SECTION IV.  CASE STUDIES
 

"...Advances in science and technology can be central factors leading to change, in some cases sufficient to alter major aspects of international affairs."
Eugene Skolnikoff, 1993

Introduction
The Department of State now has over fifty years of experience taking science and technology into account in foreign affairs, using it as a productive issue in the U.S. national interest and recruiting, training and managing its S&T policy personnel.  Science and technology in U.S. foreign affairs have been widely studied, investigated, reported, debated, analyzed and criticized.  This section treats some high-visibility cases where science and technology figured prominently in our foreign relations:

A. U.S.-USSR cooperation -  Chapter 18
B. U.S.-Spain cooperation - Chapter 19
C. Conference on International Economic Cooperation (CIEC), Paris, 1975-1977 - Chapter 20
D. New Dialogue with Latin America - Chapter 21
E. Transborder Data Flows and the Protection of Privacy at the OECD - Chapter 22.

Other examples could have been chosen having equal or greater impact, showing perhaps greater success or worse failure: the Antarctic Treaty, the U.S.-Israel Binational Institute for Research and Development (BIRD), Atoms for Peace, S&T cooperation with Poland, north-south technology transfer, nuclear nonproliferation.

The United States has always been a key player in Antarctica since the early days of exploration and the International Geophysical Year (1957-8) that led to the 1959 treaty.  That it remained so was the result of uncommonly good interagency coordination in a committee chaired by the State Department and of exemplary cooperation between the agencies and the science community.  The BIRD in Israel pays for its good research with the income from its binational foundation, the endowment of which was funded by the United States.  President Eisenhower's Atoms For Peace initiative at the United Nations in 1953 led to the formation of the watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations' arm to inspect nuclear facilities for misuse and to make available nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.  This turned out to be a trade-off between control through inspection and a wider dissemination of nuclear technology of potential misuse than would otherwise have been the case.

Cooperation with Poland, in the 1970s and 1980s, first with excess U.S.-owned zlotys then with some appropriated dollars, helped keep the doors to the West open a crack until they burst wide in 1989.

North-south technology transfer -- with its subissues of industrial policy, research budget targets, patent use and nationalization of foreign industries -- is an issue that has plagued a generation of foreign service officers.   About the best thing that can be said of their results is that they have "kept the lid on": developing countries have fought these issues in a multitude of forums and meetings, but only rarely have they presented any kind of convincing argument to change in the way the "North" transfers its technology to those in the "South."  Nor have many LDCs taken sufficient advantage of the technology offered and available.  Obvious exceptions are South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.  So many meetings devoted to technology for development focused on demands rather than offers.  Some LDC politicians seemed to prefer scoring points against developed countries rather than discussing actual application of science and technology to problems of development.

Nuclear nonproliferation policy wins pluses for reducing risks of weapons use by Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, but minuses for the bad behavior of IAEA members India and Pakistan and NPT signatories Iraq and North Korea.

The Carter Administration (elected in 1976) proposed reducing use of weapon raw materials plutonium and highly-enriched uranium amidst international disdain, only to be substantially justified rather more on economic rather than security grounds.  There remains the problem of safe decommissioning of surplus weapons as well as spent nuclear power plants.

The United States successfully negotiated cooperation in the peaceful uses of atomic energy with China and saw China and France formally adhere to the Nonproliferation Treaty.  In 1996 the United Nations adopted a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty.  By 1998 the treaty had 151 signatories -- India and Pakistan, however, not included.

CHAPTER 18.  Case Study A -- U.S.-USSR Science and Technology Cooperation
 

"This will last out a night in Russia,
When nights are longest there."
William Shakespeare
Measure for Measure, Act II, Sc. 1

Cooperation and Dissidents
The forerunner to eleven agreements between the United States and the USSR on cooperation in different fields of science and technology was the culture agreement of 1958 that provided for first exchanges of students, scholars and artists during the frigid, early phase of the Cold War.  A period of dÈtente in relations between the two countries from 1972 to 1974 was engineered by Henry Kissinger and framed by the visits of President Nixon to Moscow in 1972 and 1974, with the visit by Secretary Brezhnev to Washington in 1973.

The key issue at these three summits was nuclear arms control.  In addition, Kissinger, who moved from the White House (as National Security Adviser) to the State Department (as secretary) in 1973, wanted to engage if not entangle the Soviets in a "web of issues," of which S&T cooperation was a part.  Thus in 1972 the two leaders renewed the 1958 culture agreement for a year and initiated cooperation under four new agreements: general science and technology, health, environment and space.  In Washington the following year the 1958 culture agreement was extended until 1979, and cooperative S&T accords in oceanography, transportation, atomic energy and agriculture were added.  The agreement spectrum was completed in Moscow in 1974 with the signing of texts promoting cooperation in housing research, energy and medicine.

The agreements were similar in their terms: they generally ran for five years, with automatic renewal unless either party demurred; and they fostered exchanges of students and researchers, the exchange of S&T information and joint research projects.  As a rule, each country paid the expenses of its own scientists and engineers who participated.  All activities were subject to the laws of the two countries and the availability of funds.

