Over the last few years, official U.S.-Soviet relations have deteriorated sharply, which has had an adverse effect on scientific and cultural exchanges between the two countries as well as on trade and tourism. But on further investigation it turns out that the damage has been limited, and that in some respects unofficial U.S.-Soviet relations show signs of improving. This must be welcome news to anyone who deplores the present political stalemate and hopes for a restoration if not expansion of the wider U.S.-Soviet dialogue.

Citizen concern about the continuing arms race is certainly a major factor here. In May 1983, for instance, 26 leading Soviet scholars formed a "Committee for the Defense of Peace and Opposition to the Nuclear Threat" with the purpose of propagating their views within the larger Soviet scientific community and of establishing contact with Western scientific organizations interested in arms control.

Similarly, the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington has been conducting twice-yearly discussions of the technical aspects of arms control with a corresponding group from the Soviet Academy of Sciences-most recently in Moscow in the fall of 1983.

The U.S. State Department reports that scientific exchanges conducted under various official U.S.-Soviet agreements dating back to 1972 are currently running at 20 to 25 percent of their 1978-1979 level. Yet this still means that a total of between 300 and 500 U.S. scientists will have gone to the Soviet Union in the academic year 1983-1984, primarily in three- or four-member delegations investigating everything from agriculture to zoology, while some 250 of their Soviet colleagues will have come to the United States. Moreover an agreement to exchange information in the field of housing and other construction was recently renewed, and it is expected that another-between the National Bureau of Standards and the appropriate department of the Soviet Academy of Sciences-will be signed shortly.

In December 1983 a Soviet spacecraft-Cosmos 1514-was launched, carrying three U.S. biomedical experiments in its scientific payload. Also in December a group of Soviet, U.S., European and Japanese scientists met in Japan to discuss ways of jointly studying Halley's Comet over the next three years. The Soviet scientists agreed to take part in all phases of the study, leading a U.S. participant to describe the meeting as "one of the most successful we've ever had with the Soviet Union."

The International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) in New York, a private organization supported in part by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the National Endowment for the Humanities, has been administering academic exchanges with the Soviet Union for the past 25 years. Currently some 24 U.S. doctoral candidates and junior faculty in the humanities and social sciences (versus 45 to 50 in the late 1970s) are spending the academic year in the Soviet Union under the auspices of IREX and the Soviet Ministry of Higher Specialized Secondary Education. Their 20 Soviet counterparts arrived in the United States in the wake of the Korean Airlines tragedy only to be sent home by the Soviet Embassy out of concern for the physical safety; but 18 of them returned late in January-proof of Soviet commitment to the exchange-and are now in place on various U.S. campuses.

Another forum for private U.S: Soviet discussion is provided by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (HASA) in Vienna, which has been concerned with energy, food supply and other long range international problems. Founded in 1972 under U.S.-Soviet aegis and with members from the academies of science or other non-governmental institutions of 17 countries, including several in both Eastern and Western Europe, HASA faced a crisis in March 1982 when the Reagan Administration told the National Academy of Sciences that it would no longer pay for U.S. membership in the Institute-a sum equal to one fourth of its annual budget. With the National Academy's blessing a committee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences headed by Harvey Brooks of Harvard undertook to raise the needed funds from private sources, an effort which to date has met with considerable success. In January 1984 HASA hosted a weeklong conference on science and public policy which was co-chaired by Brooks and Academician N.M. Emmanuel of the Soviet Union and attended by two other Soviet specialists-who are said to have presented most interesting case studies-as well as by U.S. and European scientists and policy analysts. HASA plans to initiate a major international research effort on the biosphere later this year.

Other private initiatives that could be mentioned here include the Carnegie Corporations effort to promote joint U.S.-Soviet study of the problems of crisis management between the two countries and the series of meetings on arms control and academic questions planned for 1984 by the U.S. and Soviet United Nations Associations. But equally noteworthy are the attempts to foster understanding undertaken by a wide array of non-governmental, nonacademic, non-policy oriented groups as well as by ordinary citizens.

Representatives of the New England Society of Newspaper Editors went to Leningrad in the summer of 1983 and negotiated with the Soviet Union of journalists an exchange of reporters who would work directly for publications in each other's country for about three months. By February 1984 three New England reporters fluent in Russian had been selected and it is hoped to begin the exchange in September. Meanwhile, columns on daily life by journalists in one country are being printed by newspapers in the other.

Of course ordinary tourists make up the great bulk of U.S. visitors to the Soviet Union these days, as they have since the 1960s. In 1976 Soviet visas granted such visitors totalled 65,864; by 1980 the number had fallen to 12,922; but in the first ten months of 1983 it had risen again to 38,256. (U.S. visas granted Soviet visitors fell from a total of 11,960 in 1976 to about 8,000 in 1983-approximately 2,500 of which were pleasure rather than business or official visas.) Estimates for 1984 put the totals back at their 1976 levels, if not even higher, at least for the U.S. side-a reflection both of the determination of growing numbers of ordinary citizens to seethe Soviet Union for themselves and of the steady improvement of Soviet tourist facilities and programs.

The rise on the Soviet side will be slower, to be sure, just as the total of Soviet visitors to the United States will remain much lower-a function not only of the familiar political constraints but of the ruble's miserable rate of exchange. For the overwhelming majority of Soviet citizens a trip to the United States is simply unaffordable, while for the ordinary U. S. citizen participation in a ten-day or two-week group tour of the Soviet Union is one of the best travel bargains available.

Exchanges involving hundreds of scholars and specialists, visits by thousands of ordinary tourists each year: both qualitatively and quantitatively there is life in unofficial U.S.-Soviet relations, and even some improvement. May it continue!

Reprinted, by permission, from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 1984.