L'organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire (CERN)

The European organisation for nuclear research (CENR). A political and scien-tific success, Dominique Pestre After 30 years of existence, the CENR (in French CERN) created in 1954, is a scientific as well as a political success. Launched after the Second World War the plan for a major European nuclear physics laboratory was implemented at the same time as the first Community organizations were being set up (ECSC, OEEC, etc.). Its success was due to the role of the « scientific administrators » and European physicists whose Community convictions were stronger than the politic differences among member states, to the impossibility for any European count to carry out such a scientific and financial endeavour alone, and to the quality of the discoveries of the CENR in the physics of nuclear particles.Pestre Dominique. L'organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire (CERN). In: Vingtième Siècle, revue d'histoire, n°4, octobre 1984. pp. 65-76