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Science, Technology and International Politics Author(s): William T. R. Fox Source: International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Mar., 1968), pp. 1-15 Published by: Wiley on behalf of The International Studies Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3013555 . Accessed: 05/12/2013 19:19 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Wiley and The International Studies Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to International Studies Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 200.62.245.27 on Thu, 5 Dec 2013 19:19:20 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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  • Science, Technology and International PoliticsAuthor(s): William T. R. FoxSource: International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Mar., 1968), pp. 1-15Published by: Wiley on behalf of The International Studies AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3013555 .Accessed: 05/12/2013 19:19

    Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

    .

    JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

    .

    Wiley and The International Studies Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to International Studies Quarterly.

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  • Science, Technology and International Politics*

    WILLIAM T. R. Fox COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

    As the supexpowers of the 1960's have been discovering that they can neither make war on nor make peace with each other, the arms race between them has been giving way to a space race, itself part of a larger science and technology race. The space industry is today one of the world's greatest, even though -there are only two major customers for its product, the governments of the Soviet Union and of the United States. Leadership in that industry is a hallmark of superpower status, but the entrance fee and the annual dues are both so high that the space club will remain small.

    The Soviet-American science race is only the most dramatic reason for a student of world politics to pay close attention to changes, and especially to differential changes, in the world's science and technology. There is probably no other resource that can be made to serve so many alternative national purposes as a nation's scientific and technical manpower. There is no better indicator of tomorrow's wealth and power than today's science capability. Indeed, this resource is so fungible and so precious that if one wanted to plot the position of states of the world in the 1980's along a curve of economic advancement (and of per capita influence in world politics), a very good measure would be the

    * This essay was prepared for delivery as the Keynote Address at the Eighth Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, New York City, April 14, 1967. It is very largely a by-product of the author's participation in the organizing phase of the program of Columbia University's new Institute for the Study of Science in Human Affairs. The support of that Institute is gratefully acknowledged.

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  • 2 WILLIAM T. R. Fox

    proportion of each country's whole population enrolled as univer- sity-level scientific and technical students in the 1960's.

    "Science and world affairs" is by no means an unworked area. Christopher Wright's survey made in 1962 listed some 350 items.1 What he modestly called "a tentative guide" was followed in 1964 by a less selective State Department Foreign Service Institute bibli- ography.2 It listed more than two thousand items. Where there is so much smoke there must be at least a little fire.

    Nothing very useful can be said about science in general and how it is related to international politics in general. There are, how- ever, two ways of identifying particular relationships between science and world politics about which useful things can be said. One may list conventional topics in the academic study of inter- national relations and then ask about the scientific and technological aspects of each of these conventional topics. Alternatively, one may list the main headings appropriate to the study of science affairs and ask about the international political aspects of each of those topics.

    A conventional course in international politics might include several lectures on basic power factors. One of the most important would deal with the degree of industrialization of the more than one hundred sovereign states. The Industrial Revolution did not occur everywhere at the same time or at the same rate. One of the most important ways in which the influence of any particular sci- entific or technological development upon industrial society has affected world politics derives from the transient effects of that development while one or only a few states are able to utilize it. Consider, for example, the probable effects on world politics if Nazi Germany had had as much success in nuclear technology as it had in rocket technology. Or consider how different Western Europe might look today if both the United States and the Soviet Union had had atomic weapons in the period 1945 to 1950, so that the United States could not have held an atomic umbrella over the

    1 "A Tentative Guide to Writings on Science and World Affairs," Council for Atomic Age Studies (New York: Columbia University, 1962).

    2 Bibliography on Science and World Affairs (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, November, 1964). One reason why this bibli- ography is so large is that modem science operates on world politics largely indirectly via technology, so that "science and world affairs" turns out to be "science, technology, and world politics."

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  • SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 3

    then almost -completely unarmed Europe without risking two-way atomic war. Being first in science has a political significance which it did not have in earlier times.

