INTERNATIONAL

We are committed to creating a new strategic and diplomatic relationship with Russia-US

Deterrence must and will remain a critical component of our security posture. Yet, many of the conditions and assumptions that long guided the way we thought about deterrence and its supporting strategic force posture have changed fundamentally. Deterrence can involve more than just the threat to retaliate in the event of an attack. It can also be based on the ability to prevent potential adversaries from achieving their objectives there by deterring them from pursuing such objectives in the first place. The United States is developing a forward looking strategy that takes into account the changing nature of the threats we face, as well as the full range of capabilities that we can marshal to protect our nation and its vital interests, as well as meet our commitments to friends and allies.

Deterrence is our highest priority: Maintaining a reliable deterrent against attacks on the United States and our allies is a critical objective of our national security strategy. Our nation always prefers peaceful means to maintain its own security and prosperity, and that of its friends and allies, but maintains the military capabilities needed to deter and defend against the threat or potential use of force by prospective adversaries.

Our deterrence strategy todate has largely relied on our ability to respond to attack with a variety of options, ranging from a devastating retaliation through more selective strikes, and our offensive nuclear forces are and will remain a key component of that capability. No group or nation should doubt that the United States will continue to depend on the certainty of a devastating response to any attack on the US or its allies to deter attacks by ballistic missiles or other weapons.

Emerging threats and the need to diversify our approach to deterrence: However, given the new threats we all face—especially from weapons of mass destruction and increasingly sophisticated ballistic missiles in the hands of the rouge states—our deterrence posture can no longer rely exclusively on the threat of retaliation. We now need a strategy based on an appropriate mix of offensive and defensive capabilities to deny potential adversaries the opportunities and benefits they might hope to realize from the threat or use of weapons of mass destruction against our homeland and forces deployed abroad, as well as those of our allies and friends.

Today, we are confronted with a more diverse, less predictable, and less risk-averse group of hostile states that are aggressively seeking to develop or acquire weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles as a means of their delivery. They see such weapons both as operational weapons of war and as coercive tools of diplomacy to preclude us and our partners from assisting friends and allies in regions of vital interests. For such threats, deterrence must take advantage of the contribution of both offensive and defensive forces, working together.

Ballistic missile defenses enhance the traditional deterrence of offensive capabilities by denying rouge states the ability to reliably and predictably inflict mass destruction on other nations. By complicating his calculation of success, these defenses add to a potential aggressor's uncertainty and weaken his confidence. Effective missile defenses may also serve to undercut the value potential aggressor's place on missiles as a means of delivery, thereby advancing our non-proliferation goals. With these considerations in mind, missile defenses can be a force for stability and security.

Moreover, some potential threats, such as accidental or unauthorized launches of ballistic missiles, cannot be deterred by their very nature. They can only be defended against. To counter such contingencies, missile defenses provide an element of insurance that supplements and enhances their deterrent value.

A new relationship with Russia: We are committed to creating a new strategic and diplomatic relationship with Russia; one founded not on common vulnerabilities, but on common interests and shared objectives. As Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has said: "it is time to change the nuclear equation of mutual assured destruction to a more sensible strategic arrangement." While we seek to persuade Russia to join us in further reducing our nuclear arsenals, we are also prepared to lead by example. Therefore, we are committed to ensuring that this new strategic framework with Russia is characterized by efforts to achieve the lowest levels of nuclear weapons consistent with our present and future national security needs. Our missile defenses will not threaten Russia's deterrent forces.

Missile defense and China: Our missile defenses will be designed to deter and defend against small-scale attacks from rouge states, as well as from accidental or unauthorized attacks from any source. As a force for stability and security in both the Asian region and the world at large, defense and deterrence working together advance goals of regional peace and stability which we share with China. Missile defense is not intended as a threat to China's deterrent forces.

