The Cold War is Over: What Now?
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The Cold War is Over: What Now? S.S. Hecker The following article is based on the plenary lecture presented at the 1994 MRS Meeting on November 28, 1994 in Boston. S.S. Hecker is director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In the spirit of trying to keep an audience interested at this time of the evening, I decided to start my presentation with the question and answer session. And since you have not yet had the opportunity to question my hypotheses, I have provided my own questions. Why focus on the end of the Cold War for an MRS audience?
As you might imagine, the end of the Cold War has elicited an intense reexamination of the roles and missions of institutions such as the Los Alamos National Laboratory. That fact was brought home to me rather dramatically last year when at the 50th anniversary celebration of the founding of the laboratory at Los Alamos, the scientific director of one of the two Russian nuclear weapons laboratories presented me with a piece of a dismantled Russian nuclear warhead with the
al driving forces in addition to global geopolitical security changes. Over the past decade we have witnessed the emergence of a global marketplace and, as expressed by Peter Drucker,2 the world is in the midst of a social transformation to a knowledge-based society. The end of the Cold War has realigned the world's balance of power and focused public attention increasingly on the vexing social problems facing the United States and the world. International competition has dramatically changed U.S. industry. To stay competitive, U.S. companies have found it imperative to adopt quality management approaches and to integrate R&D much more closely with product design and manufacturing. This has generally led
inscription, "From Russia with love."
During the past few years, the entire defense establishment has undergone substantial consolidation, with a concomitant decrease in support for research and development, including in areas such as materials. The defense industry is downsizing at a rapid pace. Even universities have experienced significant funding cutbacks from the defense community. I view this as a profound time in history, bringing changes encompassing much more than just the defense world. In fact, support for science and technology is being reexamined across the board more completely than at any other time since the end of World War II when Vannevar Bush issued his policy classic, Science: The Endless Frontier.1
Are changes in the academic and industrial sectors really that profound? And do these changes reflect only the end of the Cold War?
Yes, they are that profound! No, they reflect much more than just the end of the Cold War. We have a confluence of sever-
Figure 1. Locations of individual rhodamine 6G molecules on a silica surface imaged by near-field scanning optical microscopy. The image size is approximately 8 pm by 8 pm. The image is formed by transmitting light through a 0.25 pm aperture, scanning the aperture -10 nm above a silica surface, and detecting fluorescence at each positi
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