Thank you for publishing Michael Riordan’s well-researched article “A bridge too far: The demise of the Superconducting Super Collider” (Physics Today, October 2016, page 48). The complexities of the subject are on full display in the book Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider, by Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson, and Adrienne Kolb (University of Chicago Press, 2015), and in the article’s focus on the political intrigue.
As a physicist at the SSC from 1990 to 1994, I can say we were quite aware of the difficulties of establishing international collaboration and funding. For example, my Japanese colleagues voiced concern about how it would look in Japan for their relatively small delegation to make a large funding request. The Japan–US relationship is politically and culturally complex, and that complexity echoes today in science—for example, in planning the Fukushima Daiichi cleanup, in which I have been a participant.
In addition to the considerations Riordan mentions from the 1993 draft letter being circulated within the Clinton administration, the general climate that year featured strident party conflicts on all fronts. Among the issues looming large were budget-balancing skirmishes and the conflict between Texas Republicans and Michigan Democrats over the closing of GM factories. Those forces converged and came to bear on Clinton’s decision to withdraw support for a large project located in an opposite-party state. So a project that had been planned for decades and was in the midst of construction was canceled largely for short-term political reasons.
To lessen the vulnerability of long-term projects to the forces of short-term political struggles, I have long advocated that before new labs are constructed, a US-participating treaty organization similar to CERN should be formed. It would likely be composed of countries that border the Pacific Ocean and would support geographically diverse sites with low construction and maintenance costs. In the modern era of improvements in remote internet access and plummeting air travel costs, big projects do not need to be located in established labs in New York, Chicago, or the Bay Area. And not everyone needs to be resident―just ask those who are planning facilities such as the Thirty Meter Telescope or DUNE. So the “intellectual backwater” opinion mentioned by Riordan is perhaps not as daunting now. Incidentally, most of us even then were quite pleased and engaged with the quality, diversity, and depth of the culture in the Dallas–Fort Worth area.
A principal advantage of the CERN project model is the stability and diversification of funding afforded by the authority of a multilateral treaty structure. Similarly, a treaty would lessen the risk that US big science faces now: that Congress would cancel a project in one of its 20 annual funding votes.
