The Desirability and Feasibility of Strategic Trade Controls on Emerging Technologies

The more difficult and expensive it is to acquire the necessary facilities and expertise, the higher the barriers to entry will be and the longer indigenous development will take regardless of material availability. [...] The quadrants, and positions within each quadrant, that the different technologies occupy are determined based on the sectoral analyses, with the assessment of desirability and feasibility of trade control policies for each technology visualized through their positions along the axes and indicating spectra of negative to positive desirability and feasibility estimations. [...] Although the specific positions for each technology are subjective with respect to the scope of policies considered and the assessment of the technical traits considered, we indicate their locations with the specific scope of trade control policies and based on our assessment of the current state of technical and political CISSM Report | The Desirability and Feasibility of Strategic Trade Controls. [...] Which approach was chosen and how well it worked depended on four factors: the current global security and economic context, the characteristics of the technology in question, the current state of technological development and distribution, and the relevant stakeholders’ interests and ideas about managing dual-use technology. [...] They compare and contrast how efforts to control the spread of nuclear technologies compared with those to control advanced conventional weapons and dual-use capabilities during the Cold War, and how the differing worldviews and national security strategies of the Clinton and George W.