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Perspectives
The Academies and the World
The National Academy of Sciences, of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine—or “The Academies,” as they like to be called now--have just completed the beginnings of their master plan for assembling the forces of American academic research into the war against terrorism. What they are up to is all about optimal outcomes for the world and the kind of policy engineering needed to make them a reality. It is an ambitious program and definitely qualifies for insertion someday into science policy case histories.
The Academies are betting that the war, or whatever will emerge as its moral equivalent, is going to last a long time and that America’s technical inventiveness and social science insights could well make all the difference in that new world just over the horizon. These institutions have never tried anything this bold and ambitious before and will probably need a lot of luck to realize even one vividly clear, attributable victory.
One important gap in the operation is one or two charismatic scientific figures to stir the attention of the top political dogs. World War II had its atomic bomb research chief Robert Oppenheimer and overall wartime R&D czar Vannevar Bush. This time, charismatic figures of Oppenheimer and Bush’s magnitude are in short supply and the marching orders are spread in all directions because of the diffuse nature of the threats.
Co-captains in the assault are NAS president Bruce Alberts, NAE president William A. Wulf, and IOM president Kenneth I. Shine. War is new territory for all three. But science, technology, and public health are not. And the war isn’t only about demolishing opposing forces anyway. It is a whole new other kind of thing. It is against all manner of attacks that disrupt societies, and the Academies seem at an early glance to understand this. That is why their plan has strong social and political science components. How well those softer but critical components can be joined to the physical challenges is a big unanswerable question.
What they are up to is a play with many acts being performed simultaneously. Their program involves reshaping foreign policy for this era of cyber communications. It involves withering the social roots of terrorism and understanding what’s really involved in rebuilding failed nations. And it entails drawing up a system that gives resilience to an industrial society’s infrastructure against attacks while preserving, if not enhancing, liberty and privacy.
The question over the longer run is whether the Academies can offer a vision of the world to the world, whether they can paint a picture of a world more realistic and far-reaching than any Administration has ever seen, and whether they can broaden the definition of science and engineering to human dimensions and everyday life. With that, it’s hard to resist the temptation of wondering whether something new, great, and healing could happen if such a mobilization succeeds and if the ideas are truly transforming. The fear is that the ideas are conventional or redundant, that nobody important enough listens, and that whole thing ends up collapsing in a heap.
But the plan must first be a good one. Most of its fruits are pretty far down the road right now, five years and more. And they are further complicated by the ideas and materiel of immediate need already pouring out from the Defense Department, the National Laboratories, the defense industry, and technology-intensive companies specializing in biological and chemical warfare, cybersecurity, and varieties of incredibly keen sensor technologies. These activities are essentially competition for the Academies’ efforts, especially those involving new counter-terrorism technologies needed early in the game. But it all needs to be integrated with the Academies’ efforts, which in theory at least are more than mere adjuncts, in this case, to the federal government.
Thus, the question is whether the Academies will really produce the systems for long-lasting security and the tools, to use a term coined by Ivan Illich in a book a generation ago, of peaceful conviviality. To read any account of conditions among Afghan refugees and homeless inside the country easily dampens much optimism. Worth thinking about, too, is whether any of the ideas that will be generated will actually be employed. Knowledge transfer to decision makers is the key here and the crucial element to all of that is President Bush’s science adviser, Jack Marburger, who coordinates the R&D needs of the Office of Homeland Security. If Marburger can be effective in getting ideas into that Office and important White House decision points, then the Academies will have one major battle won. As of December 10, however, President Bush had not even noticed Marburger enough to swear him in.
The Academies’ effort is made up of two major parts. One is the work of a just-organized committee on the Science and Technology Agenda for Countering Terrorism. The other involves sets of studies by committees within the Academies’ contracting unit, the National Research Council. These studies will delve into a range of approaches to countering terrorism from long-term security measures to root causes of terrorism.
The Committee is co-chaired by Lewis M. Branscomb, emeritus professor of public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a perennial and ubiquitous Washington presence in science and technology, and by Richard D. Klausner, former director of the National Cancer Institute and currently president of the new Case Institute of Health, Science, and Technology. Members number 24 and include John D. Baldeschwieler, prominent California Institute of Technology chemist, William Brinkman, head of physical science research at Bell Laboratories, Richard L. Garwin, IBM researcher and a critic of nuclear weapons policy through several Administrations, M.R.C. Greenwood, chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Joshua Lederberg, former president of Rockefeller University, Maxine Singer, president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and George Whitesides, Harvard University chemist.
Branscomb and Klausner have been selecting chairs of panels that will cover threats in seven operating categories—biological; chemical; nuclear and radiological; information technology, computers, and telecommunications; transportation; energy facilities; buildings and fixed infrastructure; and behavioral, social, and institutional issues. A number of short-term, on-demand studies under each category is planned, as well as “fast-track expert working groups” who would provide quick advice for a key interagency body known as the Technical Support Working Group.
“Tiswig,” as its contractors call it, makes new technologies available to federal agencies that support anti-terrorism work everywhere in the country. Formal reports would not be the method of operation here. The Academies and Tiswig have become good friends since September, so the prospects of a good working relationship appear solid. Tiswig is in the business of finding the best anti-terrorism ideas.
“The science and technology community is motivated to help,” says the committee in a brief description of its work plan. “The problem is that the structure of agencies, the distribution of assets in research budgets, and procedures for sorting out worthwhile proposals from the chaos of ideas, plans, and claimants on priority funding may not be optimally suited to address these threats most effectively.” It points out that in past wars, the U.S. traditionally had time to gear up to fight a war. “This time the enemy is already in our homeland,” it states. “There is no time to waste.”
