The ability of a country to follow sustainable development paths is determined to a large extent by the capacity or capabilities of its people and its institutions. Specifically, capacity-building in the UNCED terminology encompasses the country's human, scientific, technological, organizational, institutional, and resource capabilities. A fundamental goal of capacity-building is to enhance the ability to pose, evaluate and address crucial questions related to policy choices and methods of implementation among development options. As a result the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) Agenda 21 planning process has identified the need for better methods by which information can be transferred between industrialized nations and developing nations. The reasons for better methods of information transfer include facilitating decisions related to sustainable development and building the capacity of developing nations to better plan their future in both an economical and environmentally sound manner. This paper is a discussion on mechanisms for providing information and technologies available for presenting the information to a variety of cultures and levels of technical literacy. Consideration is given to access to information technology as well as to the cost to the user. One concept discussed includes an Engineering Partnership'' which brings together the talents and resources …

Three years ago, in response to our challenging development context, the Advanced Modeling and Analysis Section designed and implemented an object-oriented environment -- the Application Interface Engine (AIE). Our prototyping requirements forced existing application development systems beyond their capabilities. Programmers at AMAS and its contractors have developed over twenty applications using AIE. Our initial experience has been very positive. AIE extends an object-oriented programming language with syntax and classes to support applications specification. This extended system improves all stages of the application engineering life cycle, from rapid prototyping to long term maintenance.

The ability of a country to follow sustainable development paths is determined to a large extent by the capacity or capabilities of its people and its institutions. Specifically, capacity-building in the UNCED terminology encompasses the country`s human, scientific, technological, organizational, institutional, and resource capabilities. A fundamental goal of capacity-building is to enhance the ability to pose, evaluate and address crucial questions related to policy choices and methods of implementation among development options. As a result the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) Agenda 21 planning process has identified the need for better methods by which information can be transferred between industrialized nations and developing nations. The reasons for better methods of information transfer include facilitating decisions related to sustainable development and building the capacity of developing nations to better plan their future in both an economical and environmentally sound manner. This paper is a discussion on mechanisms for providing information and technologies available for presenting the information to a variety of cultures and levels of technical literacy. Consideration is given to access to information technology as well as to the cost to the user. One concept discussed includes an ``Engineering Partnership`` which brings together the talents and resources …

Three years ago, in response to our challenging development context, the Advanced Modeling and Analysis Section designed and implemented an object-oriented environment -- the Application Interface Engine (AIE). Our prototyping requirements forced existing application development systems beyond their capabilities. Programmers at AMAS and its contractors have developed over twenty applications using AIE. Our initial experience has been very positive. AIE extends an object-oriented programming language with syntax and classes to support applications specification. This extended system improves all stages of the application engineering life cycle, from rapid prototyping to long term maintenance.

Department of Energy national laboratories are charged with anticipating with a long leadtime which technologies for nuclear warheads should be developed. The Safe Warhead System Study was constituted to provide Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory management with information and suggestions for making such decisions for enhanced safety warheads. The Minuteman III replacement warheads were analyzed as a test case and that information was used to identify and describe the dominant issues, to develop a methodology and to make initial recommendations. The test case work resulted in several insights into how ongoing design and engineering interacts with the technology ranking and on how to cope with the ubiquitous uncertainties relating to our current ICBM force.