Michael Roberts: "We had a common objective to make fusion a reality"

 

It's important to remember that 1985 was not the beginning of international fusion cooperation by any means. There had been literally decades of person-to-person, program-to-program and high-level exchanges before then. The US international collaboration on fusion research dates back to the early 1950s when Professor Lyman Spitzer at Princeton was intrigued by Juan Peron's announcement that Argentina had achieved fusion in the laboratory and, later, when nuclear fusion was declassified in 1958. Heads of State have been key to major advancements in fusion collaborations. In 1973, we started to interact at more of a program-to-program level. By the time of the 1985 Geneva Summit, I had been involved in international fusion for 19 years.

 

 

Working with Evgeny was always straightforward, as we had the same objective of advancing fusion energy research through effective international collaboration. While Evgeny and I were involved with fusion collaborations from the beginning, we were always on very different levels and we were many rungs apart on the ladder! At that time, Evgeny, who was always a fusion policy leader, was the science advisor to his nation's leader, while I was a division director in the US fusion program.  Even so, we were the two leaders heading the US-Soviet fusion delegations in 1985. I think you can see the respectful relationship in the photo—he was very senior, I was very junior, but we always worked together well. We had a common objective to make fusion a reality. I worked on a specific science program level, while he did it at very high levels on many projects. For perspective, two weeks after our meetings in 1985, he was at a meeting with President Mitterrand and General Secretary Gorbachev! (See the interview with Academician Velikhov in this issue.)

 

 

The Soviets were open about what they were doing, and we became open too. Government policy helped this happen. Annual bilateral committee meetings at program level for the US-USSR Joint Fusion Power Coordinating Committee allowed us to work together, providing opportunities for me and others from the US fusion program to get to know our Soviet counterparts. I was in the role a long time and people knew who I was and that they could trust me. Leading up to the Geneva Summit, there had been considerable effort in the West to craft a common fusion program "roadmap." This was done under the auspices of the 1982 Versailles Summit process through its Fusion Working Group. The ground was very fertile in 1984 and 1985 to work together, which manifested itself in a US proposal by the end of 1986 to have a quadripartite effort with the US, USSR, EU and Japan. This effort materialized into a Conceptual Design period for ITER from 1988 to 1990. Based on many years of working together bilaterally, the view from my Soviet colleague was typically that "if it is okay with you, it is okay with me." I was known as an honest broker. We had the same international interests, but we also had to uphold our own national interests.

 

After the Geneva Summit, I was told that President Reagan wanted this to happen because he saw the potential positive impact of American and Soviet engineers living and working together for some period of time. That is a good reminder that ITER is a dual experiment—it's not just science and physics, but also an experiment in international collaboration!