Advantage by Adam Segal

Author:Adam Segal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

SECURITY AND SCIENCE: LIVING BY PARANOIA

If trade and defense specialists often speak past each other when they discuss the costs of an open economy, then scientists and defense analysts are engaged in a dialogue of the deaf. As Admiral B. R. Innman, former deputy director of the CIA, put it, there is a conflict between the “scientist’s desire for unconstrained research and publication on the one hand, and the federal government’s need to protect certain information from potential foreign adversaries who might use that information against this nation. Both are powerful forces.”18

This is not a new problem. From the beginnings of the Cold War, there was a tension between security through obscurity—that is, trying to keep secrets out of the view of the Soviets—and security through transparency—trying to outpace the Soviets through exchange and innovation. In 1950, the National Academy of Sciences warned the State Department that excessive restrictions created a “furtive atmosphere” that hampered the spread of information and the progress of science. And for the next four decades, American scientists would periodically criticize the seemingly random and apparently ineffective restrictions placed on their visitors from the Eastern Bloc.

In the mid-1980s, the academic and the security communities reached a strained agreement on the balance between openness and control. The growing Soviet threat created real alarm in the early years of the Reagan administration, and a number of senior officials called for more restrictive controls on academic research. According to William Casey, director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1981 to 1987, “The Soviets got virtually a free ride on all of our research and development.”19 In several public forums, Defense Department officials reported that the Soviets had acquired both the technology to develop a superior antitank missile and high-speed computers used for designing advanced weapons systems.20

At the same time, there was more of a sense that the Soviet Union, owing to its secretiveness and tight control of information, was falling behind the West in science and technology. George A. Keyworth II, a physicist and science adviser to President Reagan, commented at the time, “The last thing we want to do is ape the repressive Soviet model which stifles technological innovation through its obsession with secrecy.”21

In 1985, after several years of back and forth, the (qualified) primacy of openness was enshrined in National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 189, a document that declared the Reagan administration’s policy toward academic research: “to the maximum extent possible, the products of fundamental research [shall] remain unrestricted.” Although NSDD 189 remains in effect today, the terrorist attacks of September 11 again raised the question of the right balance between openness and security. The George W. Bush administration, concerned that terrorists could gain access to any research that might help them build a chemical or biological weapon, sought tighter controls on universities. Significant amounts of work have been classified as “Sensitive But Unclassified,” a less restrictive classification that, though theoretically in the spirit of NSDD 189, has, in fact, dampened research and collaboration.

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