Statement

by

Philip Handler

Member of U.S. Delegation

President, National Academy of Sciences
of the United States of America

before

Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe

Madrid, Spain

3 December 1980
Mr. Chairman:

It is a deep irony that the subject of cooperation in science
should be on the agenda of the CSCE. Communication and cooperation
among scientists is a tradition of five centuries; indeed it is the
very essence of science. Because, without communication, science is
essentially pointless, science never has known international boundaries.
Scientists from different countries first meet each other, in spirit
as it were, in the printed pages of scientific journals; later perhaps
at the international disciplinary Congresses sponsored by the Interna-
tional Scientific Unions; then in each other's laboratories. Sharing
a common culture and set of values, even a common scientific language,
no natural barriers need impede their communication.

However, science, once the hobby of enthusiastic amateurs, has
become a principal preoccupation of governments. Worldwide expenditures,
by governments, in support of fundamental research, approach $18 billion
annually, of which approximately one-third is provided by the U.S.,
one-third by Western Europe and Japan, one-third by the Eastern European
bloc. Expenditures for applied research are about twice as great and
similarly distributed.

This huge enterprise has become a leading edge of our worldwide
culture. The vista of understanding obtained within our lifetimes is
the great legacy that we leave to the future, analogous as it has been
said, to the Gothic cathedrals built in an earlier time. And what a
magnificent panorama it is. Allow me to sketch it for you:

An ever more certain picture of the cosmos now excites us, of the
distribution of energy and matter, of the nature of celestial bodies,
of how it all began and how it may end. Plate tectonics has become
one of the great syntheses of science, explaining the movement of
continents, mountain building, vulcanism, earthquakes, and the forma-
tion of ore bodies. Three decades of experimental high energy physics
appear to have revealed what may be the ultimate structure of matter--
the family of quarks which, together with the four fundamental forces,
seem to suffice to account for the entire universe. Wonder of wonders!
Detailed understanding of molecular interactions, of the behavior of
matter in the solid, liquid and gaseous states, underlies the bulk of
the newer technologies of our time. Chemistry has been transformed
from a pot-boiling art to a profound science capable of reliable
prediction and the ability to synthesize any desired molecular struc-
ture at will.
Yet none of this is more awe inspiring than the understanding
gained of the nature of life, of enzymes the remarkable catalysts of
nature, of the transduction of energy in living cells, of the remark-
able complex functional organization of cells, of the messengers
between cells, of the genetic apparatus and its control of metabolism,
reproduction and embryogenesis, of the unimagined subtleties of the
immune system. And what can be more remarkable than the realization
that the human brain is capable of understanding itself?

Withal, the beauty thus revealed does not alone motivate this
enterprise, nor induce governments to support it. They do so, rather,
because of the technologies thus made possible. It is the insights
so gained that have enabled the conquest of infectious disese, rendered
malnutrition a problem of food distribution, not of understanding.
Science has made possible the gifts of radio, television, jet aircraft,
nuclear energy, communication and weather satellites, synthetic polymers,
and the solid state devices that serve as the heart of computers,
microprocessors, industrial robots and information processors. And
it is science itself that revealed the need for further studies of the
oceans, the atmosphere, soil conservation, climatic change, enhanced
agriculture, alternative energy sources, and attention to the chronic
diseases of later life (cancer, atherosclerosis, diabetes, arthritis,
lupus, multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, etc. etc.), the disorders
so prominent now that the acute diseases that were the principal causes
of death for most of human history have largely been brought under
control. The great objectives of much of such science are to stabilize
the biosphere, to enable a rational humanity to live in peace and
comfort, in harmonious equilibrium with the limited physical resources
of our small planet, seeking some higher human destiny, whatever that
may prove to be.

Patently, that goal is still very remote from attainment and, for
scientists, much more remains to be done than has yet been accomplished.
That is why we need not only to communicate to each other in the scien-
tific journals but to interact personally so as to refine our under-
standings, to stimulate each other's creativity. And surely we should
share the great, expensive physical facilities (accelerators and
telescopes, for example) of which the world needs no more than one
each. But that is in the most ancient scientific tradition. Since
the founding of the great European universities scholars have trekked
to each other's libraries, laboratories, each other's presence.
Scholarly exchange and freedom of inquiry are among the very founda-
tions of the European intellectual tradition. And it is abundantly
clear that the scientists of Eastern Europe treasure this tradition
quite as deeply as do their Western colleagues.
It is taken as given that a new piece of information, a new
understanding, gained anywhere benefits mankind everywhere, that no
nation has a monopoly of talent, that all can benefit from the work
of each of the others. Thus the scientific community really is trans-
national--a single world community. Scientists engaged in East-West
exchange must traverse bureaucratic governmental barriers--but they
already know and identify with one another; no governmental intermediary
is required to match laboratory with laboratory, or scientist with
scientist. When a scientist first visits some country other than his
own, he knows whom he wishes to see, and is welcomed as an old friend.
And it has been the hope of the scientific community that these close
human ties would also serve, in some measure, as stabilizing bridges
of goodwill and mutual understanding, counters to the tensions that
arise from conflicting ideologies and political practice.

