197 



The second one is the concern, in this country particularly, that 

 our relative industrial competitiveness is somehow decreased by 

 the free outflow of our basic science. 



Then the final one is the worry that our military secrets are 

 leaking out through international scientific exchange. 



Well, with those three very strong societal pressures on the sev- 

 eral good reasons for carrying this, we have to look pretty carefully 

 at the policies and the procedures and the practices and the 

 projects and the programs that we have. Therefore, I congratulate 

 you all for doing something about it, and I look forward to a good 

 report from this operation sometime that puts this all in context. 

 I am not so sure that you aren't becoming the best putter-togeth- 

 er in total of science and technology there is. Administrations come 

 and go and they fail a little bit in the big picture, and some of your 

 reports are very important in that respect. 



You asked me particularly to speak about two things, one, the 

 SSC in high-energy physics, and the second was the National Sci- 

 ence Foundation and its role in international science and technolo- 

 gy. Let me make a brief statement on each of those, and then I 

 would be glad to answer any questions on them. 



On the first, the SSC, unfortunately for high-energy phsyics, this 

 arrived on the scene at a very hard, rough time. It's a big-ticket 

 item. There used to be a song by the British great music hall singer 

 that always ended up, "It's the biggest Aspidistra in the world." 

 You may remembor that old song. And SCC is the biggest Aspidis- 

 tra in the world. 



Mr. FuQUA. I missed that. [Laughter.] 



Dr. Stever. And yet it comes when there is a tight budget, and 

 so the pressure for internationalization of it is very strong. 



Now, high-energy physics has an excellent record of internation- 

 al cooperation in science. It is exchanged at an individual level. It 

 is exchanged in small projects. Visitors come, visitors go. When a 

 foreign country has a facility which is more suited for a particular 

 experiment devised here, or vice versa in countries, there is that 

 visitation. But we have never succeeded in the total management 

 and financing from capital and operations. 



CERN is a big exception there, and we should study how well 

 they have done. But now we are proposing that the world get to- 

 gether on an SSC, and as my predecessor in this seat, Mr. Gavin, 

 said, people are suspicious of the fact that we are coming forward 

 with our program and asking complete internationalization of it 

 when they could have participated in the planning and so on. 



Second, the high-energy physics budgets are really committed 

 overseas pretty heavily, and it's going to be very difficult for them 

 to get involved. I think there is no question — oh, there is one other 

 reason: we haven't got the mechanism together, and I think it will 

 take a prodigious effort of both government top people — and some 

 of them have worked on this but still haven't made a great deal of 

 progress — and the high-energy physics community itself. 



So I think that it's going to be difficult to bring that off in a 

 timely fashion in an international way, in spite of all the advan- 

 tages for funding that international cooperation would have in that 