    Another whole set of effects derives from the unequal benefits which a given technological advance permanently confers once it is fully assimilated into the world political system. Compare the effects of the Industrial Revolution on coal-and-iron rich England and on coal-and-iron poor Ireland. A recurring theme in the geo- political writings of the 1940's was the disparate effects of a trans- portation revolution on the great powers in their competition with each other, the improvement in the relative efficiency of overland transport as against overseas transport which was felt to have had a major influence in reshaping the whole international order.3 Great continent-size states, such as the United States and Russia, could be integrated politically and economically. Centrally located Germany could gain power in the age of t-he railroad, at the expense of less centrally located European power competitors. But it does not take science leadership to enjoy the natural advantages in location or resource which a new technology may ultimately confer. Otherwise, the citizens of oil-rich Kuwait would hardly enjoy in 1968 an aver- age income about equal to that of citizens of the United States.

    There may be another set of lectures dealing with the actors in world politics. Here it might be appropriate to consider how scien- tific and technological changes affect the relative importance of local, national, and transnational groups in world politics. It seems clear that for most of the past two centuries the advancing tech- nology of communication and transportation-the technology of the railroad, the telegraph, the mass newspaper, the motor car, the airplane, radio and television-has increased mobility and contact within individual countries relatively more than it did between countries. This may no longer be true in Western Europe, and the increasing efficiency of world-wide networks of communication and transportation may be creating politically important transnational communities and interest groups of various kinds.

    One student of the impact of atomic age inventions on our state

    3 See, for example, Harold and Margaret Sprout, eds., Foundations of National Power (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1945), Chapters IV, V and VI for pertinent selections not only from their own writings but from those of William T. R. Fox, Nicholas J. Spykman and Robert Strausz-Hup6

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  • 4 WILLIAM T. R. Fox

    system, John Herz, has concluded that these inventions are causing the demise of the territorial state.4 This ought to mean that the nation-state will decline in importance as one of the categories of actors in world politics and that only the superpowers or the bloc actors will be important in the future. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, some of the territorial states do not seem to have gotten the word. Herz wrote before the balance of terror had begun to appear quite stable and before lack of discipline and polycentrism had become apparent on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The tech- nological gap between the United States and its Western European NATO partners which has attracted so much attention in the press recently also helps to explain some of the Western polycentrism. The United States government does not appear to be greatly con- cerned about closing this gap, even though the gap is a threat to alliance solidarity and thus limits the efficiency of perfornance of the bloc actor in today's bipolar competition.

    The proliferation of new states in the non-European world raises questions as to how small a state can be and still enjoy access to the benefits of advanced science and technology, and to what extent the problems created by the new pattern of micro-sovereignties can be overcome by the desire for such access. In theory, either common services arrangements of the Kenya-Uganda-Tanzania type, or func- tional international organizations such as the World Health Organ- ization, open the way for a solution to these problems.

    As one turns to discuss the Western state system itself, and par- ticularly the transformation of our multiple sovereignty system from a balance of power system to a loose bipolar system, one may specu- late on the role which scientific and technological changes have played in this transformation. To do this one must engage in an activity which might be called `hindcasting" or, perhaps more ele- gantly, "retrospective forecasting." Let us imagine that there had been no such thing as two world wars. How different would the world of 1967 look? Would the secrets of atomic energy have been discovered sooner or later, and on which side of the Atlantic Ocean? Would not the pace of scientific and technological advance have quickened in the twentieth century without the spur of war and

    4 International Politics in the Atomic Age (New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 1959).

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  • SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 5

    defense mobilization? Is there any reason why the advantages of scale in research and development which the United States and perhaps also the Soviet Union enjoy today would not also be en- joyed by a United States and a Russia which had avoided participa- tion in two protracted world wars? One cannot separate out the strand of scientific and technological change from all the other dynamic forces, but it is instructive to make the effort.