Scientists have long taken the position that they are quite
capable of managing their own affairs and have so proven, time and
again. Happily, they persist in the notion that the advancement of
knowledge is their business--not that of governments, believing that
if the bureaucrats would kindly leave them alone, they could get on
with their tasks. Unfortunately, governments must provide the where-
withal to finance exchange, for governments are, of necessity, the
principal patrons of science, thereby acquiring a responsibility for
the scientific enterprise that, from country to country, varies more
in degree than in kind.

Accordingly, it is apparent that if the original provisions of
the Final Act, all of them, were adhered to by the signatory countries,
there would be little need to pursue the subject of scientific coopera-
tion further within the CSCE context. But it wds because that did not
appear to be the case that the Scientific Forum at Hamburg assumed a
character surely quite different from that anticipated when the provi-
sion for a Scientific Forum was written into the Final Act.

I was pleased to lead the American delegation to Hamburg--remember
that that was a meeting of scientists, not of governments. But I went
in a deeply troubled frame of mind.

When Soviet scientists began to attend international scientific
congresses in the 1950s, they were warmly welcomed despite the irrita-~
tion occasioned by the go-called "interpreters" who accompanied them--
surely that pained our Soviet colleagues more than it pained us. And,
happily, with time, that practice disappeared. But we have yet to
learn to put up with the all too frequent event in which a distinguished
Soviet scientist accepts an invitation to give a paper at an inter-
national meeting--and then does not appear, or some unworthy substitute
appears in his stead. We have yet to find acceptable the practice of
issuing visas to Western scientists just shortly before their departure
for the airport; yet to accept that diverse productive laboratories
whose work appears in the scientific literature are unavailable to us
in person; yet to appreciate why large, scientifically interesting
areas of the Soviet Union--such as Kamchatka, the Arctic and the
permafrost belt--should be closed to our earth scientists and biologists.
Our bilateral exchange programs operate on the basis that normally the
sending side nominates. But the receiving side is free to propose
particularly welcome guests to the sender; we cannot understand why
those suggestions are almost never acted upon favorably. And we shall
never accept the mutilating censorship of scientific journals before
they are deemed fit for the eyes of our Soviet scientific colleagues.

Presumably, Mr. Chairman, this was the genre of problems that
was to have been thrashed out at Hamburg. According to our agenda
we were also expected to identify significant areas of research and
new modes of cooperation in the general fields of alternative energy
sources, food production, and medicine, as well as in the humanities
and social sciences. We did grapple with all of these subjects.
But, as it happened, those were not the principal matters that occupied
our attention.

By the time we had gathered, it was apparent that the scientists
of the West were primarily concerned with what they considered to be
serious infringements of the human rights and freedoms of too many of
their scientific colleagues in the East. The Bill of Particulars is
painfully long. Some, imprisoned, have become althost "household words"--
Orlov, Scharansky, Kovalev--but there are also Bakhmin, Kukk, Marynovych,
Nazarian, Skoudis, Velikanova and Zissels, for example. And, of course,
there was the case of Andrei Sakharov, only recently exiled to Gorky.
It matters not that not all of the list are truly distinguished scien-
tists whose accomplishments have brought them worldwide repute; the
transnational scientific community is as one, leaders and followers,
the architects of the intellectual structure of science and the layers
of the bricks in that structure. There are, in fact, only a handful
of figures, worldwide, comparable to Sakharov. (He was not only a
principal figure in the design of a military fusion device; it was also
he who pointed out that if the Tokomak is to work, the plasma must be
confined magnetically, not electrostatically as originally planned--
and that remains the basis for our hope that contained fusion may,
one day, become a major energy source for humanity.)
To be sure, also, none of the scientists who have been so
grievously injured have been so treated because of their scientific
activities. In general, the seeming transgressions for which they have
been penalized so excessively have been either to have participated in
monitoring their own government's adherence to the provisions of the
Final Act or merely to have requested permission to enigrate--both
activities vouchsafed by the Final Act itself. And it was attention
to that circumstance that dominated our time in Hamburg.

And so, the Scientific Forum was not a scientific meeting as
scientists use that term; its principal concern was the international
scientific enterprise itself, including its rules of ethical conduct,
rather than the substance of science.

