COCOM

The Cold War-era multilateral export-control regime through which NATO members (plus Japan) restricted sales of strategically sensitive, dual-use technology to the Soviet bloc — active from 1949 to its 1994 dissolution, administered outside any single member state's ordinary trade bureaucracy.

Matters to this vault as the regulatory regime that actually governed the Toshiba-Kongsberg submarine-quieting scandal — Toshiba Machine's 1982–84 sale of CNC milling equipment to the USSR violated COCOM export licensing, not any U.S. investment-review statute. This makes COCOM structurally distinct from CFIUS/Executive Order 11858's Exon-Florio regime, which separately governed the unrelated Fujitsu-Fairchild matter — a distinction the vault's 1980s Japan-panic cluster needed made explicit, since the two episodes are otherwise an embedding false friend.

References

• claim-cfius-exon-florio-and-cocom-are-categorically-different-legal-regimes
• claim-toshiba-machine-sold-ussr-submarine-quieting-tools
• observation-fujitsu-fairchild-toshiba-kongsberg-cosine-pairing-is-embedding-false-friend
• MOC: moc-1980s-us-japan-tech-panic