    Governing ideas in world politics may also be derived from the science of t-he time, sometimes spuriously. For example, social Dar- winism, the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, provided a ration- ale for foreign policies with untold human costs. For Darwin himself the survival of the fittest referred to a competition between species and not between members of the same species who happened to differ only slightly in the color of their skin, eyes, and hair, and sometimes did not even differ that much. Query: Are there similar vulgarizations of twentieth-century science which today corrupt thinking about foreign affairs?

    Scientific and technological changes affect the institutions for the settlement of interstate disputes. The slow-acting sanctions of Article 16 of the League Covenant would have been wholly ineffec- tive in any conflict in which irretrievably decisive events occurred in the first hours of military action. If technology has rendered League of Nations style collective security obsolete, it has had an even more devastating effect on the utility and cost of general war as a device for resolving disputes among first-ranking powers. Query: Are newly available scientific and technological resources being effectively harnessed to the task of strengthening other kinds of institutions for resolving international disputes?

    Part of the answer may be found by examining the ways in which the new science and the new technology have altered the objectives of foreign and military policy. If even for the first-ranking powers it is something called deterrence rather than something called victory by which a government hopes to avoid military de- feat, then reciprocal deterrence may be performing some of the tasks formerly handled by war or by a functioning machinery of collective security.

    There are North-South problems as well as East-West problems. The promise of science is shaping both the sense of what advanced industrial countries can do about less developed countries and the

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  • 6 WILLIAM T. R. Fox

    demands which the less developed countries are making on the advanced ones. The stigmata of new sovereignties may be a national university, a national airline, a national steel mill, and a national delegation at the United Nations larger than the staff of the Foreign Office in the national capital; but ecological, demographic, and nu- tritional studies may be more important in the management of the rising and as yet unfulfilled expectations of the burgeoning popula- tions outside North America and Europe.

    All this is rather conventional speculation, but it does suggest how much work can be done by students of intemational politics, using conventional categories of analysis and conventional methods of social science research Students of international relations are hampered by lack of science literacy and by the limited demands which they can make upon natural scientists for help in overcoming this scientific illiteracy. The natural scientists can make them better students of international politics. Students of international politics, however, cannot make natural scientists better scientists, though they may occasionally make them more effective citizens.

    Let us now approach science and international politics from the other direction. Let us list some of the main categories for the study of science affairs and ask something about the world political aspect of each of those topics. Thus, one might identify for discus- sion such topics as the following: (1) science and the scientific method in the study of international politics; (2) national and trans- national scientific communities and their impact on the world politi- cal process; (3) members of the scientific establishment as advisers to governments (and to international organizations) in decisions affecting the world political process; (4) scientific considerations affecting decisions in the world political process; (5) decisions about science as an institution in the modern world made by na- tional governments and international organizations; (6) the dream of science as the way out of "politics"-science and a depoliticized world; (7) science and technology as semi-independent variables in world politics; and, above all, (8) the problem of cutting down innovative-adaptive time in adjusting to scientific and technological change.

    The political scientist has always been under some pressure, a good deal of it self-administered, to live up to the pretensions of the name of his discipline. Others may be skeptical of how scientific

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  • SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 7

    political science is and perhaps not even understand how little pre- tension was involved in the development of the discipline's name. If it is presumptuous to talk about a science of politics, it is even more so to talk about a science of international politics. One can, however, talk about the role of science in international politics. The scientific method, and particularly the need for conducting and re- porting on research in such a fashion that another scholar can repli- cate as much of it as he wishes and make his own judgment about the accuracy and objectivity of the prior research, have long oper- ated to keep the student of international politics honest. But when one talks about science and the study of international politics, one is talking about something more specific. The new paradigms of science have stimulated the construction of new paradigms for the study of world politics. A most obvious example is the effect of Norbert Wiener's cybernetic studies on Karl Deutsch's conception of politics. Deutsch conceives of politics more as a steering device than as a power competition.5 Many statesmen will be glad to learn that they are not mere politicians but helmsmen on the spaceship Earth.

