CERN’s Early History Revisited

Krige replies: The letters from Herwig Schopper and Sameen Ahmed Khan are reminders that many actors were engaged in launching CERN; all contributors need to be given due credit. In volume 1 of our History of CERN (North Holland, 1987), I and coauthors Armin Hermann, Ulrike Mersits, and Dominique Pestre evaluated at length this aspect of the laboratory’s origin. I would recommend that volume to Khan, who seems unaware of it.

It was not my intention to repeat those arguments in my article, nor shall I belabor our very different perceptions of the precise roles of people like Denis de Rougemont and Edoardo Amaldi. My aim was rather to show that I. I. Rabi, in particular, had a foreign policy agenda when he took the floor in Florence. He wanted to suggest that the US would not look favorably on a laboratory that included a research reactor, as did Brookhaven—a project being actively promoted by the French but that would necessarily exclude Germany. More fundamentally, in line with the aims of the Marshall Plan and the Schuman Plan, he wanted to reintegrate and relegitimate West German physics by including that country, which had barely gained limited sovereignty, as part of a supranational European laboratory equipped only with accelerators. My aim was not to attribute credit but to situate CERN squarely in Rabi’s and the US State Department’s agenda for the postwar reconstruction of Europe in the early cold war era.