The Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls — COCOM — tightens its rules on space-grade hardware and software flowing from Western countries to the Eastern Bloc, classifying whole categories of routine civilian components as militarily sensitive.
The 1987 Toshiba-Kongsberg scandal, in which dual-use machine tools enabled quieter Soviet submarine propellers, supplies the political momentum for the most stringent revisions COCOM ever makes. Western component suppliers are forced to rewrite their export procedures — a reform that travels intact, post-Cold-War, into the Wassenaar Arrangement and survives to this day.