    Scientific advances have affected the study of international poli- tics in another way, for they have altered research technology as well as research paradigms. Data collection, data classification, data storage, data retrieval, and data maniipulation all take forms hardly imaginable only a few years ago. The study of international rela- tions is inevitably affected by the culture of science in which it now has to be carried on.

    One cannot, perhaps, speak of the American science community or the international science community as new actors in the world political process. Scientists are no more likely to agree about United States policy in Vietnam or United States policy toward the test ban than are initernational lawyers or professors of international politics. The national and international science communities have, however, begun to develop interests in questions of public policy, so that even where scientists disagree, the disagreement tends to take the form of arguing about the significance of various scientific considerations. The student of world politics needs to know who are the policy-sensitive and policy-influential members of these

    5 The Nerves of Government (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963).

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  • 8 WILLIAM T. R. Fox

    national and international scientific communities.6 He needs to un- derstand the consequences of international contacts between scien- tists from various countries. Pugwash conferences, first sponsored by the Canadian-born, Russian-sympathizing American capitalist, Cyrus Eaton, are only the most dramatic example. The student of functionalism may find interesting data in the Pugwash experience. It is ironic that social scientists, for whom meetings with their op- posite numbers on the other side of the Iron and Bamboo Curtains might be a professionally useful experience, have no Pugwash con- ferences to report. One need not, however, accept the explanation which J. Robert Oppenheimer once gave that perhaps social scien- tists do not have anything to say to each other.

    Morton Grodzins invented the colorful term, "traitriot," to de- scribe the patriot-traitor that each of us is. 7 He described a group of psychiatrists who were asked how they would handle information relevant to national security which they stumbled on in their doctor- client relationship. ITey reconciled the requirements of the Hip- pocratic oath and of loyal citizenship in a variety of ways. Grodzins might equally well have been talking about the guilt-ridden scien- tists of Los Alamos who made atomic weapons to be used against Adolf Hitler in a European war and saw them used against an almost defeated Japan in an Asiatic war. How much one or another of us ought to be willing to risk national security in order to slow down the nuclear arms race is only partly a matter of technical judgment, as public disagreements among world renowned Ameri- can physicists constantly remind us. Even in weighing a potential sacrifice of national interest in relation to a potential gain in some transnational interest, we are, as moral men with plural values and plural loyalties, behaving as "traitriots." The policy perspectives of influential scientists are as worthy of study as those of high-level military men, diplomats, and professional politicians. The unex- plicated value preferences of a statesman's scientific advisers pose the same kind of problem for the responsible statesman-politician

    6 On the composition and characteristics of the American science com- munity and on govemment use of 'scientific advice, see Robert Gilpin and Christopher Wright, eds., Scientists and National Policy Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964).

    7 See "The Traitriot," Chapter 12 in his The Loyal and the Disloyal (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 208-16.

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  • SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND INTERNAnONAL POLIrICS 9

    as the unexplicated value preferences of other expert advisers.8 The professional civil servant, the professional diplomat, and the pro- fessional soldier who have for more than a century been learning how to give value-neutral advice may have lessons to teach the newcomers to the policy process.

    Query: Do social scientists, and particularly students of inter- national relations, perhaps feel that they are at least as much en- titled to whisper directly into the ear of the statesman-politician as the natural scientist? Do the social scientists fear about the natural scientists what they have sometimes feared about soldiers, that if the physicists are too close to the seat of power, their advice may exhibit what Alfred Vagts has called the "vice of immediacy," so that the statesman-politician gets fractional advice to deal with whole policy? Is it the secret desire of students of world politics that they should stand between the statesman-politician and all other experts, including natural scientists and soldiers, because they believe that their distinctive talent is to be able to advise on whole policy? So far, they have not succeeded in getting the President to appoint a social science adviser to serve alongside his natural science adviser.

