Crosscut · 33 min
Borders and Science
From violent campaigns to stop German rocket experts from reaching 1960s Egypt to a modern proposal locking American physicists out of CERN, governments treat the movement of scientists as a national security threat.
When Egypt Tried to Build Its Own Missile Program × How Trump’s “America First” Administration Could Shut U.S. Scientists Out of the Next Nobel-Worthy Discovery
Published 2026-07-27
0:00 / 32:46 · Narrator Sulafat/Charon/Vindemiatrix
In this episode
The connection
A scientist packing a suitcase carries ideas that governments want to control. Two articles published this week show how nations treat the movement of expertise as a security threat. In Mada Masr, Jeffrey G. Karam details a violent 1960s campaign by global powers to stop German rocket experts from reaching Egypt. Today, the tactics shift from physical force to bureaucracy. Writing for ProPublica, Lisa Song examines a proposal that would block American researchers from international projects like the CERN particle accelerator. Putting this history next to a modern policy draft reveals something striking. Whether through violence or paperwork, the political instinct to build a wall around human knowledge remains exactly the same.
Jeffrey G. Karam leaves off with a violent picture of the 1960s: letter bombs and kidnappings deployed to stop a few German engineers from sharing their expertise in Egypt. The historical takeaway is clear. Powerful nations will go to extreme lengths to control who gets to hold advanced scientific knowledge. Turning to Lisa Song, that same obsession with controlling knowledge appears again, but the direction flips completely. In Karam's history, global powers are terrified of a developing nation importing foreign minds. Song looks at a modern American policy proposal that does the exact opposite: a superpower voluntarily walling its own researchers off from the global stage. Read alongside Karam, the rule Song describes looks like a strange inversion. Egypt saw cross-border scientific collaboration as the ultimate key to independence, worth risking an international crisis to achieve. Decades later, American political appointees look at massive, Nobel-winning global projects like the CERN particle accelerator and see a liability to be shut down. The underlying assumption remains identical. Science is treated as a border-security issue. But the tactic has shifted from stopping foreign nations from learning, to stopping domestic scientists from participating.
What lingers here is how a mailed explosive in Cairo and a drafted policy in Washington end up doing the same work. They both treat human knowledge like a fenced-in commodity. The instinct to lock the doors on research spans decades, driven by a fear that a rival might learn something first. But discovery relies on friction between different minds working across borders. If a government successfully walls off its laboratories and isolates its brightest thinkers, how long can the ideas inside survive before they run out of air?