Soviet Physics JETP

For a number of reasons physics journals published in the Soviet Union have not enjoyed an especially wide circulation in the United States, but even if the mails suddenly were to be filled with Soviet physics periodicals there would still be the difficulty that scarcely one American physicist in a hundred can read enough Russian to make use of a scientific paper in that language. While it has been argued that so glaring a deficiency should and eventually must be remedied in the schooling of future physicists, the fact remains that physicists in this country have been unable to follow the published literature of Soviet research, even by means of translations. Although various agencies have undertaken the translation of selected physics papers from the USSR, there exists no complete and up‐to‐date set of English translations of the Soviet physics journals. At the same time there is abundant evidence that physicists in the USSR have a close familiarity with the non‐Soviet physics literature and are making swift and efficient use of Western research techniques and results.