Impact of New Technologies on the Arms Race

This is the record of the 10th Pugwash Symposium, an outgrowth of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. These Conferences and the more specialized Symposia are marked by a free and open exchange, in which world scientists and scholars share their facts and their thoughts. This enables them to give objective expression to their concerns about the effects of science and technology on mankind, positive and negative, potential and actual, and especially about the role of science and scientists in evolving sane arms policies. While unofficial, these meetings have often heralded several years in advance what were to become official national policies and international agreements. This symposium brought together participants from the United States, the Soviet Union, England, France, West Germany, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Israel and India. The discussions that resulted include both "hard" technical analysis of specific weapons systems and assessments of long-range tendencies of a necessarily general and exploratory nature. The explosive growth of modern technology and the proliferation of armaments have been accelerating-and parallel-developments. Although there is a lag between new discoveries and their application in hardware, this lag is rather shorter in the case of weapons than for more peaceful products-hence the need to monitor as closely as possible and without delay the military application of new techniques. Thus, a goal of the participants in this symposium was to trace the paths by which known and foreseeable technologies could be transferred both into weapons and into arms control devices. The first of the book's four sections is concerned with applications of new technology to ballistic-missile guidance and to nuclear weapons, including the possible military significance of the (as yet undiscovered) superheavy elements. Reconnaissance and surveillance as arms controlling elements, the performance of ABM systems, and offensive and defensive ocean technology are also treated in detail. The second section discusses the safeguarding of nuclear materials and installations and the problems of nuclear weapons proliferation arising from the expansion of nuclear power production. Military research and development is the subject of the next section, which investigates both the growth characteristics of military systems and problems of controlling their development or their elimination. The final section is devoted to some political (as distinct from the technical) implications of the subject.Feld, Bernard T. is the author of 'Impact of New Technologies on the Arms Race' with ISBN 9780262560108 and ISBN 0262560100.