Prime Directive - Variations and Origin

Variations and Origin

The first reference to the Prime Directive occurs in the episode The Return of the Archons.

The Prime Directive is explicitly defined in the Star Trek episode "Bread and Circuses," which is set in 2267:

Whether this was the full text of the Directive is unclear, but by the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Infinite Regress," which is set in 2375, it is revealed that the Directive has 47 sub-orders. However, once contamination has occurred, Star Fleet personnel are allowed to directly intervene on the planet to attempt to minimize the harm as much as possible with an openness in proportion of how significant the exposure has been. For example, in "Bread and Circuses" itself, James Kirk and crew investigated the fate of a ship's personnel on a planet while attempting to keep their origins secret even while the planet's rulers were aware. By contrast, in "Patterns of Force," where the crew discovers that a Federation cultural observer has contaminated the culture he was supposed to be observing by having blatantly reformed a planet's government to emulate Nazi Germany, they help the local resistance overthrow the government.

The non-interference directive seems to have originated with the Vulcans. In Star Trek: First Contact, it is stated that but for Zefram Cochrane's historic warp flight, a passing Vulcan ship would have deemed Earth unready for contact and ignored the planet, and in the Enterprise episode "Fight or Flight" T'Pol makes reference to a Vulcan policy of non-interference. However, the policy was not implemented immediately, and did not exist on pre-Federation Earth: in the Enterprise episode "Civilization," Charles "Trip" Tucker III notes that the prohibition is a Vulcan policy, not human. In another episode, "Dear Doctor," Jonathan Archer says:

The Prime Directive was not actually written into law until some years after the formation of the Federation — in the Star Trek episode "A Piece of the Action," an early Federation ship, the Horizon, visited a primitive planet and left behind several items which altered the planet's culture significantly—most notably the book Chicago Mobs Of The Twenties, which the inhabitants quickly seized upon as a blueprint for their entire society.

An alternative origin comes from the Enterprise episode "Observer Effect," where it is revealed that the Organians also adhere to a form of the Prime Directive. However, as Star Fleet does not officially make first contact with the Organians until the original series episode "Errand of Mercy," it is unknown what impact, if any, they had on the development of the directive.

In real life, the creation of the Prime Directive is generally credited to Gene L. Coon, although there is some contention as to whether science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote of the Prime Directive in an unused script for the original series, actually came up with it first. The Prime Directive closely mirrors the zoo hypothesis explanation for the Fermi paradox. In an interview with Gene Roddenberry in a 1991 edition of 'The Humanist' magazine, he implied that it might also have had its roots in his belief that Christian Missionaries were interfering with other cultures.