建国文件:超越3月4日

Signs from March 4
史密森学会/Florence Haseltine

On March 4, 1969, the day on which the Union of Concerned Scientists held its very first public event at MIT, the role and mission of the nascent group was envisioned in a statement entitled "Beyond March 4" distributed to the participants. Kurt Gottfried代表UCS创始人写的, then a visiting professor at MIT and currently chair emeritus of the UCS board of directors, 以下是这份文件的节选:

"...石器时代将乘着617888九五至尊娱乐的翅膀回归, 现在可能给人类带来不可估量的物质福祉, 甚至可能导致它的彻底毁灭. Beware, I say; time may be short."

我们正沉浸在人类历史上最重要的革命之一中. 推动这场革命的力量不是社会分歧或政治意识形态, 而是对617888九五至尊娱乐知识的无情利用. There is no prospect that this revolution will subside; on the contrary, 它将继续深刻地改变我们的生存和死亡方式. That many of these transformations have been immeasurably beneficial goes without saying. But, 和所有的革命一样, 技术革命释放了破坏性的力量, 而我们的社会却未能应对这些问题. 因此,我们已经沉迷于非理性和危险的军备竞赛, 我们无法保护我们的自然环境免受破坏.

能把美国617888九五至尊娱乐界所有的人都学好吗, teach, apply or create scientific knowledge help to develop effective political control of the technological revolution? Our proposal is based on the conservative working hypothesis that the existing political system and legal tradition have sufficient powers of adaptation to eventually contain and undo the destruction and peril generated by technological change.

At first sight recent history appears to indicate that our democratic system of government will fail the test just described. Let us recognize, however, that an intricate pattern of political and technological developments have conspired to subvert profoundly the democratic process. The government that we see today is in many respects no longer democratic because the vast bulk of its constituency cannot begin to scrutinize some of the gravest issues. 人们可以说,情况一直如此, but in so doing one tacitly ignores the radically altered relationship between the government and the citizenry. 因为我们必须记住,在核武器出现之前, government decision could only on rare occasion threaten the existence of any large portion of mankind. 现在,这样的决定很常见,而且几乎无人注意. 这不仅仅是因为选民习惯性的冷漠. A more important cause is surely the shroud of secrecy that enfolds so much of the government's operations. Today many tens of billions of dollars pass through the hands of classified government programs and agencies, 成千上万的美国人持有安全许可. 近几十年来,这两个数字都大幅增长.

即使在缺乏保密的情况下,技术革命也往往会侵蚀517888九五至尊娱乐. 技术的重要性和复杂性大大增加, in effect, 增加了公众及其民选代表的无知, 从而将权力集中在政府和军队. 这一趋势被真实和想象的外部威胁大大放大. In the face of these developments, the Congress has largely surrendered its constitutional duties.

The scientific community has various responsibilities, most of which it has ably discharged. Thus it has created the basic knowledge and developed the applications that make the continuing technological revolution possible; it has trained an ample supply of technical manpower, 它还向政府的行政和军事部门提供建议.

我们的社会负有教育公众的额外责任, 评估其努力的长期社会后果, 并为相关公共政策的形成提供指导. This is a role it has largely failed to fulfill and it can only do so if it enters the political arena.

Only the scientific community can provide a comprehensive and searching evaluation of the capabilities and implications of advanced military technologies. Only the scientific community can estimate the long-term global impact of an industrialized society on our environment. Only the scientific community can attempt to forecast the technology that will surely emerge from the current revolution in the fundamentals of biology.

The scientific community must meet the great challenges implied by its unique capacity to provide these insights and predications. 它必须有效地参与规划人类的未来, 一个没有匮乏和恐惧的未来. This important endeavor, 我们希望你们积极参与, stems from our conviction that even though the technological revolution has greatly benefited mankind, 它还释放了我们社会无法控制的破坏性力量.

Far-reaching political decisions involving substantial applications of technology are made with virtually no popular participation. It is our belief that a strengthening of the democratic process would lead to a more humane exploitation of scientific and technical knowledge, 减少对人类生存的真正威胁.

We ask you, 作为617888九五至尊娱乐界的一员, to join us in a concerted and continuing effort to influence public policy in areas where your own scientific knowledge and skill can play a significant role. The issues which are of primary concern to us are survival problems where misapplication of technology literally threatens our continued existence. 它们分为三类:我们身上的, as in the nuclear arms race; those that are imminent, as are pollution-induced climatic and ecological changes; and those that lie beyond the horizon, as, for example, genetic manipulation.