362 JÜRGEN DANYEL AND ANNETTE SCHUHMANN
the tide of public opinion really began to turn against it after the reactor
meltdowns in Harrisburg in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986.^38
The Eastern Bloc states also tried to launch themselves into the Infor-
mation Age by tapping into enormous fi nancial and human resources in
the 1970s and 1980s. These countries—most especially the USSR—had
been developing computing and data processing technology since the
1950s. They had also created similarly ambitious scientifi c programs and
innovation project cycles comparable to those in the West. In the GDR,
computer science and the development of “electronic computing tech-
nology” fl ourished under the technocratic reforms that were undertaken
in the 1960s and the additional support that came through the cyber-
netics boom. Yet, before long, the SED put a political damper on the
technology-friendly social climate that had welcomed rationalization and
improved effi ciency, as well as the cultures of expertise that had accom-
panied it. It had become clear rather quickly that it would not be easier
and faster to mobilize the resources necessary to support technological
innovations and their implementation within a centralized planned econ-
omy. Political trends and poor decisions, bureaucratic planning mech-
anisms, rivalries between local and regional authorities, diffi culties in
cooperation and the division of labor with the COMECON, not to mention
a simple lack of investment funds, plagued computerization in the East-
ern Bloc at the everyday level.^39
All the countries of the Communist bloc were dependent on the trans-
fer of technology from the West in order to further their own development
of computer and software technology.^40 It proved to be extremely diffi cult
to ensure this transfer given the conditions of the American embargo on
advanced technologies and the politically motivated move toward iso-
lation vis-à-vis the West. Without the special conditions that applied to
German-German trade, and the acquisition activities and industrial es-
pionage practiced by the main reconnaissance offi ce (Hauptverwaltung
Aufklärung, or HVA) of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (the Stasi),
the GDR would never have been able to achieve its fully fl edged micro-
electronics development program with its prestigious one-megabyte
memory chip project.^41 In fact, it was an open secret that the privileged
key microelectronics factories in the GDR, such as VEB Carl Zeiss Jena,
often took technology that had been acquired from IBM in the West and
either replicated it or just put a new label on it.^42 The GDR also made
several attempts to circumvent the embargoes in the West in order to
acquire production documents and licenses to manufacture memory
chips and even entire printed circuit boards. A planned deal that had
taken a great deal of negotiation with the Japanese corporation Toshiba
in 1986 broke down in 1987 before it even really got going. The Jap-