703 



eventual end users, are even more content than those in the United 

 States to watch and wait without investing their own money. 



Cooperative efforts on fusion within the EC are driven by the 

 accepted reality of long-run economic cooperation. Thus natural 

 obstacles to fusion cooperation have been overcome. There is faith 

 that the ultimate economic benefits will be captured more or less 

 equitably by all EC participants through normal diffusion within the 

 European economy. 



By contrast, there is no natural economic force that compels the EC 

 and the United States to cooperate. The natural long-run competitive 

 relationship will prevail and will make obstacles to fusion 

 cooperation hard to overcome. The same observation holds between the 

 EC and Japan and between the United States and Japan. No mechanism 

 assures that the economic benefits will be captured equitably. More 

 specifically, the fundamentally different treatment of government 

 patent rights in Japan and the United States, for example, remains an 

 unresolved obstacle. 



One might expect that the separate stakes in fusion perceived by 

 the EC, Japan, and the United States would tend to persist unaltered 

 and not be easily subordinated to international cooperation. 



The Influence of the Versailles Summit 



The stated aim of the Summit Working Group in Controlled Thermonuclear 

 Fusion is "to reach a consensus on the desirable strategy in fusion in 

 order to facilitate early joint planning to coordinate individual 

 development programs." Thus, by pushing for a world strategy to which 

 all can agree, the meeting of the Summit of Industrialized Nations at 

 Versailles in 1982, together with subsequent meetings, constitutes an 

 external force toward cooperation. A German official was sympathetic 

 with Summit guidance for joint planning of sequential (or phased) 

 programs in the three world regions. U.K. officials conceded that 

 high costs might compel a high-level mandate for cooperation, say, if 

 the costs of NET reached the neighborhood of $4 billion. 



Character of the Program of the European Community 



Fusion collaboration within the EC is viewed with much pride as a 

 showpiece of research and development. JET is similarly viewed as the 

 showpiece of fusion. There is significant desire by several of its 

 participants, especially Germany, to maintain the self-sufficiency of 

 the EC program. Germany supports cooperation as much for the 

 psychological benefits of European cooperation as for actual progress 

 in fusion. German officials were not anxious to broaden the scale of 

 cooperation, since EC unity might be diminished and the German 

 contribution might lose relative importance thereby. 



A U.K. official had no view, without extensive staff analysis, as 

 to whether the EC program should proceed alone or collaborate with 



