1766 



For example, the commercial aircraft industry in the United States, 

 long dominant in world transportation lines, owes its preeminence to 

 the very large U.S. Government investment in the development of 

 military aircraft. On the low-technology side, the steel industry is 

 affected more by Government policy with respect to sources of 

 materials in developing countries and tariff policy on imported steels 

 than by support for research in steelmaking. 



The next question to be considered in this essay is the extent to 

 which the high technology — low technology — diplomacy relationship 

 siu^faced in the six cases and the six issues dealt with in the present 

 study. 



Appearance in the Study oi the Question of High-Low Technology and 

 Diplomacy 

 Some attention was addressed to the question of technological 

 impacts in The Evolution oi International Technology (Issue One). 

 The question of organizing to analyze and deal with future impacts 

 was considered at length in Science and Technology in the Department 

 of State (Issue Six). In general, the studies tended to emphasize high 

 technology over low, partly because the most salient cases involved 

 novel, government- sponsored developments that were readily identi- 

 fiable. The low-technology area tends to escape notice because its 

 practice is traditional, unspectacular, and diffused. Moreover, for 

 different reasons, both kinds of technolog}', as such, tend to resist the 

 economic analysis on which policy anal3'sis is usually based. Ac- 

 cordingly, the main contribution of a number of the stvidies to the 

 question at hand lies in the inferences and interpretations derived from 

 technology analysis rather than from detailed evidence in the form of 

 economic data. 



CASE one: the baruch plan 



The U.S. proposal for international control of atomic energy, the 

 earliest instance in the series of the impact of high technology on 

 diplomacy, is a foremost example of an unsuccessful effort to reach 

 international agreement on a technological issue of transcendent 

 importance. Atomic weaponry and atomic energy are incontrovertibly 

 "high technology." It illustrates the principle with which the study 

 concludes ". . . the creation and application of new technologies 

 arising from scientific discoveries may so change relations among 

 nations that a system of international control of that technology 

 becomes desirable. ..." 



. . . Nuclear energy is neither the first nor the last example of a technological 

 innovation suggesting the desirability of international machinery and procedures 

 for controlling it. But it is probably the most dramatic example to date.*"* 



The lesson of this case is that an innovation in the form of a "high 

 technology" of tremendous diplomatic significance came into being 

 without first receiving deep analysis by diplomatists and scientists — 

 working together — to devise a strategy of control that was both 

 technically sound and diplomatically acceptable to all parties con- 

 cerned. In the long run it is possible that the United States, and the 

 world at large, might find that to have withheld the use of the weapon 

 in World War II until plans and arrangements for achieving control 



«8 Wu, Ttie Baruch Flan, vol. I, p. 118. 



