Science and Public Policy: National Security 121 



about one in five or .4 of 1% has the skill or motivation to 

 stay in basic research, and an even smaller number actually 

 continues with significant contributions. Now we are finding 

 how to couple that minute fraction with the massive operation 

 of developing the great systems for national defense, wherein 

 hundreds and thousands of able technologists and engineers in- 

 deed create marvelous combinations of new materials and 

 effects. 



For all this we are grateful, but we also see an even more exact- 

 ing future ahead. It is one in which the Navy and the Defense 

 Department must deal with cosmic environments of outer 

 space, of inner depths, of vast earth surface changes, and me- 

 teorological variations. The oceans must be treated as a total 

 environment, not conveniently classified according to the Naval 

 Bureau or the weapons system which has to function thereon. 

 The capabilities of computing machines will let us begin these 

 titanic tasks through modeling and simulation studies, through 

 more perceptive data analysis and through the merciful com- 

 paction of display by graphics generated directly from the digi- 

 tal machines. Our global and even interplanetary sensing and 

 signaling systems must be more elegantly adapted to the human 

 channels through which they must ultimately pass. We are gain- 

 ing in these sectors, but if Newton said that the vast sea of 

 knowledge yet lay before him, we can conclude that that sea of 

 knowledge is full of Naval science and we had better keep 

 going, charting the voyage with ever deeper probes into the 

 essence of things. 



