Science and Technology in
United States Foreign Affairs

Copyright © 1999
by Robert G. Morris


CHAPTER 3.  Bilateral Science and Technology CooperationBilateral Science and Technology Cooperation


The Cooperation Agreement

A key use of science and technology in foreign affairs has been the bilateral intergovernmental cooperation agreement.3  The first such accord appears to be the one signed in 1958 between the United States and Japan, although science cooperation was included in a cultural agreement signed with the USSR the same year.  (Cooperative agreements in civil nuclear energy date from 1955.)  The "intergovernmental agreement" governs cooperation between governments as distinguished from agreements U.S. government agencies have long carried out for cooperative research with counterpart agencies abroad under so-called "agency-to-agency agreements."  Examples include long-time cooperation on weights and measures standardization between the U.S. Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and foreign counterparts, on agriculture between the U.S. Department of Agriculture and similar agencies abroad, on public health between U.S. and foreign health agencies and between U.S. and foreign military services.  Post-World War II agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have a specific emphasis on international cooperation in their enabling legislation that reflected the growing recognition of both the potential and universality of science.  All three agencies have actively sought research cooperation in other countries; many older, more traditional agencies have as well.

While all such agency-to-agency arrangements are important in our foreign relations, their primary or even sole purpose was properly to advance the agencies' scientific agenda.  Occasionally, serving the agencies' agendas seemed to conflict with foreign policy goals, as when they cooperated with "undeserving" countries or when such cooperation could be perceived as sending a signal of U.S. government approbation to a regime when none existed, or where there was actually disapproval or hostility.  For years, for example, science cooperation was withheld from Czechoslovakia because of human rights abuses by the government.  Reconciling the science needs of the agencies with U.S. foreign policy was a problem eventually taken on by the Department of State and only imperfectly resolved, as further discussion in Section III on organizing to deal with S&T issues in foreign affairs will show.

The first type of S&T agreement treated here is the one between governments that, in addition to mutual scientific benefit, also gives great weight to advancing foreign relations with the country in question.  In 1986 there were counted thirty-three government-to-government agreements (including those with USSR, Japan, Italy , Spain  and India ), along with over 300 agency-to-agency agreements with about a hundred countries.

By its universality and neutrality science offered the foreign affairs community a subject for an intergovernmental agreement vastly easier to conclude than one on consular affairs, trade, human rights or arms control.  Donald Deskoff, that prototypical State Department FSO in charge of relations with Farawaia, could always at the very least bring off an S&T agreement when Farawaia's president Pompo came to Washington.  United States world leadership in many S&T areas offered a cachet to Farawaia if it could be seen by the world as a worthy partner for U.S. scientists in the frontier field of spin-inverted ion traps or amorphous peptides.

Typical Agreement

A typical S&T agreement was negotiated by the State Department or the White House with counterparts in the other country and signed during the visit of one leader to the other's capital.  Endorsement by the White House, and to a lesser extent by the State Department, of the concept of cooperation with Farawaia would often stimulate the international offices of the science agencies to come up with proposed projects and funding.  Thanks to the informal but pervasive science network, scientists in these offices are always aware of what's going on abroad that's good and where the interests of their agencies overlap with those of foreign counterparts, even in Farawaia.

Science is to some extent fashionable.  Despite its objectivity there is a certain follow-the-herd compulsion.  Thus, scientists all over the world at any one time are working on the same "hot" projects in black holes, theoretical physics, number theory, elementary particles, molecular biology and compound semiconductors.  One valid purpose of U.S. agencies' international science office is to make sure nobody gets ahead of U.S. scientists in a hot, promising field and to monitor foreign development.  The agencies are also interested in how other countries plan their science programs, set their priorities and evaluate results, since no country has a perfect system for this yet, certainly not the United States.

