Other Nations Should Help Foot Bill for Supercollider

It’s no contest when the colossal comes up against the merely sensible on the political playing fields of Washington. The latest example is the White House’s decision to build a goliath atom smasher, the Superconducting Supercollider.

Fifty-two miles in circumference, $6 billion to build and $500 million a year to run, it would dwarf existing facilities in this field. Along the way, however, it would draw scarce money and genius to esoteric research that would be remote from down-to-earth problems, particularly the nation’s mounting industrial woes. That’s why the proposed super atom smasher has aroused several respected scientists into rare departures from the live-and-let-rule protocol that generally governs the politics of research money.

“The supercollider’s capital cost will clearly squeeze capital expenditures for other sciences,” warned Arno A. Penzias, a Nobel laureate in physics at AT&T;’s Bell Laboratories. Penzias doubts that the potential for new knowledge is worth the cost. And Roland T. Schmitt, chief scientist of General Electric, has asked: “Do you fix the multibillion-dollar health of university research and education, or do you build a Superconducting Supercollider?” The answer from Schmitt, who also chairs the board of the National Science Foundation, the principal federal agency for university-based science: “I think the top priority is getting the academic research and education base fixed first.”

Why, given these sober doubts--not to mention budget-pinching efforts on cancer and heart research--has the tight-fisted Reagan White House committed itself to this venture? And why has it done so in the absence of foreign cost-sharing agreements that Congress has been urging to relieve the strain on American research budgets?

For answers, it is necessary to look at the mystique of atom-smashing, or high-energy, physics--an elite discipline that for 50 years has employed bigger and costlier machines to probe the basic building blocks of matter. The field is intellectually exciting, it attracts the very brightest of scientific recruits, and its superstars are heavily represented in the ranks of Nobel laureates.

Thus, scientific glory and national prestige have long been associated with high-energy physics, which is why Western Europe, the Soviet Union and Japan operate big accelerators--though none on the scale of the proposed $6-billion machine.

Close collaboration among scientists from different nations, including the Soviet Union, adds an agreeable dimension to the research. And, unlike most other branches of the physical sciences, atom smashing is so remote from military applications that all of its work is conducted openly and the results are published freely.

Unfortunately, there’s a downside to this grand venture in cosmopolitan science; by its very nature, it reveals more and more about less and less--so much so, in fact, that industry spends not a penny on atom smashing, since there’s no way to make it back. The research is, of course, fascinating. But, in these hard times, regrettably it is not very useful--certainly not by the measure of value for money.

Some technological spin-offs have ensued from accelerator designs and operations, and the research has probably had some stimulating effect on other fields of science. But only a perversion of scientific and social priorities could account for the United States going it alone on this monumental undertaking at a time when university laboratories are pleading for more money and health-research agencies are turning down more than half the grant applications deemed worthy of support.

Since all the world will be able to share in results of research on the super machine, at least some of the world should share in the costs. Eager for funds to build what will be a wondrous plaything for a relative handful of scientists, leaders of the project have advised Congress that other countries may eventually join in financially.

But some members of Congress have their doubts about how diligently American scientific leaders have pursued foreign partnerships that would dilute their control over the machine. So far, no European nation has pledged anything for the project. Japan has expressed interest but has not offered any money. And there’s a wariness about collaboration with the Soviets, even with Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s call for closer scientific relations.

American physicists complain that internationally run research facilities tend to be bureaucratically cumbersome. Often they are. But the $6-billion atom smasher is in the category of science that’s too important to be left to the scientists. If they want this fascinating toy, let them round up their foreign friends to help pay for it.