Political Decisions Where the Technical Component is Substantial

Abstract

IT IS THE BURDEN OF CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE AND technology to produce change at a rate, and of a scale and character, which is genuinely without precedent. Science and technology have between them made the world a smaller and inescapably interdependent place, and as catalysts and instruments of change they are far from finished yet. In fact, the introduction into industrial societies of systematic research, development and innovation, as contrasted with the more or less serendipitous activity of invention, bids fair to being one of the few major benchmarks of history. It is also a benchmark to which political systems, and above all the international system (if one may so dignify what is still in many respects a rag-bag) have still fully to accommodate themselves.