We need scientific brainstorming on shared global dangers

By Frank N. von Hippel

With Russia and the West again as adversaries, their scientific cooperation has been drastically reduced. And as tensions between the United States and China rise, the United States has agreed to only short-term deals. extensions of the 1979 Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement between both countries and is likely to reduce its coverage in the long term.

International scientific organizations are also under pressure. For example, CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, was created after World War II to help unite Europe by bringing together physicists from formerly adversarial countries to build and conduct experiments with the proton accelerator. most powerful in the world. But CERN recently announced that it will cut ties with the Russian government due to its continuing war against Ukraine. Russian scientists currently working at CERN will be allowed to stay only if they change their affiliations to institutions outside Russia.

CERN is trying to distinguish between Russia’s current government and Russian scientists, many of whom support the internationalism that nuclear physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov promoted in his notable 1968 essay “Reflections on progress, peaceful coexistence and intellectual freedom.”

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Another international organization, ITER, is building an experimental fusion reactor in the south of France. However, unlike CERN, ITER has no plans to cut its ties with the Russian government. The basic reactor design was proposed by Sakharov and the physicist Igor Tamm in 1951; The international project was proposed by the late Mikhail Gorbachev, then general secretary of the Soviet Union, at the suggestion of one of your physical advisors. And Russia is providing key components for the power supply and for the protection of the ITER superconducting magnets.

It is difficult to unravel international science. That’s a good thing. International scientific cooperation is key to addressing global problems such as nuclear weapons, pandemics, climate warming and the misuse of artificial intelligence. It also creates opportunities for scientists to exchange ideas about how we can address those problems. Governments have long recognized this. He Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change It is just one of the international organizations founded to facilitate agreements on the scope of various global problems and analyze possible mitigation strategies.

During the cold war, the Pugwash Lectures on Science and World Affairsan international organization of scientists that was created in response to the 1955 crisis. Russell-Einstein Manifesto against nuclear weapons, they exchanged ideas that facilitated nuclear arms control, bans on chemical and biological weapons, and deep cuts in the massive military confrontation along the border between what was then East and West Germany.

In the 1980s I was among the American scientists who He exchanged ideas with Gorbachev’s physical advisors. on measures to end the nuclear arms race, starting with underground testing of new nuclear warhead designs. Evgeny Velikhov and Roald Sagdeev, two of Gorbachev’s advisors, were fusion scientists who had collaborated with their foreign counterparts for decades. In fact, on my first visit to the Soviet Union, when the enthusiastic Velikhov met me at Sheremetyevo International Airport near Moscow, he was wearing a Princeton University tie from one of his many visits to the Plasma Physics Laboratory in Princeton.

A decade later, when he worked in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the legacy of openness fostered by Gorbachev was so strong that then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin allowed experts from American nuclear weapons laboratories cooperate with experts from Russia’s nuclear laboratories to increase the security of the country’s huge stockpiles of nuclear materials and warheads.

Chinese nuclear weapons physicists were also inspired to join the international brainstorm. Beginning in 1988, under the auspices of the International School of Disarmament and Conflict Researchthe Italian group Pugwash, organized a biennial seminar in Beijing (now called the PIIC Beijing Seminar on International Security) with European and American physicists. These physical meetings ended under Chinese President Xi Jinping, but the brainstorming continues over Zoom.

Between the two world wars, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, and other prominent members of the physics community participated in the international cooperative effort to develop modern physics. Bohr never lost faith that the path to the salvation of human civilization passes through an “open world.” He made repeated efforts to persuade world leaders and finally, in 1950, wrote in his Open letter to the United Nations“Every initiative by any party aimed at removing obstacles to free information and mutual relations would be of utmost importance in breaking the current stalemate (the cold war) and encouraging others to take steps in the same direction.”

Gorbachev adopted what he called “new thinking” and used “glasnost” (“openness”) to open the Soviet Union internally and to the world. This allowed him to work with US Presidents Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush to end the Cold War and begin a process that dramatically reduced the Combined Soviet, Russian and American nuclear arsenals. by almost a factor of 10.

The authoritarian regimes that Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Xi have built make international cooperation difficult, but the West must consider the costs and benefits of proposals to build additional walls. Us do They have secrets that must be protected, but unnecessary barriers will be created. weaken us at least as much as our adversaries—especially where they make it more difficult for scientists to share ideas about how to make the world safer and more liveable.

This is an article of opinion and analysis, and the opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of American scientist.