Summary: Finally, it is worth emphasizing that missile defenses are only one tool among many in maintaining peace, security and stability, and must be considered within the context of our entire strategic framework. This framework includes offensive nuclear arms as well as our broader diplomatic and security activities, including arms control and nonproliferation efforts. This diversifies approach to deterrence is appropriate for the complex and less predictable world in which we live. Text courtesy: USIA, Kathmandu, Nepal.

The Lepine competition, a century of inventions

Sylvie THOMAS, France

The prestigious Lepine competition, which was created in 1901 to reward the most ingenious inventions, has already led to the creation of a host of now famous items. It is celebrating its centenary with competitors from all over the world and a list of winners resolutely turned towards the technologies of the future.

When, at the beginning of the century, the Paris chief of Police Lepin launched a competition which was to become highly popular, his aim was to develop games, toys and fancy goods and to fight against foreign competition. However, the Concours Lepine, registered as an association by the 1901 law, quickly opened up to all French inventors and then, far from ignoring products from other countries, it opened up its arms wide to them. This trend is clearly visible this year with a record number of competitors from Algeria, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, China, Germany, Korea, Luxembourg, Morocco, Russia, Spain, Switzerland and the United States.

The winners: a woman and high technology: This international gathering of Inventors met for the International Inventors' Fair organized by the Concours Lepine as part of the Foire de Paris, one of the most popular events and one which receives some 700,000 visitors. This year, there was a new surprise and one which the respectable chief of police in those very male circles, would, no doubt, hardly have expected. For the first time, a woman has won the highly sought after President of the Republic Prize, the one crowning the invention of the year. Florence Flority, aged 30, the holder of a post-graduate diploma in electronics, DESS, beat the 397 other competitors with a long distance remote-control, a little box making it possible to operate all pieces of equipment functioning with an infrared remote-control such as television, music centers, DVDs and video recorders, from a distance of several hundred meters. In addition to private individuals, installer of satellite dishes and channels are very interested. "A marvel of technology with lots of applications", the organizers of the competition enthuse.

This invention, which uses very sophisticated technology, confirms a trend in the competition.

Over the years, the Lepin Competition developed a reputation for bringing together the weird and the wonderful and was a real boon for mad inventors. Now things are changing. Even if one of th competitors is offering a machine for twiddling one's thumbs, a disk with two holes,, "the rule of gadgets and slightly crazy inventions is a thing of the past", the organizers of the competition assert. Today, most of the competitors are young engineers, future computer-firm creators or others who come to take advantage of a free life-scale market survey as well as media publicity likely to help bankers make up their minds to offer backing. And it works! 32% of last years' participants have managed to market their products by finding an investor or a manufacturer, whereas the average rate of success in Europe is less than 2.5%.

Inventions to facilitate everyday life: The winners are chosen by a jury of 47 members, including numerous personalities and there is no lack of prizes. There are three first prizes and 150 distinctions with trophies, medals and diplomas. Today, the inventions cover three fashionable areas:; protecting man and the planet, biotechnology and road safety. Not all the inventions would find a place in a science fiction film and a number of winners were primarily concerned with facilitating our lives such as Phillipe Teeten with his basket for carrying multipacks of bottled water or Guylaine Aubert's clip for closing started cans of drinks so that we no longer have to drink them up all at once. This charming inventor has been a great hit at the Inventor's Fair and in the press, and stores are already fighting over her clips.

These clever creations will join the prize-winning inventions of the past which are noe part and parcel of our lives today such as the ball-point pen, the artificial heart, the plant holder with a reservoir for the water, contact lenses, the Moulinex potato masher, the hang-glider and the suction snake-and-insect poison-remover. By giving these awards, the Concours Lepine continues to help with inventions today which will be part of our lives in the future and those inventors who continually innovate to improve our everyday lives.

