434 
NATIONAL OCEANOGRAPHIC PROGRAM—1965 
A LONG 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- 
nsirished 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. 
