Preface

This book has been conceived and written with a dual rationale in mind. It is intended first as an attempt to provide a more solid understanding than previously available of Soviet technological capabilities as a basis for interpreting and forecasting Soviet choices regarding energy options. The Soviet Union today faces a tighter energy situation and a more complicated set of energy choices than in the recent past. The managers of the Soviet economy must rebase its energy supply system to new kinds of energy resources and to new regions. They need to give a strong role to conservation as an alternative to supply expansion, decide to what degree and in what form nuclear energy can help, decide how much technology transfer should be employed as an alternative to domestic innovation to solve the associated technological tasks. Many of the potential actions the planners could take pose requirements for improvement in existing technologies or the creation of completely new ones if they are to become feasible. In dealing with this, they must make assessments regarding the probability of successful realization and relative attractiveness of alternative technical solutions to fuel problems. It is the author’s hope that, by examining the status of a number of important energy technologies in the USSR and by looking at the history of Soviet efforts to upgrade technologies and to innovate in the energy sector, it will be possible to develop a much more informed perspective on the degree of success to be expected in the future in coping with technical changes, on the considerations that will guide Soviet efforts, and on the directions they are likely to follow.

There is a second important motivation for studying Soviet energy technology in detail. It is my belief that a detailed examination of concrete cases and an examination that looks at the evolution of technologies over some period of time in the setting of overall management of a specific sector add considerable concreteness and reliability to our views regarding the characteristic features of Soviet R and D management and its effectiveness. There is now a large literature on R and D, innovation, and technical progress in the Soviet economy, much of which is concerned with R and D resources, with R and D planning as an aspect of national economic planning, and with the behavior of various kinds of decision makers as they operate within the overall system of the planned economy. There are also interesting studies of technical progress and R and D in individual sectors and technologies. But the subject remains full of controversy and unsettled issues. I believe that a work focussing as this one does on the R and D process in a concrete individual setting is valuable as a way of grounding and testing in the experience of actual cases and sectors what we think we know about the subject. Given the other concern underlying the book, we have here a fruitful opportunity to examine how R and D efforts and the technological conditions they create (or fail to create) grow out of and react on the broader issues of economic policy that R and D is intended to serve.

The R and D element in energy policy is a vast topic, of course, as we know from the huge literature on the subject that has already grown up in our own society. This book cannot pretend to be comprehensive in covering the topic, and I have deliberately selected a limited number of aspects of the issue for detailed investigation rather than trying systematically to cover everything. Several major considerations have governed the choice of topics to concentrate on: First I have tried to consider R and D areas that are most relevant to current energy policy issues. For example, nuclear power is so central in energy policy that it is absolutely necessary to deal with it. Unfortunately some things that are clearly important may not be researchable because of inadequate information in Soviet literature. Thus I have been able to deal only superficially with long-distance power transmission. Also, I lack the engineering expertise or the practical acquaintance with technological conditions in other countries to deal with some important issues, such as many aspects of underground coal mining, and have therefore tried to focus on questions or levels of generality in which conclusions may be obvious enough not to require that kind of expertise. Finally, since I have dealt with some of these issues of technology and R and D in the oil and gas industry in other works (The Economics of Soviet Oil and Gas and Trends in the Soviet Oil and Gas Industry), I have rather slighted the oil and gas sector here. The examination in Chapter 7 of technology transfer is based on cases drawn from that sector, however.

Given the goal of putting technological policy in its overall problem setting, Chapter 1 offers an overview of the Soviet energy situation and Soviet energy policy as background. R and D and innovation in the USSR take place in a different institutional setting from that in the United States, and, for those not familiar with that setting, Chapter 2 prefaces its description of the energy R and D establishment with an explanation of how energy R and D policy is made. Chapters 3 through 7 are essentially case studies of individual sectors and technologies. Chapter 8 attempts to draw together some implications for the two main issues that have motivated the book.

The research for this work was carried out under a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF SOC 74–17609) and the Foundation’s financial support is gratefully acknowledged. I would also like to express my appreciation to Stephen Able and Judith McKinney who provided valuable assistance in gathering material for the book. Much of the text of Chapters 2 and 3 originally appeared in two studies prepared for the RAND Corporation (Campbell 1978a and 1978b), and the section on gas pipelines in Chapter 6 was originally written as a study paper for the California Seminar on Arms Control and Foreign Policy. I am pleased to express my thanks for the permission of these organizations to use that material in this book.