79 



McDougalU Science Policy Task Force, page 6 



outweighed by the 5 percent of contracts lost to American industry, and 

 the 5 percent of "lab time" surrendered to foreign experimenters, and the 

 incalculable price of technology transfer. It is not at all clear that 

 cooperation is politically or financially worth the trouble. 



My articLe on the European ^)ace program, which I deposited 

 with the staff, describes the strategies of "competitive cooperation" 

 adopted by France and Europe after the Soviet Sputnik and the vigorous 

 American response. President deGauUe initiated a crash program to break 

 -the U.S. monopoly in nuclear, space, and computer technology, and 

 forestall the deciine cf Europe into a technolDgical backwater. To this 

 end, he restructured the entire French economy, quintupled spending on 

 R&D, and sought cooperation with other European countries and with 

 NASA. But French cooperative programs were themselves shrewdly 

 designed so as to channel foreign funds, ideas, and markets into a 

 technoLDgy flow irrigating France's own garden. The French took 

 whatever the U.S. would give them in satellite design, solar cells, 

 telemetry, systems integration, and so forth, thus getting a leg up on 

 their European competitors. They also promoted European development of 

 ^pace boosters and satellites, but always spent many times more on their 

 own national program than on their cooperative efforts. In European 

 agreements the French insisted on dauses allowing them to apply jointly 

 discovered know-^iow to their national effort^ without being enjoined to 

 share nationally derived know^iow with the others. What deGaulle 

 intuited— and every French government since has followed his intuition — 

 was that our age of continuous technological revolution would not be an 