Besides expertise, the agencies supply the key item of funding for this intergovernmental S&T cooperation.  The U.S. government R&D budget (excluding defense research) amounted to $29 billion in 1998.  Three hundredths of a percent or $10 million of this is a very rough estimate for what is spent on international cooperation, even though not all of this goes through S&T agreements.  But it is clear that the agencies have the funding and that they are permitted and encouraged by their charters to use it for international projects.  Perhaps surprisingly the White House and the State Department have practically no funds for S&T agreements.  There have been important exceptions: routing AID funds to SpainSpain  and IsraelIsrael  and use of Treasury-owned excess foreign currencies in PolandPoland , YugoslaviaYugoslavia  and IndiaIndia  derived from sales of U.S. surplus goods in these countries.  (The Fulbright program for the exchange of scholars, researchers and professors in fields including science was originally financed the same way.)

But the general truth is that the foreign affairs agencies in the United States don't pay for most bilateral cooperation.  Instead, they must rely on the international R&D programs of NSF, NASA, DOE, NIST, Agriculture and others.  This is understandable since the agencies get the primary benefit.

Categories of Countries and Support

Science and technology agreements sprang up with the following categories of countries for the political and economic reasons indicated (of course, all agencies involved demanded mutual scientific benefit on top of these reasons):

Soviet Union and Eastern Europe  - to facilitate movement of persons, form links to the populace, reveal U.S. life to visitors, sustain the intelligentsia, provide minimal bilateral activity of noncontroversial nature;

India, Poland and Yugoslavia  - to apply science and technology to economic development using excess U.S.-owned foreign currencies;

Israel  - to finance a foundation that supports research and development with the interest funds earned by the endowment;

Latin America  - to support worthy institutions that existed under undemocratic governments in Brazil and Argentina; improve relations with Mexico, utilize science and technology for economic development and reduce environmental pollution by both countries; to build up S&T infrastructure of richer countries like Venezuela.

Spain  - to make part payment for U.S. use of Spanish military bases.

Agreements with the Soviet Union

Soviet Union   Cooperation agreements with the Soviet Union were the most extensive, the most publicized, the most contentious and in many ways the most successful.4  A case can be made (see Chapter 18 in Section IV) that the eleven agreements concluded during the historic summit meetings between President Nixon and Secretary Brezhnev in 1972, 1973 and 1974 were instrumental in sustaining the scientists who Hedrick Smith5 writes "...were hidden, an army of defectors-in-place."  "Their disaffection," he continued, "made them a veritable army, awaiting a new political movement, ready to be summoned into battle..."   Thus they were ready to emerge after 1985 during Gorbachev's perestroika (restructuring).

Four professionals in the State Department and four in the Moscow embassy were occupied nearly full-time with the program, not to mention those in international offices of the participating U.S. science agencies.  By 1978 over a thousand scientists were going each way annually.  Cooperation with the USSR went into partial eclipse following the trial and conviction of Soviet physicist Anatoly Shcharansky for treason and espionage in 1978.  Then in 1980 the internationally admired physicist and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Andrei Sakharov was exiled to Gorky, and his wife was repeatedly denied an exit visa to leave the country for medical treatment.  Normal activity resumed under the agreements about ten years later, and the United States and other countries have since then made a concerted effort to expand cooperation in order to occupy benignly former Soviet weapon scientists.

Key to working out the 1972-4 agreements was Henry Kissinger, National security adviser to the president 1971-3 and secretary of state 1973-7.  He recognized the role that perception of science and technology played in foreign affairs.  For example, the blow to U.S. pride by the Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 was palpable and overcome only by the successful U.S. space program that placed men on the moon in 1969.  He also appreciated the role science and technology have played in U.S. economic development.  Equally important, he recognized the high reputation U.S. science had around the world in the 1970s and what a tremendous bargaining chip it could be in foreign affairs.

Agreements with Advanced Countries

The United States has never had many formal agreements with the countries of Western Europe, Canada or Australia.  In these democratic advanced countries with their market economies, government intervention is unnecessary to promote S&T exchange and cooperation: it occurs on a massive scale without help.  Agreements with Japan date from 1958 and 1961.  The obvious post-war political motives for this cooperation were superseded by more modern ones in the 1980s as the United States sought to use cooperation to redress the perceived Japanese lead in technology.  At that time this particular bilateral cooperation drew White House attention.  The President's science adviser took a high-profile political lead on the issue of assuring mutual benefit in all bilateral cooperation.

