A LONC; RANGE 

 NATIONAL OCEANOGRAPHIC PLAN 



1963 - 1972 



SUMMARY 



This Nation's destiny and the sea have been 

 significantly linked together since the day this 

 country was discovered by seafaring men. During 

 this Nation's early growth, the sea provided both 

 a natural barrier to aggression, and a highway 

 for world-wide exchange of goods and of culture. 

 Later on, the Nation's interest in and dependence 

 on the sea waxed and waned. During World War 

 II, it was stimulated by the offensive and defen- 

 sive manifestations of undersea warfare, and 

 attention was focused even more sharply on 

 submarine warfare when nuclear power sudden- 

 ly cast the entire ocean, from bottom to sur- 

 face, as the arena for warfare. The POLARIS 

 system was a natural evolution of this new tech- 

 nique as a new, virtually undetectable, form of 

 deterrent. 



Simultaneously, late in the decade of the fif- 

 ties, came a new appreciation of the potential of 

 the ocean's abundant fish stocks to feed under- 

 nourished peoples of the world. Also, the new 

 era of scientific exploration revealed oceanog- 

 raphy lagging significantly by comparison to 

 rapid growth in sister fields. But to achieve these 

 objectives for security or for peaceful exploita- 

 tion of the ocean greatly increased knowledge 

 was required of the sea itself, its contents, its 

 boundaries, and its interaction with the atmos- 

 phere. Federal agencies having oceanography- 

 related missions requested the National Academy 

 of Sciences to undertake a comprehensive study of 

 the opportunities of science to contribute to man's 

 understanding of the unseen 72 percent of the 

 planet. With the 1958-59 publication of the NAS 

 reports, both the Executive and the Congress 

 recognized "inner space" to be a challenge de- 

 serving of enhanced support. 



Federal budgets have grown from $24 million 

 in FY 1958 to $124 million in FY 1963. Equally 

 significant, oceanographic research, which is a 

 concern of some 20 separate agencies, began in 

 1959 to be planned on a Government-wide basis. 

 Scope and effectiveness of joint planning and 

 conduct of research have kept pace with growth 

 in research, and since FY 1961, these plans have 

 been published as "National Programs" annually 



developed through the Interagency Committee 

 on Oceanography. 



As valuable as have been these yearly programs 

 in guiding developments by constituent ICO 

 agencies and in providing a coherence to activ- 

 ities of the scientific community that conducts 

 much of this research, there has been a growing 

 need for a perspective in which the oceanog- 

 raphic programs of various federal agencies over 

 the next decade can be more clearly seen in rela- 

 tion to each other, and especially in relation to 

 the national goals which they support. 



This plan is now complete — neither as a rigid 

 blue print to be followed slavishly, nor as a single 

 master document. Rather, it is a restatement of 

 national objectives that depend on oceanography, 

 an assignment of relative priorities expressed in 

 terms of levels of activity associated with these 

 different goals, a projection of the growth neces- 

 sary to achieve these goals, expressed in terms of 

 required research resources — funds, manpower, 

 and facilities. These requirements are expressed 

 in contemporary terms, but with intention of flex- 

 ibility that reflects an accommodation, even an 

 integration, of new technologies of instrumenta- 

 tion, deep diving vehicles and data collection 

 systems that will make the conduct of oceanog- 

 raphy of the seventies far different from that of 

 the sixties. 



Finally, the plan establishes the different roles 

 of federal agencies who participate in these pro- 

 grams, with changes in their programs that are 

 more than a simple linear expansion of present 

 activity. 



This report, incidentally, anticipates the prep- 

 aration of additional "satellite" reports — pro- 

 jecting in more detail plans for specific scientific 

 objectives, plans for individual agencies and 

 research institutions, but all presumably related 

 to a common goal: The national goal in oceanog- 

 raphy: To comprehend the world ocean, its boundaries, 

 its properties, and its processes, and to exploit this com- 

 prehension in the public interest, in enhancement of our 

 security, our culture, international posture, and our 

 economic growth. 



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