Closing the Gap with the West

To drive the system, an offensive in physics and technology

"One cannot be satisfied with the collapse of capitalism. It is necessary to take all its science, technology ... Without that we will not be able to build Communism."

Since Lenin uttered those clangorous words in 1919, the Soviets may have muted their tone. But they continue to view the mastery of science, along with its offshoot--technology--as essential to the triumph of their system. Indeed, in areas deemed critical by the Kremlin, notably defense, space and agriculture, Soviet scientists are lavishly supported in their research. They can buy the best lab equipment from abroad, are allowed to travel to the West for scientific meetings and are treated to personal privileges--housing, clothing, cars--beyond the reach of ordinary citizens.

Partly in response to such encouragement, Soviet researchers have made enormous strides in narrowing the scientific gap with the West; in some cases, like the physics of fusion, certain aspects of metallurgy, and mathematics, they may be ahead of the U.S. In the near future, the Soviets are likely to advance in other areas as well; they are now spending about 3.4% of their gross national product on research (compared with 2.2% by the U.S.) and are training young scientists and engineers at a rate three to four times that of the U.S. Still, for all the triumphs of Soviet science, it is plagued by major problems, some of which may be endemic to the very system that has made science a national priority. One sign: since 1917, the U.S.S.R. has won only eight Nobel Prizes in the sciences, less than a tenth as many as the U.S.

Most of the best and heavily supported research is done under military auspices, which means that the work is kept tightly under wraps. For this reason, Western analysts long could only guess about Soviet progress in, say, lasers and electron beams. Both of these technologies are essential to achieving a key Soviet defense goal: an antisatellite satellite. After word that the Soviets had developed such a killer satellite reached Washington, the Carter Administration quietly ordered the Pentagon to step up its own studies of these devices.

In nonmilitary areas, the Soviet scientific record is much easier to evaluate. Moscow may well be the world's capital of theoretical mathematics, in part because the Soviets lack the computers that enable Westerners to solve complex problems by brute force "number crunching." Says Yale Physicist D. Allan Bromley: "We've become lazy because of our digital computers. The Soviets don't have easy access to good computers; they do a lot more analytic mathematics in their heads." The Soviets are also strong in other "blackboard" sciences, like astrophysics and cosmology, where absence of up-to-date instrumentation is not critical to success.

Exploration of the cosmos is another key objective of the Soviets. Last year they launched payloads into orbit at a rate ten times that of the U.S. Many were military satellites, but they also included a number of manned flights. Indeed, only last week two more cosmonauts returned from a visit to the Salyut 6 space station, which has been circling the earth for nearly three years. By contrast, although the U.S. has scored a flurry of spectacular successes with unmanned planetary probes, no American has flown in space since 1975.

The Soviets are leaders in more down-to-earth branches of physics, especially the search for heavy elements. Their doughnut-shaped tokamak machines, in which hydrogen plasma is contained and compressed by powerful magnetic fields and heated to sunlike temperatures, offer perhaps the most promising route toward harnessing nuclear fusion as a future energy source. Soviet scientists are preeminent, too, in applied areas like oceanography, polar research, climatology and meteorology, and seismology. But even here they show some blind spots; though Soviet investigators made early breakthroughs in earthquake prediction, the geological establishment was slow to accept plate tectonics--a kind of unified-field theory for the earth sciences that explains everything from mountain building to volcanic eruptions.

As their interest in Western technology shows, the Soviets still have a way to go. Almost all advanced instrumentation in their labs is imported. When the Soviets do try their hand at instrument building, they sometimes fail embarrassingly; their giant six-meter (236 in.) telescope in the northern Caucasus, after years of effort, remains flawed by a defective mirror. Says M.I.T. Physicist Herman Feshbach: "They have never been able to exploit machines." Nor are they anywhere near the West in the ability to produce pharmaceuticals, plastics and other chemicals or to pursue the hottest of contemporary sciences, molecular biology.

How can these shortcomings be accounted for? Part of the problem, as in so many other instances, lies with the system. Priorities are set not in the lab or institute but by state planners, often without regard to scientific realities. Says Bromley: "In our society, ideas boil to the surface more than they do in the Soviet Union. There is no intellectual ferment, no give-and-take." Also, the senior scientists who run research institutions sometimes do so with an iron hand, making it more difficult for young, imaginative scientists to press ahead with daring ideas. By contrast, most institutions in the U.S. are only too eager to advance promising newcomers with an innovative spirit. Says M.I.T.'s Loren Graham: "That's the glory of American science."

Finally, there are the political commissars who are part of virtually all research establishments. They not only enforce ideological purity--for example, blackballing dissidents--but can veto projects that do not fit in with their conceptions of research. Indeed, only now is Soviet biology catching up with the West after years of backwardness under Trofim Lysenko, Stalin's chief scientific hatchet man, who regarded work in traditional genetics as heretical.

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