CHAPTER 24— SOME CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS 



This final statement attempts to distill the main problems disclosed 

 by the entire study and to offer some possible legislative options to 

 improve the national capacity to overcome these problems. 



One fact is evident. The uses of technology in the service of di- 

 plomacy^ need to be made more rational, coherent, constructive, 

 effective, and sustained. Somehow the talents of diplomacy and the 

 expertise of technology need to be brought together to work in concert. 



Technology — the systematic employment of rational and empirical 

 methods to achieve human purposes — has been shown to be a principal 

 element in the interactions among nations. It has given military 

 forces instruments of total destructive power. It has offered human 

 societies the means to overcome the Malthusian dilemma of population 

 pressure on food, resources, and land. It has generated serious, even 

 dangerous, degradation of the earthly environment of land, water, 

 and atmosphere. It has intensified age-old problems of diplomacy 

 like ocean sovereignty, and created new ones like space satellite 

 communications and surveillance. It has enabled the world's peoples 

 to change surroundings, life styles, habits of thought, and physical 

 capacities more in the past century than in the previous 2 million 

 years or so that mankind has lived on the earth. Technolog;y con- 

 tributes a large part of the substance of modern diplomacy. The 

 question is thus posed: what adjustments in organization, in institu- 

 tions, in plans and doctrine, and in operational procedures, are now 

 needed in response to this massive change steadily being wrought by 

 technology in the substance of diplomacy? 



The Threat and Promise of Technology for the Future of Mankind 



The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has underway 

 a multimillion-dollar search for evidences of intelligent life in outer 

 space. Among other things, this program seeks — according to one 

 participant — to discover whether intelligent beings more advanced 

 than those on Planet Earth had found it possible to organize and 

 conduct themselves in such a way as to survive technological progress 

 for many millenia. The value of this knowledge would be incalculable. ' 

 Can a planet of heterogeneous intelligent beings capable of self- 

 destruction refrain indefinitely from using this pov»'er? As a practical 

 matter can ways be found to resolve disputes, reduce intransigence 

 over values in conflict, distribute physical resources satisfactorily, 

 and evolve a system of global institutions based on the same aspira- 

 tions that are found in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution? Is it 

 possible for the nations of the world to recognize the interaction of 

 interdependence and national self-interest — and to comprehend that 

 their shared aims and goals are more important than the issues that 

 divide them? 



Already, on Planet Earth, human technology has reached the pDint 

 at which it is capable of destroying human civilization. One obvious 

 goal of diplomac}^ is balanced quantitative reduction of this capability. 



(18 89) ' 



