Scientific Passport | Ladders Across Walls
War and Peace… and Science
“During peacetime, a scientist belongs to the world, but during wartime, he belongs to his country,” claimed Fritz Haber, whose research prevented world famines and stirred world wars [1,2]. His life, and the ruinous conscription of science in the twentieth century, sharpen the question: what should scientists do when war looms? Haber’s statement – poisonous in its complacency – matters again because peace has become a brittle interlude [3]. Great-power trade friction, sweeping export controls, and hot fronts from Ukraine to Gaza to the Taiwan Strait have turned science into a strategic asset. The global researcher pool – some 8.85 million full-time-equivalent researchers by 2018 – gives technical capacity unprecedented scale [4]. Academic life feels that strain: Scholars at Risk recorded 391 attacks on scholars, students, and institutions in one year [5]. Knowledge, once a public good, now carries national-security value and political risk [6].
Lessons from History: Science as a Bridge
In such instability, scientists should act as ambassadors of peace, not auxiliaries of power. Big laboratories once did so: CERN arose as a postwar reconciliation and remains the model of science as a bridge [7]. Policymakers echo that need – Chatham House urges cooperative management of quantum and frontier technologies to avert arms-race dynamics [8]. Technically trained leaders have shown how scientific habits can steady politics: Jerzy Buzek drove EU energy-solidarity measures and later built regulatory frameworks for hydrogen and gas [9]; Lee Hsien Loong fused R&D strategy (A*STAR, RIE funding) with Singapore’s stability-first governance [8]. These are not technocratic claims but examples of systems thinking, risk calculus, and engineered interdependence applied to policy.
That openness is fraying. Export-control regimes multiply: the US Commerce Department’s Entity List nearly doubled from ≈1,350 entries in 2019 to ≈3,350 by 2025, with bespoke restrictions on chips and encryption [10]. When institutions are cut off, only personal networks remain – much like 18th-century European astronomers who coordinated Transit of Venus observations across battle lines during the Seven Years War between their countries [11].
The Case for a Scientific Passport
How can such bridges be protected? One idea is a recognised “scientific-diplomatic” status – a passport of trust granting expedited visas, humanitarian evacuation channels, and a duty-to-mediate in crises, overseen by an independent board with audits and public reporting. It could preserve data and de-escalatory lines for dual-use work, though risks intelligence abuse and politicisation [8]. The question is trust: who grants, polices, and funds it?
What Scientists Can Do Now?
For now, grassroots practice must substitute. Scientists can prepare lab-evacuation packets, encrypted backups, ethically governed dual-use disclosure channels, and pro bono legal rosters with small travel funds [5]. These echo Asimov’s Foundation: preserving knowledge to soften any coming dark age – but transparently and collectively, not through elite social engineering.
Scientific Citizenship in an Uncertain World
If Haber’s bargain asked scientists to trade science for a uniform, the answer today is citizenship: be bridge-builders, keepers of evidence, and practitioners of bridge-science – the duty to keep channels open. Build those ladders now; when politics fractures, they may be the only bridges left.
References:
[1] https://legionmagazine.com/mad-scientist/
[2] https://www.iai.int/admin/site/sites/default/files/uploads/2008.Erisman-et-al_NatureGeo.pdf
[3] https://sinaiandsynapses.org/content/is-science-morally-neutral-the-curious-case-of-fritz-haber/
[5] https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/resources/free-to-think-2024/
[7] https://home.cern/about/who-we-are/our-governance/member-states
[8] https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/2021-01/2021-01-28-eu-us-quantum-tech-everett.pdf
