Quantum Tunneling through the Iron Curtain

• Published in: Cahiers du monde russe 2019, Vol.60 (2-3), p.369-396
• Main Author: Khandozhko, Roman
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1252-6576; 1777-5388; 1777-5388
• DOI: 10.4000/monderusse.11222

In this article, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, USSR, is considered as one of the institutional hubs in the complex mosaic of the “Global Cold War”. The paper discusses how the bureaucratic machinery of Soviet science and the authoritarian Soviet state in general, with its omnipresent state security apparatus and party control, responded to the challenges of scientific globalization in the field of high energy physics by creating an “international oasis” on its own territory. The author argues that establishing the research centre in Dubna helped the Soviet Union implement the policy of “nuclear imperialism” in the Eastern Bloc and facilitate access to the latest achievements of Western science and technology. At the same time, from the 1950s to the 1980s the Dubna institute functioned as an interaction zone in which stable informal relations between scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain led to cultural and ideological interpenetration.