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Introduction This report is the first published product of a collaborative effort spon- sored by the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council in the United States and the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (ASUSSR) on social and behavioral science research directed toward the prevention of nuclear war. In 1985, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) es- tablished a Committee on Contributions of Behavioral and Social Science to the Prevention of Nuclear War within the National Research Council's Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. The central purpose of the committee was to identify knowledge in basic behavioral and social sciences that is relevant to issues of war and peace, to communicate that knowledge to the appropriate audiences, and to encourage research in areas that appeared ripe for developing new policy-related knowledge. The committee brings together people with policy-oriented backgrounds (se- curity specialists, international relations scholars, and Sovietologists) and scholars whose expertise covers a range of fields in basic behavioral or social science, from organizational behavior to cognitive psychology to the study of social movements and ethnic relations. One of the committee's principal aims was to establish contact with counterparts in the Soviet Union. Since no group comparable to the committee existed in the USSR, and U.S.~oviet scientific exchanges were still on shale ground in 1985, many experienced Soviet hands advised the committee not to set its expectations too high. The committee persisted nevertheless, and in early 1987 NAS and ASUSSR agreed to a planning meeting to be held in Moscow M March. A six-member delegation from NAS spent five days in Moscow and met with representatives of nine ASUSSR institutes. The delegation was pleased to find scholars at several institutes who were responsive to the idea of developing basic social science 1

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2 SOVIE1:AMERICAN DIALOGUE IN THE SOCLIL SCIENCES in directions related to the prevention of nuclear war. At the end of the visit, U.S. and Soviet delegates met to draft an agreement for future cooperative activity, and at that meeting a Soviet counterpart of the U.S. group began to take form. It was agreed that the joint activity would begin with the topic `'In- terdependence Between Nations." Despite, and in some ways because of, the vagueness of the term, the topic suited the purposes of the ex- change in several ways. First, it was a topic that had meaning to both American and Soviet scholars. General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev had been using the term "interdependence" frequently in his descriptions of the world situation, apparently in place of older characterizations in terms of "imperialism" and "class struggle." This new language made an idea from American social science (Cooper, 1968; Young, 1968-69; Morse, 1969; Waltz, 1970; Rosecrance and Stein, 1973; Keohane and Nye, 1977) attrac- tive to Soviet academics, who could reasonably expect to be called upon to provide the detailed analyses needed to implement Gorbachev's "new thinking." Second, the topic combined policy relevance with potentially strong conceptual and empirical bases in social science literature. The concept emerged from a research tradition that emphasizes interdependence in all areas of society, so contributions might come from experts on trade, com- munications, international organizations, politics, and other fields. More- over, there exists substantial basic research on interdependence below the international level, ranging from the interpersonal (for example, Kelley and Thibaut, 1977) to the interorganizational (for example, Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978~. There was thus an abundance of potentially relevant knowledge. Third, the topic was broad enough to encourage contributions from scholars with a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds (in American terms) and from various institutes of the ASUSSR (the Soviet equivalent). "Inter- dependence" provided a common conceptual umbrella that enabled basic researchers in fields as diverse as game theory, international economics, social cognition, public opinion research, and political decision making to work together. The breadth of the topic also encouraged the Soviets to create a group as broad as the American committee. In terms of interdis- ciplina~y potential, the topic proved a good choice: from the first planning meeting, Soviet scholars came together who were not yet aware of each other's work. Thus, one effect of the collaboration has been to improve communication among Soviet scholars in different institutes. As the Soviet group has continued to diversity, this process has continued. The collaboration began with two research workshops, the first in Washington, D.C., in January 1988 and the second in Tallinn, Estonia, in January 1989. The workshops were intended as much to encourage ex- change of ideas and to promote international collaboration as to present

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INTRODUCTION 3 formal papers. Thus, each workshop featured plenary sessions with presen- tations of papers by American and Soviet authors followed by discussions and other comments, as well as smaller seminar sessions for groups with common interests and free time for informal interaction. After each meet- ing, the members of the visiting delegation spent a week to 10 days visiting research centers in the host country. The conduct of the meetings has reflected the increasing openness of U.S.-Soviet contact. It was agreed to provide papers in advance of each meeting, but at the first workshop only a few were ready in time to be distributed beforehand. At the second worlo;hop, all the U.S. papers and the great majority of the Soviet papers were available early enough to be translated and distributed before the meeting. As a result, discussion of the papers at the second meeting was much more substantive and penetrating than at the first. Increasingly broad discussions over the two meetings have reflected the growing interest of Soviet researchers in Western scholarly literatures and of Americans in the possibilities of learning from parallel or joint research projects. Participants from both countries have learned much from the exchange, and some promising new collaborations are beginning to take shape. The Committee on Contributions of Behavioral and Social Science to the Prevention of Nuclear War has prepared this report to share with a wider audience the insights that have come from the two workshops. In Part I, participants from each country comment on the contributions to the workshops of the other country's participants. These two papers provide a sense of the subject areas represented as well as an analysis of the contributions from a foreign perspective. Part II presents brief summaries of two representative papers on each of four topics. The Appendix lists all the papers and talks presented at the two workshops. This report evidences a watershed in U.S.-Soviet interaction in the social sciences. The new openness in Soviet society permits increasingly free discussion and investigation of social phenomena, turning ideological questions into empirical ones. As a consequence, discussions between Soviet and American researchers, which had once been dominated by normative assertions and political posturing, can now focus on conceptual clarification and analysis of methods and data. Soviet social researchers are beginning to welcome the sort of peer review that typifies scientific interchange in other parts of the world. As they adopt international scientific norms, Soviet researchers will become more easily integrated into the international social scientific community. We hope this report will come to be seen as an early indicator of an emerging ability of American and Soviet social scientists to work together to clarifier the great political and social issues on which international security turns.

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4 SOVIET-AMERICAN DIALOGUE IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES REFERENCES Cooper, R.N. 1968 The Economics of Interdependence: Economic Policy in the Atlantic Corrunu- ni~. New York: McGraw-Hill. Kelley, H.H., and J.W. Thibaut 1~77 Interpersonal Relations: A Theory of Interdependence. New York: Wiley. Keohane, R.O., and J.S. Nye 1977 Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition. Boston: Little, Brown. Morse, E.L" 1969 The politics of interdependence. Intemational Organization 23:318. Pfeffer, J., and G.R. Salancik 1978 The E=emal Control of Organizations. New York: Harper & Row. Rosecrance, R., and A. Stein 1973 Interdependence: Myth or reality? International Organization 35:55~560. Waltz, K.N. 1970 The myth of interdependence. In The International Corporation, CP. Kindle- berger, ea., pp. 205-Z3. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Young, O.R. 1968-69 Interdependencies in world politics. International arousal 24:726-750.