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their budget situation in the Congress. Those would be examples of 

 tradeoffs that we would want to look very carefully at. 



Mr. FuQUA. Your historical perspective suggests something about 

 our prospects of controlling the pace of technological change. Could 

 government do that? Can we as policymakers do that? Or should 

 we be involved in that? Or is that a thing that is going to happen 

 on its own in a free society? 



Dr. McDouGALL. Yes; Mr. Chairman, I understand. I have been 

 called a pessimist by some people. Some people have disagreed with 

 me; others have merely called me a pessimist without necessarily 

 disagreeing with me. But it is my conclusion from looking, particu- 

 larly, at the 20th century that controlling the pace of change is 

 very difficult for any given country to do, even for the leader. 



Since the industrial revolution and the growing interplay be- 

 tween science and technology, and, of course, the growing applica- 

 tion of science and technology to military systems, international 

 competition has probably played the greatest role in stimulating, 

 or in setting the pace, as you suggest, of scientific and technological 

 change, so that a given country is not really able to control the 

 pace because, if a given country chooses to slow down, some other 

 country is going to push ahead. 



In military systems, this is obvious, but I think it is probably 

 true even in basic science. I think that we would all be nervous if 

 the Soviets, for instance, achieved a clear leadership in one or an- 

 other area of basic science, even if there were no particular mili- 

 tary applications or commercial applications to that scientific field 

 at the moment. The very fact that they were gathering this scien- 

 tific capital and we were not, I think, would disturb us. 



So the fact that there are a number of highly industrialized 

 countries promoting scientific and technological progress means 

 that the only way that one could control the pace of science would 

 be through international agreements somehow to prevent any 

 country from pushing ahead in a new field of research, and I think 

 that would be very, very hard to negotiate and probably even 

 harder to enforce. 



Mr. FuQUA. Let me rephrase it just a little bit. Suppose you have 

 something like Sputnik, which this country did react to. That was 

 perceived as a military threat to the United States. That is very 

 clear to understand, that you would respond in fashions of that 

 type, and the United States did respond. 



But suppose you are talking about bioengineering or you are 

 talking about fusion energy, the more basic types. How would you 

 respond to that? In other words, if it is not a military threat but 

 maybe it is a technological threat or something that this country 

 feels, for economic reasons — it may lead to military reasons, but it 

 may be economic reasons that we feel that it is in the national in- 

 terest to move forward so that we do not lose jobs or maybe lose 

 technological advantage that we may have. 



Dr. McDouGALL. Well, your question is a good one in terms of 

 probing toward a definition of the word "critical," or one could also 

 say 



Mr. FuQUA. Or world leader. 



