After the Cold War: A new calculus for science and security

Academe, Sep/Oct 2003 by Wallerstein, Mitchel B

The debate over scientific openness and national security is not new. Drawing on the past, we can earn how to continue doing science in a new age of terrorism.

I have been concerned professionally for more than two decades with the relationship between scientific openness and national security. Indeed, just more than twenty years ago, I had the privilege of directing a National Academy of Sciences panel that issued a report entitled Scientific Communication and National Security, known informally as the Corson Report, after Dale Corson, the panel's chair and president emeritus of Cornell University. Thus, for me, today's discussions about science and security have, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, a strong sense of "deja vu all over again."

The nature of the threat has changed, of course, since the Corson panel issued its report. The target of restrictions on open communication of scientific information is no longer the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Treaty states. But the risks to scientific and technological progress and the potential negative effects of imposing restrictions remain similar.

After working on the Corson Report and related studies at the National Academy in the 1980s, I managed major aspects of the U.S. Department of Defense's policy on technology security and export controls from 1993 to 1997. Even though my time in government preceded the terrible events of September 11, 2001, I can report that we recognized during the 1990s that certain areas of science, such as biotechnology, could be enormously helpful to the so-called proliferant states, such as Iraq and North Korea, as well as to terrorist groups seeking to gain access to mass-casualty weapons-or weapons of mass destruction. (Proliferant states are states known to possess, or strongly suspected of seeking to acquire or develop, nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons and their means of delivery.)

I had forgotten, until I went back recently to review the Corson Report, that the panel had anticipated the need to consider how restrictions on scientific communication would differ in an era in which the principal security threats did not emanate from the Soviet Union and Warsaw Treaty states. This observation was, however, simply noted toward the end of the report as a subject that the National Academy might wish to address in the future.

Of course, the fact that the threats we worry about today no longer derive from a monolithic adversary with considerable science and technology capabilities necessarily must alter the calculus of how we think about the problem. During the era of the Soviet Union, we faced an opponent that, because of the shortcomings of its science and technology infrastructure and its economic constraints, undertook a systematic and sustained effort to obtain scientific and technological information from the West. It did so by taking advantage of the openness of the western science and technology community. It sent agents to scientific meetings to search for specific information (or someone who could be co-opted to supply it); it placed supposed "students" onto university campuses where they could gain access to leading-edge research; and it engaged in many other activities, both overt and covert. These efforts were well documented by the intelligence community, and some were fairly successful.

In 1981, in response to this growing threat, senior officials in the incoming Reagan administration began to call-loudly at times-for compartmentalizing sensitive research on university campuses and in the private sector and for excluding many foreign nationals from participation in such research. This development alarmed the leadership of the science and technology community, including university presidents. Shortly thereafter, the National Academy presidents set up the panel on scientific communication and national security that issued the Corson Report.

I dwell on this history to make a point: in the Soviet era, we had a technically sophisticated adversary that, if it succeeded in gaining access to sensitive research and analysis, would have been able to overcome the gap in fielded weapons systems between itself and nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. This gap gave the West its technological dominance, which, in turn, maintained the strategic parity between the opposing sides in the Cold War despite the substantial numerical superiority of the Warsaw Treaty forces.

What the Corson Report pointed out, however, was that, with few exceptions, it was (and is) not individual widgets or weapons component technology that must be protected, but the knowledge base and technical know-how necessary to design and build them. This seemingly obvious but important observation applies to every major threat from weapons of mass destruction we face today, including that posed by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and even more esoteric weapons such as those used in cyberwarfare.

The most immediate concern driving recent federal legislation and executive branch actions-including the enshrinement of the ambiguous term, "sensitive homeland security information"-is the fear that al Qaeda and other terrorist groups may gain access to the knowledge and materials necessary to build crude, but nevertheless deadly, mass casualty \veapons for use against the United States or its interests or citizens abroad.