836 



REFLECTIONS ON PAST EXPERIENCE 



of distributing supply, engineering, research, and 

 hardware contracts among the participants in roughly 

 the proportion that the state is contributing to the 

 common enterprise. This frequent insistence on juste 

 retour runs against sound management principles and 

 can have a serious if not crippling effect on project 

 efficiency and effectiveness. It is a particularly severe 

 problem where the project is not easily amenable to 

 modularization but instead involves a single, indivis- 

 ible entity. Euratom, ELDO, and INTELSAT were af- 

 fected in varying degrees with this problem. 



4. Control. Whatever the propensity to cooperate, 

 states generally are concerned about control over pro- 

 gram and project management and over resource 

 expenditures beyond national jurisdiction. This can 

 be seen in the pattern of resource allocation between 

 national and international programs in the same area. 

 The international component even in the best of cir- 

 cumstances represents only a small percentage of 

 what the state invests nationally. 



It is also reflected in the organizational arrange- 

 ments devised to carry out joint programs. The U.S.- 

 Euratom Joint R&D program is a case in point. In 

 1958, the United States signed a cooperation agree- 

 ment with the newly formed Euratom community. 

 The agreement called for a $350 million capital in- 

 vestment in U.S.-type nuclear power plants with the 

 United States providing up to $135 million in Export- 

 Import Bank credit loans. This was accompanied by a 

 joint R&D program to be carried out in Europe and 

 the United States on the types of reactors to be con- 

 structed. Each partner was to commit $50 million to 

 this program over a five-year period. To avoid the 

 combining of U.S. and European funds and to permit 

 each partner to remain in full control of its own con- 

 tributions, two boards were established. European 

 proposals went to the Euratom board and U.S. pro- 

 posals to the Atomic Energy Commission. While in 

 no way diminishing the value of the work done and 

 probably minimizing if not eliminating a possible 

 basis for controversy over R&D contract distribu- 

 tion -a problem that commonly plagues joint arrange- 

 ments-this approach exemplifies the sensitivity of 

 states to losing control over project management and 

 expenditures. Along with such matters as concern 

 over the control of commercially useful information, 

 the development of national capabilities, and other 

 considerations of national interest, these are factors 

 that can weigh heavily in decisions on whether or not 

 to pursue R&D independently or cooperatively. 



III. SELECTED PAST EXPERIENCE IN SCIENTIFIC 

 AND TECHNOLOGICAL COOPERATION 



International cooperative arrangemcpts. 

 have M.>en. fall along an organizational spectru 



I 

 ing from (a) information exchanges between national 

 programs to (b) coordination and confrontation of 

 national programs through (c) lead country ap- 

 proaches in which one country assumes responsibility 

 for linking related programs around an R&D exercise 

 with a view to maximizing efficiency and effectiveness 

 to (d) more formal central institutional approaches in 

 which responsibility is vested in a central institution 

 that makes R&D decisions and allocates responsibili- 

 ties on behalf of the membership. Euratom, CERN, 

 and INTELSAT represent variations closer to the lat- 

 ter end of the spectrum while the Halden, Dragon, 

 and Eurochemic undertakings in the ENEA context, 

 and Urenco, are examples of cooperative arrange- 

 ments closer to the middle of the spectrum. 



It bears repeating that the choice of organiza- 

 tional arrangement will depend on the project char- 

 acteristics including scientific, technical, economk, 

 and political considerations. It also needs to be em- 

 phasized that a truly objective assessment of the suc- 

 cess or failure of different ventures is most difficult 

 to achieve. Reliable objective criteria of performance 

 that effectively isolate the host of external political 

 and related factors that can affect outcomes are fiot 

 available. Judging outcomes against original intentipns 

 can easily overiook the evolution of interest or the 

 emergence of unanticipated consequences that bring 

 good and bad consequences in their wake. In addi- 

 tion, ventures may be simultaneously successes and 

 failures. Concorde, for example, was a technical suc- 

 cess but an economic and commercial disaster. Sim- 

 ilariy, while the ENEA enterprises did not lead to 

 visible commercial success (Halden and Dragon did 

 not yield industrial collaborative programs on the 

 reactor types involved and Eurochemic disbanded as a 

 collective enterprise in the face of competition from 

 larger national programs in member countries), they 

 were smoothly operating ventures, which helped to 

 engender a positive and constructive climate of co- 

 operation. The Euratom experience, on the other 

 hand, led to neither visible programmatic successes 

 nor generation of a positive will, but rather was a 

 victim of, and in some ways contributed to, tension 

 and combativeness. A modest review of aspects of 

 these experiences follows. 



III.A. CERN 



The earliest of the major and significant interna- 

 tional cooperative scientific endeavors is CERNj It is 

 generally regarded as the most successful in terms of 

 achieving its initial objectives, maintaining a strong 

 and active scientific cadre, and largely avoiding 

 some of the difficulties that have afflicted other co- 

 operative efforts.' Much of this is explained by the 

 character of CERN, which is fairiy unique in that 

 (a) its activities arc confined to pure scientific and 

 fundamental research, (b) it generates information of 



NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY/FUSION VOL. 2 JULY 1982 



