Abstract
It remains such a strong positive notion: that the military use of R&D not only safeguards security in the technological arms race, it also enhances the economic well-being of the nation by virtue of spin-off. Yet this pleasant combination becomes more and more disputed. R&D, or creativity, after all remains humankind’s most important resource for survival . There are growing suspicions that this scarce resource should be geared to ends other than means of destruction , and that the flow of inventions from the military sector to general or (what a strange distinction) “civilian” technology does not represent a stream, but a mere trickle. The high level of uncertainty about the real magnitudes of commonly used technology stemming from military activities and the bitter dispute among protagonists about the validity/invalidity of the whole argument provoke this contribution . Such a “fundamentalist” approach, which tries to delineate what can be known and what not , is not a frivolous attempt. With a view to clarifying a highly ideologized argument (the next section depicts the dimensions) , the question to be asked in a meticulous, maybe pedantic , manner is : What can science reasonably say to the spin-off debate?
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Notes and References
Industrieanlagen-Betriebsgesellschaft mbH, Ziviler Nutzen militaerisch motivierter Forschung (Civilian usefulness of militarily motivated R&D) , Ottobr runn near Munich, 1985, mimeo, p.45 (quoted as ”IABG study”) .
The formula “military use of R&D”, introduced by the UN Expert Group study mentioned above, points at a broader concept than the better known formula “military R&D”, pitting a functional against an institutional understanding of the issue concerned.
Morton H. Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, (Washington, D.C. : The Brookings Institution , 1974) , esp. p. 11.
Bernd W. Kubbig, Zivilen Nutzen schaffen mit Raketenabwehrwaffen? Technologie- und industriepolitische Aspekte der SDI-Diskussion , HSFK-Forschungsbericht 2, Frankfurt a.M. 1986.
Amerika-Dienst, February 30, 1985, p.9. Cf. also Washington Post, April 4, 1985.
Wireless Bulletin from Washington , Jan . 23, 1985, p.6.
Der Spiegel, No. 11/1985.
Cf. Der Spiegel, No. 24 of June 10, 1985.
Quoted from Capital , No. 6 (1985) , p.86.
Kubbig, loc. cit.
Wehrtechnik, vol . 4 (1986) , p. 12.
Ibid.
Wehrtechnik, loc. cit.
Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft und Politik, No.24, June 12, 1985 , p.2.
Helmar Krupp and Uwe Kuntze, Dilemmasa Inherent in the Public Promotion of High Technologies, Înstitute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISIO, Karlsruhe, 1986 (paper for the International Conference on Technical Cooperation and International Competitiveness, Pisa, 1986).
Taken from ibid.
Debbie Hatton-Bennett, “Civil Exploitation of MoD R&D” , ADIU Report, vol .9, no.3. (Sussex: Armament & Disarmament, Information Unit).
.Ibid. , p.2.
Ibid. , p.3. We should also note that the managing director of DTE maintains that his organisation has access to all MoD Research establishments. He furthermore gives his staff numbers in 1987 as follows : 8 “ferrets” within Establishments, 25 consultants, and 4 MoD patenting staff. (See chapter 10 in this volume. )
Lloyd Jeffrey Dumas, The Overburdened Economy. Uncovering the Causes ofChronic Unemployment, Inflation and National Decline, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) , p.213.
Mary Kaldor , The Baroque Arsenal, (New York: Andre Deutsch, 1981) .
Michael Seagrim, “Does Relatively High Defence Spending Necessarily Degenerate an Economy?” , Royal United Services Institution Journal, No. 1 (1986) , p.46.
Aviation Week & Space Technology, March 17, 1986, p. 13.
The standard study in this approach for Germany is the PhD dissertation by Niklas von Goetz, Forschungsoekonomie in der Luf tfahrtinaustrie . Forschungsausgaben und Nachf rage als Wachstumsfaktoren in der Luftfahrtindustrie (R&D economics in the aerospace industry. R&D expenditures and demand as growth factors in the aerospace industry) , Stuttgart 1970, mimeo. The standard reference for the US will be: Mary A. Holman , “The Utilization of GovernmentOwned Inventions”, in: IDEA. Patent, Trademark, Copyright Journal of Research, Education , No. 7 (1963) .
These enumerations of individual “success stories” of spi n-of f from publ i c programmes are often exaggerated , if not i naccurate . A case in point is the famed teflon pan , commercially widely advertised as a space product . An investigation provoked by a student with the main subject chemistry prompted an investigation which produced very different results : the pan was granted a patent in 1938 , when butter for frying was at a shortage in Germany, and a medium-sized producer resorted to teflon-coated pans (at the time, the slogan in advertisements was “frying without butter” ) . In the post-war years, when everybody in Germany returned to frying with butter , the teflon-coated pans did not produce much of a turn-over, and the disillusioned producer turned to an advertising agent, who found the formula: make it a space pan. . . (source: Westdeutscher Rundfunk, un-edited script for a TV programme ed. by Eberhard Kuhrau, 1974) .
(Sir) Ieuan Maddock, Civil Exploitation of Defence Technology. Report to the Electronics EDC, (London : Electronics Economic Development Council , 1983).
Cf. Kubbig, loc. cit. , p.3.
Ibid.
Ibid.
E.g. , Dumas, loc. cit., pp. 101–102, 213, 217.
Besides the Baran-Sweezy tradition, see Dumas, loc. cit., esp. chapters 4 and 9.
IABG, loc. cit. , p.7.
Kubbig, loc.cit. , p.3.
Maddock, loc. cit. , p.7.
Der Spiegel , No. 37/1985, p.28.
E.g. Kubbig, loc. cit. , p.3. In a more systematic manner: Friecter Meyer-Kramer, “Evaluation of industrial innovation policy — concepts, methods and lessons”, Policy Studies Review, May 1984, vol . 3, p.467.
Kubbig, loc. cit., p.3.
Gordon Adams, loc. cit. , and Rolf Kreibich, Die wissenschaftsgesellschaft, Frankfurt/M. (Suhrkamp) ,1986.
Letter by the 10 Governments of the EC to the Secretary General of the UN (Pol . 370.20/3) , of June 15, 1983, p.2.
Ibid.
IABG, loc.cit. , p.39.
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Albrecht, U. (1988). Spin-Off: A Fundamentalist Approach. In: Gummett, P., Reppy, J. (eds) The Relations between Defence and Civil Technologies. NATO ASI Series, vol 46. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7803-5_3
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