    The American student of world politics may sometimes wonder how the Americans wandered into a race with their British and French friends to see on which side of the Atlantic the first super- sonic transport would fly. The science and technology race, ever since the trauma of Sputnik, was supposed to be between the two sides of the Iron Curtain and not between t-he two sides of the North Atlantic. Whether a social scientist would have had any bet- ter luck than a natural scientist in making that point if he had been in a position to advise the highest level of policy makers, there is no way of knowing. In any case, the characteristics of those scientists who are part of the national policymaking establishment

    8 See especially Warner R. Schilling, "Scientists, Foreign Policy and Politics," in Gilpin and Wright, op. cit., pp. 144-74, and the references there cited to the conflicting advice which Henry Tizard and F. A. Lindemann gave the British government in 1942. See also Warner R. Schilling, "The H-Bomb Decision: How to Decide Without Actually Choosing," Political Science Quar- terly 76 (March 1961), pp. 24-46; Robert Gilpin, American Scientists and Nuclear Weapons Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeiton University Press, 1962); and Harold K. Jacobson and Eric Stein, Diplomats, Scientists and Politicians: The United States and the Nuclear Test Ban Negotiations (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1966).

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  • 10 WILLiAM T. R. Fox

    need to be described at least as carefully as the national and in- ternational science communities do.

    There is need to study not only the scientists in the policy pro- cess, or the scientific community as a group actor, but there is also need to examine considerations relative to science which enter into policymaking. Here one can make a rough two-fold division be- tween the role of scientific considerations in making national policy, and particularly national security policy, and the way in which government decisions are made which constitute the science policy of the country. Only then can we come to understand the role of mobilized science in an era of total diplomacy and limited war.

    Scientific and technological change is a semi-independent vari- able in the equations of world politics because decisions of national governments and occasionally those of international organizations affect the rate, the direction, and the mass of the effort which goes into producing the change. In the past, it was left largely to the economic historian to describe the impact of major technological changes on the social system in which they took place; but an economic historian magisterially writing about the early industrial revolution and the relative rise in English power, which in the course of a century or two gradually became visible, does not quite meet the needs of the 1960's and 1970's.9 In a time perspective of centuries the impact of wars, even world wars, on changes in the international order may seem slight as compared wi-th the great scientific and technological changes of recent centuries. It was earlier suggested that nuclear energy, the computer, and micro- electronics generally might well be producing many of the same effects we now see whether or not the mass carnage of 1914-18 and 1939-45 had taken place. One cannot, however, go far with this line of argument. Otherwise, it might be difficult to explain why nations provide such massive support to their scientists in an effort to be the first to discover a new scientific principle or to complete the devel- opment of a scientific device.

    Some social scientists were more nearly correct than some nat- ural scientists in projecting the political consequences of the great events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They appear to have understood

    9 See John U. Nef, War and Human Progress (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952).

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  • SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 11

    better than the scientists who advocated "one world or none" that even nuclear weapons cannot persuade a representative of a great power to yield his country's veto in an international organization.10 They saw more readily than at least some natural scientists why co-existence was likely to be the order of the day for some time to come, why the real choice in the post-World War II world was not "One Rome or Two Carthages" but "Two Romes or None."

    In a headlong race to be first in scientific advances, secrecy can only have a short-term utility. If, however, a short period is enough to implement irreversible decisions of the first importance, then recommendations for the long run which fail to take account of the short-run problem are inappropriate. Not only the atomic bomb but the proximity fuse, radar, LSTs and the artificial harbor for the Normandy landings were t-he product of what Churchill called "the wizard war." The computer and micro-electronics are in the 1960's playing an analogous role, in helping to keep the balance of terror stable. In all these cases, by answering short-run technological problems, time was bought in which to discover answers to long- run political problems.

    One should at least examine the possibility that Soviet-American competition in the science race is having a benign effect on world politics, whatever the intentions of the men who have ordered that the science race be run. It diverts at least some energies away from simply piling up armaments for the arms race itself. Samuel P. Huntington has suggested that only quantitative arms races are dangerous.1' Certainly the science race tends to keep the arms race qualitative, thus keeping each side from feeling that it is sufficiently prepared to resort to trial by battle. There is always the "weapons system after next" to be made operational before one can ever begin to think of being so fully prepared as deliberately to choose war. The science race may, however, yield clues as to the con- tenders' respective capabilities with such great clarity that a trial by battle becomes unnecessary. Furthermore, there may be some

    10 See, for example, Bemard Brodie, ed., The Absolute Weapon (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1946).

