In the mid-1960s, an American engineering firm achieved notoriety with a plan to divert more than 130 cubic kilometers of water annually from Alaska and northwestern Canada to the United States and Mexico via a network of canals and reservoirs that included an 800-kilometer trench reservoir in the Rocky Mountains. Now, after fifteen years of environmental legislation and litigation, such a project could sooner be built on the far side of the moon than in the western United States (to say nothing of the participation of the Canadians). But something like it may soon be built in the Soviet Union. Soviet planners and engineers are talking seriously of rerouting the flow of several northern rivers to support irrigated agriculture in the southern half of the country, arrest the decline of the Caspian and Aral seas, alleviate their pollution problems with clean northern water – in short, to remove at one bound the most important obstacles to the further development of the southern half of the country. The idea has recently gained important official backing and is moving rapidly toward advanced engineering and economic studies. Construction could conceivably begin within the next five years.

Conceivably, but not inevitably. The idea of such a titanic engineering venture has stirred up a highly emotional public argument in the Soviet Union, among competing regions, institutions, and technical specialists. As a result, the diversion projects offer the fascinating spectacle of a fullfledged and relatively open “technology assessment” (to use the term fashionable in Washington) of a project that an earlier Soviet generation would have undertaken without public debate. But what has been the effect of that debate on the course of policy?