Science, Technology, And The Issues Of The Eighties by Albert H. Teich Ray Thornton

Author:Albert H. Teich, Ray Thornton [Albert H. Teich, Ray Thornton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9780429305528
Google: AttCzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-01-15T03:50:09+00:00

Transborder Issues

A series of transborder and global science and technology issues will be important elements of the international security picture in the next five years, although the separation of these from “economic” issues is rather arbitrary. The importance of environmental, ocean, resource and energy issues will be largely in their economic and, ultimately, political effects, as is the case for those just discussed.

Resources and Energy

In the short term, the major issues related to security, resources and energy have to do with supply interruptions engendered by political action and, secondarily, the economic terms on which resources are made available to industrialized societies.7

A major political phenomenon of recent years is the assertion of the right of absolute sovereignty over natural resources. It is a natural concomitant of a nation-state system but has not before been sanctified as it is today. The growing dependence of industrialized societies on resources under the control of others, particularly developing countries, creates major dependency relations, many fraught with great uncertainty and danger for international stability.

The dangers come not only from the threat of supply disruption, or of sudden dramatic increases in the cost of the resources, but also from the second-order strains created among industrial countries whose disparate dependence on resources from abroad may lead to major and disruptive foreign policy differences. The much greater dependence of Japan and continental Europe than the United States on Middle East oil, or the differential dependence on South African resources, could lead to serious conflicts of interest over Middle East or African or Soviet policy.

Although the world is painfully conscious of the political restrictions oil-rich developing countries sometimes place on resources, these countries are not the only ones to do so. Canada and Australia both have restricted export of uranium ore on nonproliferation grounds, and the United States severely restricts export of enriched uranium on the basis of specific political considerations. Moreover, the United States embargoed soybean exports for a short time in 1974 to stabilize domestic prices, and it has embargoed the sale of grain and high technology to the Soviet Union in protest against the Afghanistan invasion. A cabinet member of the Reagan administration in his first public statement spoke of using U.S. food exports as a foreign policy “weapon” (later changed to “tool”).8

These consequences of resource dependency and of unequal distribution are all political and economic in character. The issues arising in the near future will be concerned with distribution and availability but not with depletion. In the long term, the adequacy of resources will be determined by economic, not geologic, phenomena,9 and there is no reason to doubt that the industrial system could cope with long-term changes in the price and availability of materials and energy.

Short-term vulnerabilities must be met with measures that are largely outside the realm of science and technology directly: stockpiling, political negotiations, pooling arrangements in time of crisis and so on. Conceivably, new R&D for resource exploration, or exploitation of deep seabed minerals, could change U.S. dependency on foreign resources, but this is unlikely in a five-year time-horizon.

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