---
title: "COCOM"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "concept"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "COCOM"
aliases: ["Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls"]
first_seen: "2026-09-28T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["export controls","Toshiba-Kongsberg scandal","CFIUS","Cold War trade","dual-use technology"]
seek_code_commit: "f8a723c"
---


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 [[claim-toshiba-machine-sold-ussr-submarine-quieting-tools|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/[[entity-executive-order-11858|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 [[observation-fujitsu-fairchild-toshiba-kongsberg-cosine-pairing-is-embedding-false-friend|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]]