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U.S.-Soviet Scientific Exchanges: A Case for Caution
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17855 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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3 / 1990 |
3,264 Words |
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Juliana Geran Pilon
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American officials expect the number of U.S.-Soviet scientific exchanges to grow in the new atmosphere of superpower cooperation. But some officials worry that too enthusiastic a quest for scientific cooperation may blind American participants into unwittingly compromising U.S. national security.
One of the last acts of the Reagan administration was the signing of a science and technology (S&T) agreement with the USSR on January 8, 1989 that paved the way to increased cooperation between the two countries in basic science research. And indeed last year this cooperation flourished. Among the principal bilateral projects is a space cooperation program. The United States and the USSR, for example have agreed to exchange feasibility studies of future unmanned missions for solar system exploration, including missions to the moon and Mars, opportunities to fly instruments on each other's spacecraft, as well as exchanges of scientists and scientific data.
The S&T agreement constituted the culmination of a process started in November 1985 when then Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze signed an agreement at the Geneva summit marking the resumption of official academic and cultural exchanges.
The new S&T agreement had been preceded in 1972 by a government-to-government pact on scientific cooperation that eventually led to 11 specialized agreements. But in response to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the 1981 imposition of martial law in Poland, and the 1983 downing of the KAL airliner, the United States curtailed seven of those agreements - on space, energy, transportation, and S&T - were allowed to lapse.
Whether the United States benefited from the scientific exchanges with the Soviets in the 1970s is still an open question. But as Mikhail Tyspkin of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, told the Congressional Committee on Security and Cooperation in Europe on November 17, 1987, "In the 1970s, with the excitement over Soviet-American exchanges in the air, the security aspect of scientific exchanges was all too frequently overlooked. As a result, according to the Department of Defense, Soviet scientists used their exchange visits to American research centers to obtain information on militarily significant projects."
The USSR approaches scientific exchanges in a highly professional manner, placing high priority on militarily related technology. Recent information indicates that the Military Industrial Commission of the Soviet Presidium of the Council of Ministers is responsible for planning the collection of scientific information from the West in a precise and highly professional manner.
Within the U.S government, problems have been averted when the interagency process has worked well. Some cooperative projects have been found to be vulnerable from a national security perspective and were stopped. In 1986, for example the Ocean Drilling Program was halted because of technology transfer concerns. That same year, it was decided to withhold permission for National Science Foundation funding of a project with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) because of questions about possible espionage problems that had affected the institute.
Yet the system often
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