454 



1036 Walter A. McDougall 



on the government even as the state loses all hope of maintaining standards of cost 

 and quality "given the revolutionary size, scope, and pace of the public interest in 

 technological change."^' 



Once funding and contractual decisions fall by necessity to "experts" in arcane 

 technical fields, once benign efforts at "technology assessment" are stymied by the 

 very absence of shared values among scientists, engineers, businessmen, and 

 bureaucrats, once the volume, scale, and complexity of projects invite cost overruns 

 and unpredictable performance, then the state is demoted by its own magic to 

 sorcerer's apprentice. If this is not what Kennedy or de Gaulle or Khrushchev had 

 in mind when they and their advisers seized upon technology as a political tool, 

 then perhaps Mazlish's expectation of stages through which a social invention must 

 pass is borne out. Predictability of effects declines rapidly with the diffusion of new 

 techniques and patterns of management throughout society. The special character- 

 istics of aerospace and related industries suggest that traditional historical catego- 

 ries for policy, labor relations, investment patterns, and other phenomena are 

 proportionally less applicable as integration or "interface" among state agencies and 

 private or semiprivate corporations increases. Above all, it seems that government- 

 industry-university teams to promote technology are inherently contradictory 

 unless the conflicting values they embody are repressed. 



The tendency of strategic, high-technology industries to alter the relationship of 

 state and society is evident in Western Europe. Britain, France, Italy, and West 

 Germany have all undergone almost complete concentration of their aerospace 

 industries into semipublic behemoths under government pressure, so that the 

 resulting giants might compete with each other and the large American firms. 

 Monopsony has bred monopoly; exogenous pressures have shaped domestic 

 institutions. Similarly, the Soviet Union, though socialist, actually fosters more 

 competition since it can support several research centers that compete for party 

 favor in design and production.™ 



Take away the Cold War — and, hence, missile and space technology — and what 

 would the American economy look like? This counterfactual question suggests that 

 the journalistic debate on fall-out from the space program (NASA gave us the 

 teflon pan, but was it worth it?) has hindered serious discussion of its historical 

 impact. The role of space research as the intellectual, institutional, or financial 

 progenitor of revolutionary developments in micro-miniaturization, computers, 

 optics, materials processing, robotics, lasers, solar power cells, and more — this is the 

 proper subject of the economic history of the Space Age.^' And the net gains from 

 space technology should be measured not only against the total cost, or the 

 economic cost, of the program itself but also against the continuing loss incurred 



" H. L. Nieburg. "R & D and the Contract State: Throwing away the Yardstick." Butom of the Atomic Scientists 

 (March 1966), 20-24. Also see H. L. Nieburg, In the Name of Science (Chicago, 1966), chap. 10. 



™ See Parrot, "Politics and Technology in the Soviet Union," chap. 5. Also see Alexander G. Korol, Soviet 

 R y D: Its Organization, Personnel, and Fundi (Cainbridge. Mass., 1975). 



' Robert Fogel. in Mdzhsh, The Railroad and the Space Program, 106: "The consequences of space technology 

 for the biological and physical sciences in general could lead lo a technological and commercial revolution far 

 more portentous than that which followed from the scientific breakthroughs of the seventeenth, eighteenth, 

 and nineteenth centuries." 