The committee’s plan is to move on dual tracks for the first few months. By the end of six months at the most, they hope to develop a taxonomy of research priorities based on assessing for risk the many different forms of terrorist tactics—bombs or infectious bugs in suitcases, primitive missiles, arms smuggling in shipping containers, money laundering—and the means of meeting such threats or mitigating their execution. “This typology,” states the work plan, “would consist of a matrix spanning the range of threats, each characterized by targets, weapons, and delivery systems, and the possible points of intervention.” A main point would be to “define the nature of the challenge the society faces. It is not a conventional war between nation states, in the style of WWII or the Iraq-Kuwait war. Nor is it a crime-fighting response sufficient to deter or prevent terrorist attacks.”
The timetable? An initial meeting has been scheduled for Dec. 18-20 to launch the project to go over plans of each of the seven teams. The teams were to meet early in January, and again in late January. Draft team reports were due by the end of March and a final, integrated report containing research agenda in each of the seven areas would be produced in May, ending Phase I.
Phase II two would begin with the issuance of the May report and then the real fun begins. That will consist of organizing or reorganizing the government’s R&D agencies so that they more or less march to the same tune. That will be the work of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and science adviser Marburger. The Academies cannot do this. They can only provide ideas. Someone else must pull everyone into line. As Oppenheimer had a General Leslie Groves to run and keep secure the organization that designed, built, and tested the atomic bomb, the troops on the R&D front will need a Groves to tell the bureaucrats to shape up and take orders.
In any case, Phase II will produce a report of its own, due Sept. 11, 2002, “addressing the ways in which the federal R&D enterprise must evolve in policy and structure in light of the expectation that terrorism is a permanent feature of contemporary society which government must address.”
So fresh ideas across the board were the big priority at the Academies as they assembled the panels. Wulf himself says too much emphasis, to his mind, has been placed so far on airport security and screening or sterilizing mail. “At our first meeting on Sept. 26, one of the messages was that one of the ways terrorists will make us feel most vulnerable is by exposing all of the different ways in which we are vulnerable.”
Parallel to the Branscomb/Klausner operation at the Academies will be the ongoing production of reports and studies through the National Research Council. This activity will literally be of global dimensions and will put strong focus on relations among Academies of science and engineering from other parts of the world. The NAS is far more along with this than the NAE but that may make no difference since technology slips into policy issues in full volume whenever scientists meet to talk policy. Nuclear proliferation and arms control have always been a concern of the NAS in its relations with Russia, India, and China. Pakistan is now added to the list. Activity on emerging infectious diseases around the world will become an even higher priority in issue studies. The U.S. public health infrastructure is now an item of high priority in government and the IOM will be looking at that. A new look at state-federal relations in science and technology, especially in response to terrorism, will be undertaken for Marburger.
Discussions between NAS and the Russian Academy of Sciences will be intensified. “We’re pretty excited about that,” says Alberts. “We have a full battery of things with them in non-proliferation, anti-terrorism, and studies of ethnic conflicts. We’d really like to ramp that up. We have common enemies, after all, and they have a lot of information about things we ought to know about.”
More quietly, the Academies have also developed strong relations with the Iranian science and engineering establishments. Several joint projects have been launched, but little if any publicity has been generated due to the political delicacy of conditions within Iran.
Wulf says, “We have been isolated from Iran for so long that that there is a younger generation that shares our value system in the sense of being engineers and scientists but with whom we are not acquainted at all. These are going to be the future opinion leaders; to some extent they already are now. The vast majority of Iranians has no ill will toward America. The other thing is that 40 per cent of the student enrollment at their MIT, Shareef University, consists of women. I think that the closed nature of that society cannot withstand such mass higher education of women. It may take a whole generation, but it’s going to happen.”
In the realms of overall policy, the Academies’ international division, headed by John Boright, is in the early stages of proposing part two of a study of science and technology as needed in the State Department and the science policy apparatus. Back in 1999, the Academies produced a report outlining the importance of science, technology, and health to international diplomacy. That led to the appointment of a science adviser—Norman Neuriter—to the Secretary of State. While Neureirter cannot be said to be sitting on the right side of Secretary of State Colin Powell, he has assembled a small staff, and is a strong presence on the policy scene in Washington.
“State I was a look at mainstream foreign policy directions and goals,” says Boright. “It made the case for the capabilities State needs. But what it didn’t do was talk about the U.S Agency for International Development [USAID] or what remains of the U.S. Information Agency. With the new realization that came from events of Sept. 11, we thought we needed to look at the whole foreign affairs family.”
The big challenge is to incorporate USAID as an element of the team. What Boright and his boss Alberts are saying is that Congressional hostility toward the State Department in recent years, and the restrictions Congress has put on USAID have squelched programs that would have helped aid and understand the larger world a lot better. Little was done, says Boright, in such pursuits as area studies, linguistics, history, and religion. Instead, the State Department, under a basically hostile Congress, shrank, shrank, and shrank, until all that is left is a Department half the size that it was in the 1970’s.
Alberts has no detailed sense of how the Academies will be affected by this new call to battle. The impact is more personal. “It’s probably going to be a ten to fifteen year thing,” he says. “I’ve got five grandchildren. I want them to succeed in a world part of which is falling behind while the U.S. is marching on. With all the resources we import, we can’t believe the rest of the world is not our problem. We knew that in a way before September 11, but we didn’t know it in the way do now.” |
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