    11 "Arms Races: Prerequisites and Results>" in Carl J. Friedrich and Seymour Harris, eds., Public Policy: Yearbook of the Graduate School of Public Administration, Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.: Graduate School of Public Administration, 1958), pp. 41-86.

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  • 12 WILLIAM T. R. Fox

    incidental peacetime payoffs. Perhaps the intensive development of the fuel cell, ostensibly for interplanetary travel, will so trans- form interborough travel between the various parts of New York City as to transform today's gray smog and aerial sewer into tomorrow's bright blue skies. The thrill of new worlds to conquer which the science race brings into view, not just the world of outer space but the world of Antarctica, the world of inner space (here one may pause to shed a tear on the grave of the Mohole project, which might have told much about the Earth's interior) and the race to make the world's deserts bloom-all these competitions may take some of the heat out of bipolar military competition.

    One must not overstate the case. The science race can be de- stabilizing and it can make the state system resistant to change. Even though secrecy can have only a short-term utility in the science race itself, a short period may be enough to implement irreversible decisions of the first importance. Recommendations for the long run which fail to take account of the short-run problem are inappropriate.

    It was a science race which has today made the one big war totally unacceptable, but the science race has neither eliminated nor solved problems that in an earlier day seemed to make that big war worth fighting. ITus, the science race may have promoted the "deceleration of history." All over the world there are problems too important to ignore, but not important enough to cause Washington and Moscow to choose to destroy each other. So history slows down, the problems remain, and some of them grow daily more menacing.

    If the science race has decelerated one kind of history, it may have accelerated another. The dizzy pace of technological advance has certainly contributed to the erosion of the physical, biological, and cultural resources of a planet on which over three billion human beings live but on which only a few hundred million enjoy a standard of living made possible by consumption of non-recurrable mineral resources. The science race may be a problem generator and a problem preserver, especially if it has brought about what Walter Millis has called "the hypertrophy of general war."'2

    12 This is the title of the concluding chapter of his Arms and Men (New York: Putnam, 1956).

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  • SCzENGE, TECHNOLOGY AND INTERNATIONAL POLrrICS 13

    The science race, on the other hand, has sometimes solved problems for governments and social scientists. Thus, the twin developments of "the spy in the sky" and ballistic sea power have transformed the problem of intemational inspection into the strug- gle to achieve some kind of international regulation of atomic energy. The first has made Soviet secrecy seem somewhat less im. portant to the Americans. Ballistic sea power, on the other hand, has made American openness somewhat less of an advantage to the Soviet Union. Thus the two superpowers have a more nearly equal interest in arrangements to exchange information. Also, the fact that counter-city strikes are technically easier than counter- force strikes means that retaliation capability rather than efficiency in inspecting down to the last few concealed atomic weapons provides the true protection against the nuclear aggressor. Some technological advances may, of course, exhibit both aspects. They may solve one problem while creating another. Reclaiming the world's wastelands, perhaps in largest part through de-salinization and cheap energy for transporting the de-salted water, may pos- sibly give the world a much needed extra decade or two in which to cope with the population explosion. It also may be destabilizing. Quest for territory seems to have become a much less potent source of conflict with the world's most fertile areas all divided up; but if there are to be new fertile areas, what reason is there to believe that neighboring states will find it easy to agree on how these new areas are to be divided?

    Whether one looks down one road to disaster at the end of which is a thermonuclear Doomsday or down that other road which ends in a population explosion, it is clear that we need in- stitutions and policies to shorten t-he innovative-adaptive time with respect to scientific and technological changes, some of which are going to come anyway and others of which can be made to come if we choose to have them. Herman Kahn has already led the way in manufacturing hypothesized history of post-explosion events and more generally in writing scenarios for alternative futures.'3 Daniel Bell has painted in broad brush strokes the picture of the post-

    1I On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960); and Thinking About the Unthinkable (New York: Horizon Press, 1962).

