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reassert the technological leadership that our competitors have 

 been chipping away at over the past decade. 



We believe a fundamental issue to address at the international 

 level is how countries are going to deal with these changes. How 

 are they going to respond to the rising expectations of their citizens 

 that science and technology will carry them into a better future? 



One of the problems we have to face up to now is that our tradi- 

 tional programs for international science and technology coopera- 

 tion have rarely addressed these kinds of larger issues. Yet, year by 

 year, those are the issues dominating how we think about science 

 and technology in our own countries and how we think about pro- 

 grams we may wish to undertake together. 



One approach that we are working on in OSTP, initially suggest- 

 ed by the Japanese, is to bring the ministers of science and technol- 

 ogy of industrialized countries — or individuals who, by whatever 

 title, oversee their governments' R&D efforts — together for an in- 

 formal working conference. 



This ministerial meeting, which could take place some time later 

 this year, would allow each of the ministers to bring his own con- 

 cerns to a common meeting ground for discussion. For our own 

 part, we would hope that the discussions would enable us to ad- 

 dress several problems that particularly concern us. One is the pre- 

 carious situation I mentioned in Europe, notably the difficulty 

 there in creating new jobs. 



As a point of calibration, over the past 15 years, we in the 

 United States have created 26 million nev/ jobs, while the Europe- 

 ans have maintained essentially the same number of jobs. Obvious- 

 ly, the economic vitality of Europe is of fundamental importance to 

 worldwide stability. 



If it seems that this is an awfully large problem to expect the 

 science and technology ministers to cope with, I would respond in 

 two ways. First, as we ourselves hear from people throughout this 

 country, and as reflected in these ambitious hearings being held by 

 the task force this year, science and technology are vitally impor- 

 tant, not simply to the people in white coats or to the high-tech 

 high flyers, but to everyone who thinks about their jobs over the 

 next decade and to everyone who v/orries about what kinds of fu- 

 tures their children will have. 



And second, as we have seen time and time again, probably the 

 most effective channel we have found for nations to cooperate has 

 been through science and technology. The example I cited earlier 

 of the People's Republic of China may be the most spectacular suc- 

 cess, but there are plenty of others as well. 



Let me add that we would also hope to have a chance to raise 

 another issue at a ministerial meeting, and that is to talk about 

 mechanisms for planning international research programs. It goes 

 without saying that, in an era when frontier research is becoming 

 exceedingly expensive in many areas, we will have no choice but to 

 collaborate on world-type research projects. 



Yet too often we wind up with a situation where one country, or 

 some small group of countries, carries a proposed project well into 

 the design stage and only then starts to solicit participation from 

 other countries. That is not what we would call a real partnership. 

 Among other deficiencies, it fails to take advantage of the kind of 



