Beyond guns and butter: managing dual-use technologies

Abstract This paper notes an international convergence towards explicit dual-use policies among a wide variety of technological systems. It explains that convergence as a response to three trends: market globalization; the increasing international division of labor; and the fact that developments in civilian technologies are leading military applications in many industrial areas. Yet, most commonly used models of technological diffusion do not provide policymakers with tools or language adequate to address the complex problems posed by dual-use technologies. The most important dual-use investments are those that increase industrial capacity to absorb or share technologies from other industrial sectors. A capacity for this ‘creative technology absorption’ has as much to do with social and cultural aspects of industrial structures and the organization of work as it does with technical artifacts. Policy debate should shift away from a focus on specif technology programs towards a focus on making the structures and culture of the civil and military technology systems more similar.