Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls

COCOM redirects here. For information about the United States Combatant Commands, see Unified Combatant Command.

CoCom is an acronym for Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls. CoCom was established in the first five years after the end of WWII, during the Cold War, to put an embargo on COMECON countries.

CoCom had 17 member states: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.

In addition there were a number of cooperating countries, such as Austria, Finland, Ireland, New Zealand, Sweden and Switzerland.

It was revealed in 1987 that Japan's Toshiba Machine Company had supplied eight computer-guided propeller milling machines to the Soviet Union between 1982 and 1984, an action that violated the CoCom regulations. It was argued in the United States that this technology greatly improved the ability of Soviet submarines to evade detection, leading to a significant cost for the United States to improve its own technology once more. In 1988, Congress moved to sanction Toshiba and bar imports into the United States of Toshiba products.

CoCom ceased to function on March 31, 1994, and the then-current control list of embargoed goods was retained by the member nations until the successor, the Wassenaar Arrangement, was established.

In GPS technology, the phrasing "COCOM Limits" is also used to refer to a limit placed to GPS tracking devices that should disable tracking when the device realizes to be moving faster than 1,000 knots (approximately 515 m/s or 1,852 km/h) at an altitude higher than 60,000 ft (approximately 18,000 m). This was intended to avoid the use of GPS in ICBM-like applications.

Some manufacturers apply this limit literally (disable when both limits are reached), other manufacturers disable tracking when a single limit is reached.

See also

• International Traffic in Arms Regulations
• Arms Export Control Act
• Defense Security Cooperation Agency
• Export Control Classification Number

References

• Mastanduno, M. (1992). Economic containment: CoCom and the politics of East-West trade. Cornell paperbacks. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y.
• Noehrenberg, E. H. (1995). Multilateral export controls and international regime theory: the effectiveness of COCOM. Pro Universitate.
• Yasuhara, Y. (1991). The myth of free trade: the origins of COCOM 1945-1950. The Japanese Journal of American Studies, 4.

External links

• CoCom control lists, as published by the British Government
• CFAO 36-56 -- Export Controls Over Strategic and Military Goods
• Establishment of New General License for Shipments to Country Groups QWY and the People's Republic of China
• The reincarnation of CoCom: Explaining post-war export controls
• Export Control Blog