Science, Technology, and Global Security

Past Projects – 1960s

• Japanese-American Relations: This project brought together American and Japanese scholars and decision-makers to discuss the security problems of East Asia and the Western Pacific. Participants met five times over several years, in the United States and in Japan. Among the topics examined were: Japan’s security problems and defense forces; the nonproliferation treaty and its impact on Japan and other non-nuclear nations; Japanese-U.S. relations with respect to security and economic development; China’s impact on Japanese-U.S. relations; and analysis of Asian security situations. Final papers were assembled in a book on Japanese-U.S. relations in the 1970s.
  
  PROJECT DATE: 1967-1974
  PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Morton H. Halperin (Brookings Institution)
  RESULTING PUBLICATION: “United States-Japanese Relations: The 1970’s,” eds. Priscilla Clapp and Morton H. Halperin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Available from publisher.
  SOURCES OF FUNDING: Johnson Foundation, Ford Foundation, Defense Policy Research Group of the Yomiuri Shimbun
  
  
• Ethical Aspects of Experimentation on Human Subjects : With new surgical techniques, like heart transplants, and other experimental procedures becoming indispensable tools in prolonging human life, the issue of human experimentation became a matter of increasing public interest. The Academy created an interdisciplinary working group to study the ethics of human experimentation. Under the shadow of the memory of the Nazi years, the participants raised issues that were not only scientific and ethical, but also social, legal, and political, and that extended beyond medicine to experiments in psychology, education, and other areas of social policy. The working group’s papers were initially published in Dædalus in 1969.
  
  PROJECT DATE: 1966-1970
  PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Paul Freund (Harvard University)
  RESULTING PUBLICATION: “Experimentation with Human Subjects,” ed. Paul A. Freund. New York: George Braziller Inc., 1970. (out of print)
  SOURCE OF FUNDING: National Institutes of Health
  
  
• Chemical and Biological Warfare: At a time when national and international leaders were involved in a debate over restraints on chemical and biological weapons, the Academy, with the Salk Institute, organized a conference to illuminate the most important public policy issues raised by the existence of chemical and biological weapons. The resulting report analyzed America’s policy on these weapons, including the military’s needs for a chemical and biological capability. Read into the Congressional Record, the report was influential in leading Congress and the administration to ratify the Geneva Protocol in 1975.
  
  PROJECT DATE: 1969
  PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS: Paul Doty and Matthew S. Meselson (both of Harvard University)
  RESULTING PUBLICATION: “Proceedings of the Conference on Chemical and Biological Warfare,” ed. Matthew S. Meselson. Unpublished report, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Salk Institute, 1969. (out of print)
  SOURCE OF FUNDING: Carnegie Corporation of New York
  COLLABORATING ORGANIZATION: The Salk Institute
  
  
• The Collected Works of Count Rumford: Count Rumford, one of America’s earliest and most infamous scientists, was born Benjamin Thompson in 1753 in Woburn, Mass. During the pre-Revolutionary War days, he was loyal to the Crown, and in 1776, he fled to England. He subsequently spent much of his life working for the Bavarian government, and in 1791, he was named a count of the Holy Roman Empire, assuming the title of “Count Rumford,” after the New Hampshire town where his career began. Rumford’s greatest contributions to science were in relation to the nature of heat, but his interests and contributions were vast and eclectic. In 1796, Rumford gave $5,000 to the Academy to award a medal in his name for outstanding scientific research on heat or light. Between 1870 and 1875, the Academy published Count Rumford’s complete works. In 1965, Academy Fellow Sanborn C. Brown received funding to edit and reprint the collected works of Count Rumford. The resulting five volumes contain Rumford’s work on the nature of heat and light; descriptions of practical applications; diverse papers on devices and techniques; work dealing with light and armament; papers on public institutions; and works related to Bavaria and Great Britain. In addition to serving as a guide to methods of research in physics during the era, these works provide a unique portrait of the scientific, political, and social conditions of the turbulent early years of the Industrial Revolution.
  
  PROJECT DATE: 1965-1970
  PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Sanborn C. Brown (MIT)
  RESULTING PUBLICATION: “The Collected Works of Count Rumford, Vols. I to V” ed. Sanborn C. Brown. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970. Available from publisher.
  SOURCE OF FUNDING: American Academy
  
  
• Space Exploration and Society: In 1962, the Academy received a grant from NASA to study the long-range effects of space exploration on American life. Given the nation was committing enormous and unprecedented financial, scientific and manpower resources to the NASA program, the Academy study was charged with investigating the potential consequences, intended and unintended, of this mobilization on various sectors of society. This multiyear research project examined means for anticipating these secondary effects of space efforts, means for detecting these effects, and means for measuring and evaluating these effects on society. During the process, project leaders developed the then-revolutionary idea of creating social indicators to measure society’s well-being. Unlike economic indicators, social indicators measure “how good” rather than “how much,” and they can be used to assess changes in lifestyle as a result of the space program, or other technological advancements. One of the project’s resulting books, “Social Indicators,” is considered a pioneering work in the development and use of social indicators. Since its publication, many sophisticated data sets of social markers have been developed to track changes in educational achievement, poverty, family structure, housing, health care, social mobility, and other measures of societal well-being.
  
  PROJECT DATE: 1962-1966
  PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Earl P. Stevenson (Arthur D. Little, Inc.)
  RESULTING PUBLICATIONS:
  “The Railroad and the Space Program: An Exploration in Historical Analogy,” ed. Bruce Mazlish. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1965. (out of print)
  
  “Social Indicators,” ed. Raymond A. Bauer. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1966. Available from publisher.
  
  “Second-Order Consequences: A Methodological Essay on the Impact of Technology,” by Raymond A. Bauer, with Richard S. Rosenbloom and Laure M. Sharp. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1969. (out of print)
  
  SOURCE OF FUNDING: National Aeronautics and Space Administration
  COLLABORATING ORGANIZATION: National Aeronautics and Space Administration
  
  
• Arms Control, Disarmament and National Security: The Academy convened a program of conferences and studies that led to the seminal 1960 special issue of Dædalus on arms control, which President John F. Kennedy subsequently called the “Bible” on the subject. The volume was designed to provide a comprehensive analysis of arms control as a means of reducing the risk of nuclear war and improving national security. Read extensively by scientists and government leaders, this report helped fashion an intellectual framework for the fledgling area of nuclear weapons arms control. The authors hoped the compendium of knowledgeable and responsible opinion would inform and stimulate work necessary to move toward a more peaceful world. Since publication of that Dædalus issue, and its subsequent publication in book form, the Academy has remained a leading source of scholarship in the study of nuclear nonproliferation and international security challenges.
  
  PROJECT DATE: 1960-1961
  PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Donald G. Brennan (MIT)
  RESULTING PUBLICATION: “Arms Control, Disarmament and National Security,” ed. Donald G. Brennan. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1961. (out of print)
  SOURCE OF FUNDING: Johnson Foundation
  

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