That time in Hamburg was not wasted. The Report of the Scientific
Forum--achieved by the same consensus process common to all CSCE

meetings--contains several pregnant statements. Let me remind you
of them:

It is observed that the present state of international
scientific cooperation still requires improvements in
various respects. Such improvements should be achieved
bilaterally and multilaterally, at governmental and non-
governmental levels, through intergovernmental and other
agreements, international programmes and cooperative projects,
and by providing equitable opportunities for scientific
research and for wider communication and travel necessary
for professional purposes.

a
The word "equitable" was mine. I know that it does not have an exact
equivalent in most other languages. When I introduced it, I referred
to its dictionary definition as "fair, just, and reasonable," and it
is the meaningful word in that sentence.

The Report goes on to say that:

It is furthermore considered necessary to state that
respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms by all
States represents one of the foundations for significant
improvement of their mutual relations and of international
scientific cooperation at all levels.
It was our understanding, Mr. Chairman, that those two statements
in the Report of the Scientific Forum constitute a firm acknowledgment
of linkage between the strong endorsement of international cooperation
in science and technology to be found in Basket II and the profound
statements concerning human rights and fundamental freedoms to be
found in Baskets I and III. These several elements cannot, any longer,
be discussed as issues apart because they are not issues apart--they
are indissolubly linked.

Ten months have elapsed since Hamburg. But the problems that so
troubled us then seem even more serious today. Kovalev, Scharansky,
Orlov remain imprisoned; their physical health deteriorates while
mentally and emotionally they remain cut off from the world, denied
access to scientific materials, forbidden to engage in scientific
writing. And Andrei Sakharov languishes in Gorky. The plight of the
so-called "refusenik" scientists remains unrelieved and, while this
very meeting was in progress, Victor Brailovsky was summarily jailed.

Mr. Chairman, it was in 1973 that I first communicated to then
President Mstislav Keldysh of the Soviet Academy my concern that if
this pattern of activities continues, Western scientists--certainly
American scientists--would, in due course, personally decide that
their only effective means of protest would be to decline to partic-
ipate in any form of exchange with the Soviet Union. It is with an
aching heart that I report that that prediction is being borne out--
and on a considerable scale.

Over these years a vast flow of letters and telegrams of protest
has gone from the West to appropriate officials in the East--but to
little avail. More recently, we have experienced*increasing difficulty
in securing hosts for Soviet scientists and scholars nominated to come
to the States under our exchange programs. Be it said, however, that
we work so assiduously at this process that, by sheer diligence we
manage to identify willing, if somewhat reluctant, hosts for almost
all nominees. How long that limited success will continue, I am
uncertain.

In a remarkable act, some 8000 American scientists recently made
known to Soviet officials that they are unwilling to participate in
any manner in exchange programs with the Soviet Union. Let there be
no mistake; these have not been actions prompted or organized by the
administration of President Carter. They flow from the saddened
hearts of individual scientists. And their attitudes will persist,
their numbers will grow, regardless of who is in the White House,
unless there is some reasonable assurance that the course of events
that so deeply troubles them will be reversed. And that is living
proof of the validity of the Hamburg Communique, viz. respect for
human rights and fundamental freedoms does represent a foundation
for international scientific cooperation.

Mr. Chairman, last February the Council of the National Academy
of Sciences of the USA suspended the program of bilateral colloquia
and symposia cosponsored with the Soviet Academy. That unique action
warrants fuller explication.

The Council is elected by the 1200 members of our Academy, the
most distinguished scientists in our land. Accordingly, we are highly
sensitive to the views and wishes of our membership. Over the years,
our members have expressed their continuing frustration at our
inability to mitigate the circumstances of the same group of Soviet
colleagues. The exile of Andrei Sakharov, he whom the Nobel Prize
Committee described as "the conscience of mankind," was a profound
shock, deeply offensive to our most precious beliefs. But communica~
tion of that reaction elicited no response from Soviet officials.

Our exchange program, the first of its kind, is rather small
compared to that which was subsequently inagurated under intergovern-
mental auspices. The latter embraced all of the scientific and
technical areas specifically enumerated in the text of Basket II and,
at its height, involved some 220 specific projects within which some
1500 American and Soviet scientists, combined, visited each other's
laboratories in 1979. Following the invasion of Afghanistan, this
program was markedly reduced by the U.S. government, except for those
projects relating to health and to environmental protection. But a
breach of the terms of Basket I is the business of governments, not
that of scientists, as scientists. Indeed, no mention of Afghanistan
was made at Hamburg, nor did that unfortunate event have any effect
on the inter-Academy exchange. But the exile of Andrei Sakharov was
quite another matter.

