Imagine being a scientist going to the Islamic Republic of Iran and not talking about uranium enrichment and nuclear power. It happens, and it has been happening for nine years with high-level exchanges of scientists and engineers between Iran and the United States.
It happens, and it has been happening for nine years with high-level exchanges of scientists and engineers between Iran and the United States. Their mission — tacitly endorsed by the Bush administration — is not diplomatic negotiation, of course, but maintaining contact with Iran’s greater science community.
“Occasionally, we have a casual conversation [about the nuclear issue] with knowledgeable people, but we don’t push that at all,” says Glenn Schweitzer, a nuclear engineer who is director of the Office for Central Europe and Eurasia at the U.S. National Academies, a District-based nonprofit advisory institution of experts in all areas of science and engineering. “One of the problems is there aren’t too many people ready to discuss it. … It’s a different crowd we take over to worry over fisheries.”
American physicists and earthquake engineers expect to visit Iran in May and June, and water conservation specialists plan to come to the United States in August, followed by a group of medical scientists going to Iran in the fall.
“In all four of these areas, they have something to bring to the table,” Mr. Schweitzer says. “In earthquakes, for instance. The good place to go is Southern California [location of the San Andreas fault]. And they have a heavy earthquake zone over there. One fault runs through Tehran. One in [the ancient city of] Bam killed 30,000 people.”
Workshops are planned on earthquake prevention.
Water conservation specialists will go to southern Arizona and California because Iranians have experience of their own with very arid land.
“In physics, they are very good, to judge by their publication record. Many have trained in Europe or the United States,” Mr. Schweitzer says.
Iran pays its way as do Academies-sponsored scientists going there, aided by foundations. Mr. Schweitzer estimates costs at about $200,000 a year and growing. The number of programs and opportunities is increasing, he says, “as people get to know us there and the government becomes more relaxed.”
The meetings generally are “people to people, scientist to scientist” and do not involve official federal representatives on either side, except, he notes, that “everything there is sort of government.” A distinction always is made between policy and research.
While there is an Iranian vice president for science and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad chairs a number of scientific councils, it also is the case that “on foreign affairs, at least, the Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] is the last word,” adds Bill Wulf, former Academies head who is a professor of engineering and applied sciences in the computer science department at the University of Virginia. He accompanied the National Academies’ delegation last fall that was hosted by Sharif University in Tehran, the Iranian Academy of Sciences and several institutes and laboratories.
Mr. Wulf challenges the view of Iran as a medieval theocracy, calling that “an oversimplification,” but agrees that image is commonly held by most Americans. He says the reception he received in the fall — his first visit in seven years — was still overwhelmingly friendly and notes that Princeton Nobel laureate Joseph Taylor, one of the group, “was treated like a rock star.” He noticed, too, that the government “clearly has recognized that basic research in a university is one of the keys to economic success and has really escalated the attention paid to that.”
One of the more interesting remarks he says he heard from the science vice president was about the need to use science to monitor the misuse of science. “He was asked if this applied to nuclear weapons programs, and he said, ’Of course.’ I think the comment definitely was meant to be noted,” Mr. Wulf says.
William Colglazier, executive director of the National Academy of Sciences, has called Iran the leading science and technology country in the Muslim world and a place where education is valued highly. True enough, agrees Mr. Schweitzer, who was active in post-Cold War efforts rehabilitating Soviet scientists. The legacy “continues,” he says, “although weakened in recent years,” the role of clerics being only one of the reasons. A serious budget crunch and slowing economy also play a part.
“There is an active scientific intellectual community that doesn’t have an easy time, but it does operate,” concedes Norman Neureiter, an organic scientist by training and director of the District-based American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy. He worked on science strategy with the Soviet Union during the Nixon administration.
What he calls a “whole series of complex checks and balances” makes it difficult to learn how decisions are made in Iran. Former President Muhammed Hatemi, for instance, who had a dinner for the delegation in the fall, “speaks out and joined in our seminar titled ’Science, A Gateway to Understanding,’ which is a remarkable title for an Iranian physics professor to put forward as title for a dialogue with the U.S.”
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