[sacw] PlayStation's ... missile-guidance system

[Harsh Kapoor]

=46YI
(South Asians Against Nukes)
-------------------------------------

Location: "http://www.economist.com/editorial/freeforall/current/wb1680.html=
"

The Economist April 22-28, 2000

War games T O K Y O=20
ALL the effort that Sony's engineers put in to making the recently
launched PlayStation2 games console a realistic experience has paid
off=97rather too well, so far as the Japanese government is concerned. The
PS2 has had export controls slapped on it, on the grounds that, when
coupled with a video camera, it could make an ideal missile-guidance
system.
William Perry, a former American defence secretary, is distantly
responsible. In 1994, he decided that the Pentagon should buy most of its
high-tech gizmos off the shelf from commercial suppliers, rather than have
them engineered specially for the battlefield by defence contractors. Mr
Perry was less impressed by the huge savings offered by mass producers such
as Sony, Toshiba or Xerox, than by the impressive levels of performance and
reliability of their products.
The North Koreans have been among Mr Perry's most eager disciples. The
radar and global-positioning equipment found inside a North Korean
submarine captured by the South Koreans in 1998 were based on popular
gadgets made by Japanese consumer-electronics firms. There were lots of red
faces in Tokyo when the South Koreans paraded their catch.
The PS2's central processor, a 128-bit microprocessor developed by Sony
and Toshiba, has twice the raw number-crunching power of Intel's most
advanced Pentium chip used in professional desktop computers. Its big
graphics processor allows it to display moving images with super pin-sharp
quality found only in the cinema. It also incorporates an eight-megabyte
memory card and a digital video-disc player.
Such provocations have led the Japanese government to designate the
machine a "general-purpose product related to conventional weapons". Under
the Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Control Law, this requires anyone
wishing to take more than =A550,000 ($478) worth of such equipment out of
Japan to get permission from the Ministry of International Trade and
Industry. Violators trying to sneak box-loads of PS2s abroad could face up
to five years in jail. Since 40% of the company's operating profit (though
only 10% of sales) comes from its games division, investors took the news
seriously enough to send the company's share price tumbling.
Rogue states should be all right, though. The PS2 retails at =A539,800, so
North Korean agents, as thick as ever on the streets of Tokyo, can carry
them out, unmonitored, one by one.