, the world will be a much more dangerous place if we have 15 or 20 nuclear powers instead of five or six; and if they have ICBMs and so forth. So it's a balance that has to be struck very carefully. And we're going to have a tough nonproliferation strategy while we promote more exports. THE PRESIDENT: If I might just add to that -- the short answer to your question, of course, is yes, we're going to review this. And let me give you one example. Ken told me last night at dinner that --he said, if we export substantially the same product to the same person, if we have to get one permit to do it we'll have to get a permit every time we want to do the same thing over and over again. They always give it to us, but we have to wait six months and it puts us behind the competitive arc. Now, that's something that ought to be changed, and we'll try to change that. We also know that some of our export controls, rules and regulations, are a function of the realities of the Cold War which aren't there anymore. But what the Vice President was trying to say, and he said so well -- I just want to reemphasize -- our biggest security problem in the future may well be the proliferation of nuclear and nonnuclear, like biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction to small, by our standards, countries with militant governments who may not care what the damage to their own people could be. So that's something we have to watch very closely. But apart from that, we want to move this much more quickly and we'll try to slash a lot of the time delays where we ought to be doing these things. ..... (even more material deleted) END10:41 A.M. PST ------ End of Forwarded Message If anyone is interested in the whole conference, I weill put it up on the CPSR Internet Library at cpsr.org /cpsr/clinton. Dave