"This book is a record of a pleasure-trip.  If it were a record of a solemn scientific expedition, it would have  about it that gravity, that profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are so proper to works of that kind..."

Mark Twain
Innocents Abroad

All retired foreign service officers are tempted to write.  They have written for years on active service and can't stop when they're inactive.  They should resist temptation, because such writings are of interest to a limited readership.  Even worse, they become obsolete in a very short time.  In government, events during the previous administration are ancient history; anything over ten years old is prehistoric.  Government records are so voluminous as to conceal what happened rather than reveal.

I yielded to temptation and embarked on writing this account of science and technology in United States foreign affairs upon my own retirement after eighteen years as a science officer in the foreign service.  Library shelves were not exactly loaded with treatments of this subject.  Two excellent books date from the 1960s and the 1970s  (Skolnikoff and Granger).  On the other hand, there was no great demand for a new one.  But so much  had happened in the field since they had been written -- for example, in space affairs, nuclear nonproliferation, environmental protection -- that I thought an update would be useful even though I knew I couldn't improve on the sweep of the previous books.

Working slowly I found my own manuscript going out of date faster than I was writing it.  When I read that the Ralph Bunche Library at the Department of State sought descriptions of the department's bureaus and their activities, I offered my draft.  Mr. Dan Clemmer, the librarian, kindly offered to receive it, and so I brought it to termination rather than completion.

The text is also inescapably a memoir.  It relies in large part on my own experiences -- and opinions -- for I had the good fortune to participate in the New Dialogue with Latin America, the Conference on International Economic Cooperation, science cooperation with Eastern Europe, international space cooperation, nuclear nonproliferation initiatives and transborder data flows at the OECD.  A historian would have treated more subjects and in a more objective manner, but not as personally.

Since I emphasize issues with which I was involved I depend heavily on my own record and notes.  I retained several boxes of papers, bulletins, press releases and secretariat documents, along with personal notebooks, calendars and logs.  I do not cite these personal papers in the section on references and sources because they are not generally available.  But I didn't make anything up.

So this text is a terminated rather than a finished review of a subject that incorporates a memoir.  As such it may be of interest to a small number of people attracted even to so obscure a subject.  I hope that it may appeal also to a new science officer or even someone responsible for science officer administration.  For this reason I have in places resumed my old role as professor, giving definitions of what may be obvious to most readers and mentioning subjects more than once to be sure to inform the reader who dips into particular chapters only.

In the end, the science and technology issues in United States foreign affairs have not changed so much since Skolnikoff's and Granger's times.  Some of the content has: different countries become nuclear threats, others reform; pollution changes, but countries find the same reasons not to control it; and the Department of State still tries to organize for the application of science and technology to foreign affairs.
 

Robert G. Morris
Ashland, Oregon, February 1999