ABSTRACT
With all of the foolishness that has characterized the “futures” game over the past decade or so, it is clearly time to put this question on the agenda of a group which is committed to an applied social science. No matter how I turn it over in my mind, the number one task for peace research always turns out to be that of prediction: the ability to forecast, with increasing reliability, the outcomes which are most likely to emerge out of a given set of background conditions and behavioral events. And it seems to me that this holds whether our concern is to aid, augment, bypass, or subvert those who now decide questions of war and peace.