The general S&T agreement had a unique article that called for cooperation between U.S. and Soviet firms, and caused no end of misunderstanding.  Some U.S. firms wrote letters of intent to cooperate in ways that would have violated U.S. export control law.  Opponents of the agreements continually referred to this article and the subsequent letters of intent as loopholes for "hemorrhaging technology," but such was not the case, nor did it occur.  There was considerable difference between a letter of intent and an approved export shipment.

Cold-War cooperation euphoria hit a high in 1975 when the U.S. Apollo spacecraft docked in space with the Soviet counterpart Soyuz, and the two crews opened a communicating passageway between the two vessels.  By 1977 about a thousand scientists went on land from each country to the other carrying out projects and exchanges under the terms of all eleven agreements.  The same year, however, Soviet oppression of individual scientists culminated in the arrest of physicist Anatoly Shcharansky, charged with high treason and espionage.  After a year of open support for Shcharansky by the Carter Administration as well as the American and international scientific communities, in the summer of 1978 he was tried, convicted and sentenced to thirteen years' imprisonment.  The trial and its outcome sent a chill through U.S.-USSR relations, particularly in science and technology.  Pending high-level visits by U.S. government officials responsible for the cooperation agreements were abruptly canceled, and S&T and trade exchanges put under review.  Exports of oil technology and computers were halted.

Science organizations, notably the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, kept up their contacts with Soviet institutions and scientists and continued their defense of the human rights of individual scientists, including the right to work and communicate with the international community without interference.  High-level contacts between U.S. and Soviet academies never ceased.  Exchanges of many kinds continued.  David Reminick points out,1 "Most of the men who ran the Kremlin had never been to the West, or when they had been, it was in the 'bubble' of an official visit.  It was not by chance that the two men who had traveled to the West extensively before coming to power were also the two main figures of official reform: [Aleksandr] Yakolev and [Mikhail] Gorbachev."2

Visits to the USSR of American working-level scientists and engineers were never called off by the State Department.  In any case, it scarcely could do so.  And it didn't want to.  Those asking the department's advice were told there was nothing illegal about their going; they should follow their consciences.  And so they did, and they went.  A basic goal underlying the exchange program had always been to keep in supportive, human contact with people in the USSR.  The U.S. S&T community showed extraordinary and commendable solidarity with Soviet colleagues as many of its members went ahead with their visits, exchanges and projects.

Soviet scientists (and others) were often fired from their government jobs for trying to emigrate, get out of the Soviet Union.  The government then accused these so-called refuseniks of the crime of not working.

In many cases U.S. scientists defied Soviet authority by meeting with dissidents, refuseniks and nonpersons in bad standing with the government, even holding seminars in the homes of scientists essentially under house arrest and unable to attend meetings elsewhere.  Mark Azbel3 was a physicist denied a visa to emigrate to Israel.  Then he was fired.  In order to keep himself and similar colleagues intellectually alive, in a master stroke Azbel invited leading Western scientists to give seminars in his Moscow apartment.

The seminars were an astounding success.  Scientists attending from all over the world included Nobel Prize winners.  All paid their own way and refused to be intimidated by Soviet warnings of retaliation.  This outpouring of support justified the refuseniks and confounded the authorities.

Sakharov
A scientist played a decisive role in the restructuring of the Soviet Union: Andrei Sakharov.  A brilliant physicist and intellectual, Sakharov worked on the Soviet hydrogen bomb project for twenty years.  After 1968, when he published his "Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom," he was persecuted by the Soviet government.  Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, Sakharov was denied an exit visa to receive it in Oslo.  His wife accepted it for him.  In 1980 he and his wife were exiled to Gorky.  Only after Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the party in 1985 was Sahkarov permitted to return to Moscow, in 1986.  He quickly assumed the role of the conscience of restructuring the Soviet Union and was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies and other honors.  He died in 1989.

During Sakharov's years of persecution and exile he received support from scientists in the United States.  In his memoirs4 he cites a decisive 1973 intervention by Philip Handler, president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, with the president of the Soviet Academy.  Handler wrote, "Were Sakharov to be deprived of the opportunity to serve the Soviet people and humanity, it would be extremely difficult to imagine successful fulfillment of American pledges of binational scientific cooperation, the implementation of which is entirely dependent upon the voluntary effort and good will of our individual scientists and scientific institutions."

Sakharov credited protests by Handler and other prominent scientists for forestalling further steps against him after he was exiled to Gorky.5

Principles Kept Alive
As Soviet scientists and intellectuals tried to keep alive accepted principles and standards of scientific conduct and universal norms of behavior, the outstretched hands of American scientists and scientific organizations were always there to help -- year in and year out, in crisis and neglect -- through visits, exchanges, seminars, letters and trading of preprints and reprints of research reports, reports and journals.  Survival through the Cold War of these standards of scientific conduct in the Soviet Union helped make possible the survival of standards of human conduct.  Post-Soviet history shows that intellectuals and scientists of the twentieth century yielded to the despotic powers of the government no more than those of the nineteenth.  Rather, with support from their international colleagues they kept alive freedom of thought for the rebirth of their country.