United States S&T agencies are especially willing to cooperate with advanced countries for a reason already mentioned: there is a strong international anxiety about being left behind in the development of a promising new field.  The international science infrastructure itself probably prevents such monopolies, but if cooperation can give even a marginal advantage, agencies probably consider it worth the effort.  The reverse may happen too: the U.S. may share its marginal advantage in some fields with other countries.  Presumably cooperation in a number of fields advances the state of science in all countries.  It is becoming more difficult to cooperate internationally (or nationally) in more applied areas like biotechnology, however, where proprietary knowledge is not to be shared.

Domestic vs International Science

Government agencies must balance their overall mission to support science against their need to develop American science and scientists.  In years when there is plenty of money, international cooperation fares well.  In low-budget years, even at presidential urging, funds for international projects are reduced.  There is practically no constituency for international S&T cooperation in the United States except in the "big scienceBig science " areas like particle accelerators, for the purpose of reducing costs to the United States.  Some U.S. scientists who treasure their international contacts or a few science administrators who care for the health of world science lobby in its behalf.  Others promote the use of American dollars for American science.

Apollo-Soyuz; MIR

In 1975, at the height of detente between the U.S. and the USSR  (see case study on U.S.-USSR S&T cooperation in Section IV), a dramatic U.S.-USSR space cooperation project brought the two Apollo and Soyuz national spacecraft together in space under conditions that allowed the two countries' astronauts to move between the two modules, share food and appear together on international television.  The Soviet early version of a space station -- MIR -- was launched in 1986 and later augmented.  MIR was manned for nearly a year by Soviet astronauts joined later by Americans.

Foreign Policy Tool

Science and technology cooperation and the S&T agreement slowly became a foreign policy tool.  Years of State Department experience and copious study, particularly in the annual series of so-called Title V Reports to the Congress on Science, Technology and American Diplomacy, required by the 1979 Foreign Relations Authorization Act, have failed to yield a definitive verdict on its efficacy, although results with certain countries seem clear.  Some of these results are cited in the case studies in Section IV.

Technical Assistance not the Same as Cooperation

Cooperative S&T should not be confused with technical assistance.  Joint cooperative projects and exchanges may provide equipment, supplies, books and travel to the participants that are indeed "assistance," but generally they involve contributions of work by scientists of both countries in roughly equal amounts.  Agency funds are committed with the idea that there must be mutual benefit.

Technical assistance may be more properly thought of as a grant to a country -- not necessarily a poor one -- for the purchase of equipment, supplies and books; payment for researchers in the country and consultants from outside; provision of patents and know-how; underwriting travel; and construction of facilities.  The one-way assistance is to science rather than a science project.  Funds for technical assistance generally have come from the Agency for International Development (AID) to countries trying to establish or improve their science establishment.  This has proved to be a difficult task, although the contribution of technical assistance to S&T development in Korea worked well.

Security

From early on it was clear that there could be valid objections to S&T cooperation on the basis of security.  American knowhow could be at risk in cooperation.  Exchanges could permit foreign scientists and their "advisers" insufficiently controlled access to U.S. information and facilities.

It was always the goal of the domestic S&T agencies (that had to justify use of the funds) and the Department of State (who had to justify the political value of the project) first, to apply U.S. security and export regulations to all activities, and second, to assure, indeed, to demand, that the research have mutual benefits.  Thus, any loss of even nonsensitive, nonproprietary knowhow -- the only kind involved in most projects -- would be compensated by a corresponding gain.

Foreign spies with access to U.S. facilities posed another question.  Visiting delegations certainly had their associates and advisers, thinly disguised members of the home security and intelligence branches.  American institutions let scientists like Alexei, Boris, Casimir, Dimitri and Efrem into their labs to understand the magnitude of the U.S. accomplishment and to expose all five to U.S. hospitality, U.S. life, U.S. values and U.S. outlooks.  They learned from the first four what they were doing in the same technical area.  United States scientists befriended them.  They gave them hope of another visit, of correspondence, of attendance at meetings, of having meetings in their own countries.  They stayed alive intellectually when times were bad in their own countries.  In return, the United States suffered Efrem, the heavy-handed adviser and obvious spy, to poke around and pick up a few technical tidbits.

End of Chapter 3.


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