The End of the Author

By Michael Giesecke, Germany

The central concepts used over the last five hundred years to describe the processes by which knowledge is acquired and information presented and transmitted have been defined by exigencies of the printing press and by the way books are distributed in a market economy. Even the order of precedence we assign to such concepts are hearing and seeing, rational and emotional intelligence, the descriptive sciences and the narrative arts, and speech and other forms of communication is based on the priorities of our modern industrial society. If we believe that the new millennium will bring with it simply a quantitative growth in our book-based industrial culture, then we can continue to create and communicate knowledge using these traditional concepts. But if we believe that the new millennium will bring with it radical innovations, then such traditional concepts will only hinder the shaping the future.

This also holds true for the concept of individual authorship-which emerged in the early part of the modern era and, though attributable to a number of causes, has always been linked with the socialization of what were then new forms of information stored in typographic media. As is the case with societies in which information is copied by hand, cultures based on the spoken word have no need of the concept of individual authorship. Even today we do not need to identify the authors of ideas in face-to-face discussions all the time. On the contrary, if at the end of a discussion we feel the need to identify the contribution of an individual participant, then the discussion was but moderately productive: the cooperative act as such produced nothing new, and the contribution in question was not a social but an individual achievement. Earlier advanced cultures based on the written word had no need of "authors", in part because their scribes saw themselves as links in a long chain down which ideas were passed. Writing some thing new was considered less of an achievement than copying old ideas. Only in the early part of the modern era, when people began to compete with the gods, did they not think twice about being creator themselves. "Novelty" became a positively changed concept. People began to welcome technical innovation instead of damning it as the work of the devil. Attitudes towards intellectual innovation also changed, and the authors of typographically stored information were granted rights of ownership. Thus order was brought into the flood of printed books-and temporal powers had somebody whom they could call to account for new ideas. Indeed, the obligation to declare the authorship of books cost some authors their lives.

New concepts for new media: Thus the concepts of copyright and intellectual property came into being in the European heartland scarcely half a millennium ago, and much later in the fringe areas of the continent. In many parts of the world they have no basis in tradition whatsoever. These concepts are also indissolubly linked with the typographical production of information and with the kind of communicative networks that exist in market economies. Other media require other concepts.. Developing such concepts is all the more difficult because as conditions change it is precisely the outstanding achievements of a particular technology that may become its greatest weakness. The historical achievement of the printing press is that it facilitated the processing of information on a social scale-but in ways that involve very little interaction. Typographical communication is characterized by an individual's making information available to the public at large through channels that allow many other individuals to receive this information simultaneously. The socialization of knowledge does not take place on the level of production or reception through the mechanisms of technical reproduction and distribution prevailing in a market economy.

There is much evidence that in future this method of creating knowledge will simply be one of many alternatives. Even today the balance between forms of producing information that involve little interaction and those that involve intensive feedback is shifting in favor of the latter. The new electronic media are capable of becoming communication media only to the extent that they are networked with each other. But as soon as they are networked, these same channels of communication can be used for feedback, creating a form of interactive information processing similar to that, which takes place within a group discussion. There is just little justification in seeing the World Wide Web as simply another typographical mass medium. This being so, there is also little point in using antiquated terminology to describe the Web and in using antiquated mechanisms to control it. We will have to search for alternative ways of attributing information and rewarding its creation-for it is obvious that people must be rewarded for making information available. Yet in the history of culture such rewards have taken so many forms-reciprocity, honor, power, love, trust-that to focus on monetary reward alone is neither logical nor particularly imaginative.

It is time to develop new visions for the new media and for globally networked humanity, comparable to those that used to be applied to "intellectual property". It is foreseeable that creating information will become a team process. Just as group project work has long been standard practice in industry, so it will become the norm in science and in the arts. Products will be attributable not to individuals but to groups-and the latter will decide themselves how to divide up the honor, power, money, or other forms of rewards that accrue.

But as long as we possess no adequate value system to apply to the new media, we must continue to solve copyright problems using makeshift solutions. What we need, however, is long-term solutions.

The author is cultural and media historian and teaches at the University of Erfurt, Germany. Text courtesy: Deutschland, number E4 3 June/July 2001. Embassy of Germany in Kathmandu.