On March 19, 1987, the Pentagon announced that it had learned the Soviet Union acquired machine tooling for making submarine propeller blades from Toshiba Machine, a subsidiary of Toshiba Corporation, better known as a major electronics manufacturer. Between the machine tools the Soviets acquired from Toshiba and Norwegian weapons maker Kongsberg, the Soviets were able to make their submarines harder to detect, identify, and track.
One of the results of scandal was the U.S. Government banning its own use of Toshiba computers and certain other products from Toshiba until the end of 1991. The Japanese government was unhappy with the ban, but did not intervene. This Cold War scandal is largely forgotten today but was a major incident at the time.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
