approach to technological and economic development. 

 The tendency to plan "from the achieved level," which 

 holds sway throughout the system, reflects what has 

 been called an "add on" philosophy of design and mode 

 of advance. Strong preference and aptitude exist for 

 improving and scaling up existing processes rather 

 than for developing basically new processes and prod- 

 ucts. This is seen in the scaling up of blast fur- 

 naces in the iron and steel industry and of gas and 

 electric turbines and generators in the power indus- 

 try. In aviation, the development of a new aircraft 

 tends to incorporate existing technology rather than 

 depend upon successful new advances in airframe, en- 

 gine, and avionics. Similarly, the Soviet space pro- 

 gram has relied heavily for a long time on the Vostok 

 launch vehicle, and spacecraft have been developed 

 not by designing a new craft for each mission but by 

 building on to a standard craft. By contrast, there 

 have been great technological differences in the 

 American program among the Atlas, Thor, Titan, and 

 Saturn rockets, as well as among the Mercury, Gemini, 

 and Apollo spacecraft. "2 



In addition, the rate of diffusion of new technol- 

 ogy in the Soviet Union is comparatively slower than 

 that in most industrial capitalist countries. During 

 the past 20 years, some major traditional industries 

 have continued to expand rapidly while in other coun- 

 tries their rate of growth has slowed appreciably. In 

 the steel industry, for example, production by tradi- 

 tional methods continued to grow even after the in- 

 troduction of oxygen smelting and continuous casting, 

 while in the West the new processes have tended to 

 drive out the old. The diffusion of synthetic fibers 

 has also been distinctly slower. As a general rule, 

 the rate of capital retirement is much lower in So- 

 viet industry, and new products and processes take 

 longer to capture a significant share of total out- 

 put. 93 



While these features of Soviet development reflect 

 in part a more conservative pattern and structure of 

 industrial production, they are also due, it seems, 

 to insufficient attention to alternative or more re- 



127 



