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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
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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).
VOLUME 12, NUMBER 1, MARCH 1968
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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. ]