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14 SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL COOPERATION 



cal Organization (WMO) and by the International Council of Scien- 

 tific Unions (ICSU). In this case, ICSU involvement provided scien- 

 tific leadership, while the involvement of WMO offered some assur- 

 ance of steady funding and global access. A similar arrangement exists 

 today in the cooperative arrangement between ICSU and WHO for 

 the World Climate Research Program. U.S. scientists have figured prom- 

 inently in the development and implementation of both programs. 



Bilateral Agreements 



In 1982, the United States had approximately three dozen formal 

 bilateral S&T agreements in force. ^^ When these formal arrangements 

 are combined with other bilateral mechanisms such as interacademy 

 exchanges, joint commissions, and informal (National Science Foun- 

 dation- or Agency for International Development-sponsored) ar- 

 rangements and interagency memoranda of understanding, total U.S. 

 bilateral S&T relationships number many hundreds. Certainly no 

 form of cooperation is more explicitly political; agreements have 

 sometimes been developed primarily in order to give visiting heads of 

 state something to sign at the conclusion of a visit. On the other hand, 

 some bilateral agreements tend to continue in effect long after the con- 

 ditions that created the need for them have changed, because termina- 

 tion may be politically difficult. For example, the United States main- 

 tains a bilateral arrangement with lapan based largely on the technical 

 and economic circumstances which existed at the end of World War II. 



In most cases, the central function of bilateral arrangements is to 

 serve as a symbolic means of winning or maintaining support with 

 friendly governments. Moreover, the U.S. decision in the wake of the 

 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to scale back U.S. -Soviet bilateral 

 S&T relations demonstrates that other types of symbolic messages 

 also can be sent in this fashion. 



Nongovernmental Organizations 



Given the predominant values of science that transcend national 

 identity— i.e., objectivity, neutrality, replicability, generation of new 

 knowledge, etc.— it is not surprising that some of the more successful 

 examples of international cooperation are nongovernmental in na- 

 ture. The principal venue for nongovernmental S&T arrangements is 

 ICSU, an autonomous federation consisting of 20 disciplinary scien- 

 tific unions and 70 national member organizations (mostly academies 



