As the costs for designing, building, and operating accelerators, telescopes, satellites, and other big experimental facilities have grown, the nations that support basic research are turning increasingly to international partnerships to fund them. But what happens when the world’s largest supporter of R&D shirks its obligations to those projects?
This year alone the US failed to come up with a $150 million contribution to ITER, the seven-party €5 billion ($7.1 billion) fusion experiment getting under way in France. The $60 million that was expected to pay the US share for an R&D program for the International Linear Collider, which physicists are hoping will become the next flagship particle-physics laboratory, was slashed to $15 million. Both cuts were the result of an 11th-hour budget showdown between Congress and the White House—a showdown that had nothing to do with the projects. Meanwhile, a $1.5 billion high-energy physics experiment built for the International...