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  • 14 WILLiAM T. R. Fox

    industrial society.14 We need not believe that only domestic politics will be affected by the emergence of this post-industrial society. We need not believe in the utopian dream of a depoliticized world made possible because science has provided the way out. Science does have its uses in the contemporary race with the twin disasters of the atom bomb and the fertility bomb. Malthus has been proved wrong now for almost 200 years, but without the most creative use of our scientific and technological resources, it will fall to this generation to have proved that both he and Hobbes were right after all.

    Science does beckon us to a new view of world politics. Thirty years ago it was possible for a distinguished political scientist to write that "politics is thfe study of who gets what, when, and how."'15 The implication that politics (including world politics) is a "zero- sum game" struggle for power or that there is an iron fund of values to be contested does not in fact describe accurately the views of Harold Lasswell, the coiner of the who-gets-what phrase. No living political scientist has a broader view of t-he potentials of political science for improving man's lot, but the zero-sum game view of politics was widely prevalent then and has been since. A political scientist writing in the 1960's, one who has since been appointed to one of the highest posts occupied by a political scientist in the Executive Branch of the American federal government, that of Under Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has written, "Today no national political system can afford to concentrate on distributive and allocative problems."'6 I understand thi's to mean that a modem political system including a world political system must, in the same writer's words "have the capacity to translate basic scientific knowledge into workable, effectively engineered de- sign and structure." For national political systems of at least the first- ranking powers this means that "decision-makers must have the assurance that the society they direct maintains technological in-

    14 "The Post-Industrial Society," in Eli Ginsberg, ed., Technology and Social Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), pp. 44-59. See also, "Notes on the Post-Industrial Society (I )" in The Public Interest, No. 6 (Winter 1967) and (H) in No. 7 (Spring 1967).

    15 Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: -Who Gets What, When, How (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1936).

    Is Robert C. Wood, "Scientists and Politics: The Rise of an Apolitical Elite," in Robert Gilpin and Christopher Wright, op. cit., p. 54.

    INTErNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTELY

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  • SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND INTERNATIONAL POLIrICS 15

    novation at least on a par with its major competitors." For the world as a whole the minimum requirement is set by the competi- tion of national systems not with each other but with nature itself. A world of plenty may or may not be a world of peace; but unless certain minimum aspirations of less advantaged peoples are met, the prospects for peace and order will be dim indeed. It will take a technology tailor-made for developing areas to satisfy these minimum aspirations.

    VOLUME 12, NUMBER 1, MARCH 1968

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    Article Contentsp. 1p. 2p. 3p. 4p. 5p. 6p. 7p. 8p. 9p. 10p. 11p. 12p. 13p. 14p. 15

    Issue Table of ContentsInternational Studies Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Mar., 1968), pp. 445-449+1-125Volume Information [pp. ]Front Matter [pp. ]Science, Technology and International Politics [pp. 1-15]The Use of University Resources in Foreign Policy Research [pp. 16-37]Reviews and Other DiscussionThe Pattern of Contemporary Regional Integration [pp. 38-64]The Concept of Alliance [pp. 65-86]Bridge Building in International Relations: A Neotraditional Plea: Comment [pp. 87-89]Reports on Panel Discussions at ISA Annual MeetingEmerging Patterns in European Security [pp. 90-97]Studies in World Affairs at the Secondary School Level [pp. 98-101]The Place of Law in International Studies [pp. 102-108]The Contribution of Regional Studies to an Understanding of World Politics [pp. 109-114]The Public Impact Upon Foreign Policy [pp. 115-118]Methodology in International Studies: A Critique [pp. 119-121]Patterns of International Institutionalism [pp. 122-125]

    Back Matter [pp. ]