ENCYCLOPEDIA OF Espionage, Intelligence, and Security Volume ...

CERNMock-up of the CERN Large Hadron Collidor or LHC atom-smasher under construction in a 27-kilometer tunnel near Geneva. ©AFP/CORBIS.military affairs via the relevance of all physics to militaryaffairs. The proposal in 1949 to form a regional Europeanphysics laboratory (i.e., CERN) was directly inspired by theexplosion by the Soviet Union, in that year, of its firstatomic bomb; furthermore, while CERN was being foundedduring the early 1950s, the building of particle acceleratorsin the United States was funded primarily by the military,which hoped to produce particle-beam weapons and tomanufacture polonium for radiological warfare (i.e., theuse of radioactive dust as a weapon). Both scientists andpoliticians involved in the founding of CERN were, therefore,aware that military applications of research in particlephysics, though not predictable, might eventually occur.Furthermore, the advanced scientific equipment andtechniques that would be developed at CERN and thelarge pool of expertise it would create and sustain wereseen as basic military European assets. Likewise, the U.S.Navy’s Office of Naval Research financed research infundamental physics in U.S. universities in the postwaryears on the ground that even “untargeted” research—science for science’s sake—could, on average, ultimatelybe counted on to bear military fruit.Nevertheless, CERN is as non-military, non-secretive,and international as an institution could well be. TheEncyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence, and Securityconstruction of a nuclear reactor at CERN was ruled outfrom the beginning precisely because of the obviouslymilitary applications of such technology. CERN has thereforefocused on the use of particle accelerators for research,avoiding the production or use of militarily significantamounts of fissionable materials and leaving themilitary implications (if any) of its discoveries to be workedout by national and commercial laboratories. To furtherdistinguish it from a weapons-research laboratory, CERNdoes not classify any of its results, but, in accordance withits founding convention, makes them openly available toall inquirers.Design work for CERN’s first facilities proceeded inGeneva, Switzerland during 1953 and 1954 while the finalinternational agreements were being worked out by CERN’soriginal 11 member states. Construction contracts wereawarded in October 1954, and CERN’s first accelerator, a600 MeV proton synchro-cyclotron, began operation in1957. Confirmation of pion decay was one of the firstexperimental results, beginning a long line of importantphysics results made at CERN.Not all of CERN’s contributions have been in therealm of physics; in 1990, CERN computer scientists TimBerners-Lee and Robert Cailliau proposed a network of171