704 



Japan or the United States. The same official, however, expressed 

 reservations about any attempts to accelerate the EC program. 



Thus preservation of the unity and coherence of the EC program, 

 tailored as it has been to fit member-country needs, may be an 

 important constraint on any broader-scale cooperative planning. 



European Attitudes 



A draft proposal for an EC Council decision (Commission of the 

 European Communities, 1984b) states, "The Commission is convinced that 

 international collaboration on fusion research and development is 

 particularly desirable." At the political level of the Summit of 

 Industrialized Nations, which includes the EC, science advisors to 

 their respective governments have endorsed international scientific 

 cooperation (Science, 1983; Science, 1984). A senior official of the 

 EC fusion program, speaking from a position intermediate between the 

 political and the management level, said that international 

 cooperation should be an essential part of the fusion program, not 

 just an incidental part. This official added that the EC is trying to 

 extend collaboration beyond its frontiers. The motive may be 

 anticipated budget problems associated with the high costs of future 

 large devices. However, the three world-class programs woula have to 

 be brought into better coordination in order to enjoy fruitful 

 cooperation on the next large step. 



Attitudes in individual Member States differed somewhat from the 

 above sentiments. Germans were largely opposed to large-scale 

 cooperation with the United States, believing that the EC could 

 probably pursue fusion development by itself. They perceived the 

 United States as interested mainly in the one-way flow of cash from 

 the EC to the U.S. program. French officials thought that 

 collaboration was likely only on medium-sized projects and that, if 

 the small-scale cooperation did not work, it would be all the harder 

 to collaborate on large projects. French officials complained about 

 lack of U.S. cooperation on the TORE SUPRA project. A U.K. official 

 expressed his country's reluctance to become enmeshed in another large 

 technology project like the Concorde supersonic transport. Another 

 U.K. official noted that three-way collaboration would have such 

 difficulties with design agreement, siting, procurement, and project 

 management that it might not be workable in practice. 



There are limits to large-scale cooperation, as evident in the 

 second report of the so-called Beckurts Committee (Commission of the 

 European Communities, 1984a) , recently released. The Beckurts report 

 recommends that expenditures "should be sufficient to keep Europe 

 fully effective, competitive and thus in a strong position to 

 negotiate information exchange and cooperation agreements with other 

 partners." The report further recommends maintaining "a 

 self-consistent European planning, avoiding too much reliance on 

 decisions from other programmes." Overall, however, it would appear 