How then could the Academy send to Soviet officialdom and to
Soviet scientists an unmistakable message, conveying the depth of our
concern, a clear signal that would amplify that which I had been
sending since 1973, an indication that we could not satisfy our
consciences by empty gestures or lengthy cablegrams that go ignored.
Our exchange program was organized into two components-—individual
exchanges and organized bilateral meetings for which the two Academies,
qua Academies, were responsible. In our Council's view, decisions
concerning the former, i.e., to visit a laboratory in the Soviet Union

or to receive a Soviet scientist, must remain with each individual
American scientist and his own conscience. The quota, in both directions,
has been filled this year. But the quota is small and the American
scientific community rather large.

However, the Academy per se is responsible for the bilateral
meetings--the choice of topic, of site and of participants. Hence,
it was this element, under its own control, that the Council suspended.
Please understand, Mr. Chairman, how painful that decision was.

All of us were deeply reluctant to sever all communication with
our Soviet colleagues by suspending the entire exchange program, knowing
that the direct burden of such an action would necessarily fall on our
scientist colleagues, not on the officials responsible for the actions
to which we object. We were and we remain most unwilling to abandon
the Soviet scientific community, unwilling to breach the bonds of
scientific fraternity, and, incidentally, pari passu, both deny to
ourselves the full benefit of scientific advances in the Soviet Union
and forego the opportunity to discuss with Soviet colleagues the very
matters that so much trouble us.

It was already our considered opinion that the individual exchange
program--which has always included an element of "scientific tourism"~-—
should not grow and might even be diminished somewhat with relatively
little loss.

In contrast, our bilateral symposia--in theoretical astrophysics
and solid state physics, experimental psychology, and molecular biology--
have been highly successful; by mutual agreement they involved areas
in which, in a meeting consisting of 15 scientists per side, there was
sure to be essentially equal strength on both sides.

Accordingly, suspending this part of the exchange program, to us
the most precious, came very hard. Our scientists enjoyed and profited
by them. They had gained new scientific colleagues and personal
friends. And yet, we took the only step available to us--a measured
step, a painful, hateful, self-denying ordinance concerning this small
but precious part of our exchange program.

As we did so, we committed ourselves to reexamine the matter six
months later. And reexamine we did.
In the interim, there had been no mitigation of the personal
circumstances of those in prison or labor camps, of Sakharov in exile,
or of those who had been consigned to some shadowy existence as
refuseniks. But a few new names had been added to those lists.

And, meanwhile, an increasing body of hard information had appeared

in the West documenting the extent of what seems almost official--

or, at least, officially tolerated--antisemitism in the world of Soviet
mathematics. The latter development has outraged American mathemati-
cians, a community that deeply believes that mathematical ability
alone should be the means of entry into their community, worldwide.
The barriers erected against the opportunity of young Soviet Jews to
study mathematics surely constitute a gross violation of the langugage
of the Hamburg Communique concerning "equitable opportunity for scien-
tific research" as well as of the language of Basket III condemning
discrimination in all forms.

And so, six months later, our Council found no alternative but
to notify the Soviet Academy that our bilateral colloquia remain
indefinitely suspended.

Nothing, Mr. Chairman, would please us more than a valid reason
to reverse that decision, some meaningful indication that these
serious problems are receiving the sympathetic attention that they
warrant, some indication that Soviet scientists will indeed enjoy
those human rights and fundamental freedoms so eloquently described
in the language of Baskets I and III.

Mr. Chairman, I regret, indeed I am embarrassed, that my remarks
are addressed to problems in a single national member of the CSCE.
Admittedly, human rights problems seem to arise almost everywhere.
Our Academy's Committee on Human Rights has attempted to defend
scientists whose rights have been abrogated in South America, Asia,
and Africa, as well as in other European countries. But in none
of those countries is science so advanced as in the Soviet Union.

And the problems that have accumulated in that country, which is
signatory to the Final Act and which we would expect to live by those
ethical standards which all 35 signatory nations hold in common, have
become so compelling as to warrant the attention of this body.

Mr. Chairman, to American scientists, the question of freedom of
inquiry, freedom to write and publish, freedom to speak, to come and go
across national borders, freedom to live where one's heart and conscience
take one, are indissolubly bound to freedom of one's person. We cannot
consider scientific communication as somehow distinct from other forms
-10-

of human communication. We perceive no essential distinctions between
pursuit of truth about the nature of man or of the physical universe
and pursuit of truth about the human condition in the societies in
which we live. We will continue to speak out for those whose rights
have been denied, for the cost of silence is the abandonment of human
rights, and that is a price we will not pay.

If I may quote a colleague:

-.» Intellectual freedom is essential to human
society--freedom to obtain and distribute information,
freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate, and freedom
from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such a trinity
of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an
infection of people by mass myths... Freedom of thought
is the only guarantee of the feasibility of a scientific
democratic approach to politics, economy and culture.

Mr. Chairman, those words were written by a Foreign Member of
the National Academy of Sciences of the USA--Andrei Sakharov.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the privilege of the floor on
this day.