Among many big and small science meetings and workshops scheduled to take place around the world in 2014, two major ones are to be held in Russia’s biggest and best-known cities. The biennial Scientific Assembly of the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) is planned for August in Moscow. And the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA’s) Fusion Energy Conference, also convened every two years, is scheduled for Saint Petersburg in October.
The drive to hold those high-profile international scientific meetings in Russia, along with the 2014 Winter Olympic Games and the 2018 soccer World Cup, signifies the country’s return to being a major player on the world stage, after two decades of reestablishing itself amid the ruins of the Soviet Union. At least, that is very much the intent.
It may not be an accident that the fields of human endeavor that have been chosen to represent the rebirth of Russia’s ambition are sports and physical sciences, the two fundamentally peaceful vocations whose achievements were the subject of particular national pride back in the Soviet Union.
It is also of note that the Soviet Union initiated the space age by putting Sputnik 1 in Earth’s orbit, and it was the first country to fly a man, Yuri Gagarin, and later, a woman, Valentina Tereshkova, into space. Andrei Sakharov, who helped develop the Soviet hydrogen bomb and later became a human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, was the one who conceived of the tokamak. Today the tokamak is the centerpiece of the world’s magnetized fusion program, most notably represented by the international experimental nuclear fusion reactor ITER, with which the IAEA has been actively involved from the beginning.
Does it appear as though there is a theme here? Unfortunately, Russia’s ongoing military action in Ukraine and the intense crackdown on all Russian independent media are part of that same theme. Russia is reentering the world stage the only way its leader knows how: by going back to being an externally powerful and internally repressive nation with imperial ambitions. And neither communism nor socialism has anything to do with it.
We can leave it to the New York Times and the Washington Post to discuss the sociopolitical implications of Russia’s actions. However, today I and many of my friends and colleagues, with and without Russian connections, have to decide whether to travel to and present at the 2014 COSPAR and IAEA conferences. Should we, can we, ignore the politics of it all? Is it okay to be a participant in the charade that the official trappings of the conferences are certain to become? Will we do more good by promoting the free exchange of scientific information or more harm by legitimizing the newly found ambitions of the Russian empire?
I have not yet made that decision for myself.
