A Country Worth Defending
Our battle lines today resonate with an iconic moment from back in 1969, when Robert Wilson, director of the National Accelerator Laboratory (now Fermilab), testified before Congress’s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. The lab, under construction in DuPage County, Illinois, was an expensive particle accelerator designed to probe the deepest mysteries of abstract physics. Dr. Wilson found himself under questioning from Democratic Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island:
SENATOR PASTORE: Is there anything connected in the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?
DR. WILSON: No, sir, I do not believe so.
SEN. PASTORE: Nothing at all?
DR. WILSON: Nothing at all.
SEN. PASTORE: It has no value in that respect?
DR. WILSON: It only has to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with those things. It has nothing to do with the military. I am sorry.
SEN. PASTORE: Don’t be sorry for it.
DR. WILSON: I am not, but I cannot in honesty say it has any such application.
SEN. PASTORE: Is there anything here that projects us in a position of being competitive with the Russians, with regard to this race?
DR. WILSON: Only from a long-range point of view, of a developing technology. Otherwise, it has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things that we really venerate and honor in our country and are patriotic about. In that sense, this new knowledge has all to do with honor and country, but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.
To make our country worth defending, amid a cascade of assaults, we must be fortified by remembering what we are truly fighting for.
Elliot Kirschner
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