We need scientific brainstorming about shared global dangers

By Frank N. von Hippel

With Russia and Western adversaries again, their scientific cooperation has been significantly reduced. And with tensions also rising between the United States and China, the United States has only agreed to short-term deals. extensions of the 1979 Scientific and Technological Cooperation Agreement between the two 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 established after World War II to help bind Europe by bringing together physicists from formerly adversarial countries to build and conduct experiments with the accelerator. most powerful proton generator in the world. But CERN recently announced that it would cut ties with the Russian government due to the continuing war against Ukraine. Russian scientists currently working at CERN will only be allowed to stay if they change affiliations to institutions outside Russia.

CERN attempts to distinguish between the current Russian government and Russian scientists, many of whom support the internationalism promoted by nuclear physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov in his remarkable 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. Unlike CERN, however, ITER has no intention of severing its ties with the Russian government. The basic design of the reactor was proposed by Sakharov and physicist Igor Tamm in 1951; the international project was proposed by the late Mikhail Gorbachev, then Secretary General of the Soviet Union, at the suggestion of one of his physicist advisors. And Russia is supply key components for the power supply and for the protection of ITER’s superconducting magnets.

It is difficult to disentangle international science. That’s a good thing. International scientific cooperation is essential to solving global problems such as nuclear weapons, pandemics, global warming and misuses of artificial intelligence. It also creates opportunities for scientists to think about how we can solve these problems. Governments have recognized this for a long time. THE Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is just one of the international organizations founded to facilitate agreement on the magnitude 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 created in response to the 1955 attacks. Russell-Einstein Manifesto against nuclear weapons, thought about ideas that ease nuclear arms control, a ban 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 one of the American scientists who brainstorming with Gorbachev’s physicist advisors on measures to end the nuclear arms race, starting with underground testing of new models of nuclear warheads. Yevgeny Velikhov and Roald Sagdeev, two of Gorbachev’s advisers, were fusion scientists who had collaborated with their foreign counterparts for decades. Indeed, on my first visit to the Soviet Union, when the ebullient Velikhov greeted me at Sheremetyevo International Airport near Moscow, he was wearing a Princeton University tie from one of his many visits. at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

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

Chinese nuclear weapons physicists have also been encouraged to join the international thinking. From 1988, under the auspices of the International School of Disarmament and Conflict Researchthe Italian Pugwash Group, organized a biennial seminar in Beijing (now called the Beijing PIIC Seminar on International Security) with European and American physicists. These physical meetings ended under Chinese President Xi Jinping, but brainstorming continues via Zoom.

Between the two world wars, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, and other prominent members of the physics community engaged in an international cooperative effort to develop modern physics. Bohr never lost the conviction that the path to the salvation of human civilization lies through an “open world”. He made repeated efforts to persuade world leaders and finally wrote in 1950 in his Open letter to the United Nations“Any initiative by any side to remove obstacles to free mutual information and sexual relations would be of the utmost importance in breaking the current impasse (the Cold War) and encouraging others to take action. measures 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 brought the Cold War to naught. combined Soviet, Russian and American nuclear arsenals by a factor of almost 10.

The authoritarian regimes that Russian Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi have built make international cooperation more difficult, but the West must consider the costs and benefits of such cooperation. proposals build additional walls. We TO DO have secrets that need to be protected, but unnecessary barriers weaken us at least as much as our adversaries…especially where they make it harder for scientists to share ideas about how to make the world safer and more livable.

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