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Show Grass Roots America U.S. Must Never Sell Off Technical Superiority By Jerry Martin The massive American Ameri-can wheat sale to the Soviet Union is being hailed as the opening of a new era of trade between be-tween the world's two super-powers, an era which could lead to peace and harmony. Because everyone is weary of Cold War tension, ten-sion, many Americans undoubtedly favor greater great-er commercial contact with the Soviets. But, based on bitter experience, experi-ence, we must never forget for-get that in dealing with the Communists, we are dealing with a political regime pledged to bury capitalism and America along with it. Almost before the last toast during President Nixon's visit to Moscow, there was talk of big new trade deals. Nation's Business- magazine reports re-ports that the Soviets have an ambitious shop- ping list: "computers and other electronical devices; paper-making machinery; oil and gas exploration equipment, extraction, refining and transmission equipment and processes. . . ." In short, the most attractive at-tractive trade to the Russians Rus-sians is not our consumer consum-er goods, but the technology tech-nology that produces them. It's one thing to sell surplus American wheat or other foods. We can always shut off these shipments. Besides, by offering America's food surplus for barter, we emphasize communism's commun-ism's chronic failure to produce even a stable food supply for the people peo-ple it controls. But selling technology is something else. Instead In-stead of fostering peace, this could actually encourage en-courage future aggression aggres-sion by (1) strengthening the Soviet economy and thus, aiding communism's commun-ism's hold on the Soviet people and (2) increasing increas-ing the Soviet ability to compete with the U.S. in the advanced technology technol-ogy necessary for a modern mod-ern economy or a modern war. . It also can drastically affect the U.S. economy and whatever military advantage we still enjoy because of America's advanced technology. Our technical lead is more important than many people suspect. It was not a Russian who first went to the moon. It was an American. Ameri-can. And the technology that enabled us to be first to the moon is crucially cru-cially important to any nation that wants to be No. 1. Unfortunately, America Ameri-ca has been selling its technical advantage, to any nation that will buy. Between 1960 and 1970, the only area of foreign trade where the United States did well was in exporting capital goods. We once sold the automobiles, auto-mobiles, the electronic devices and other consumer con-sumer goods to a world hungry for these products. prod-ucts. In the past decade, we started selling the equipment necessary to build automobiles and other consumer goods. Instead of selling the eggs (the finished products), pro-ducts), we now are selling sell-ing the hens (whole plants and equipment, technical processes, computers). The production this technology helped make possible allows other countries to build up their export sales, at our expense. This brings |