George Keyworth, science advisor to the US president, at a lecture in Baltimore (around 1984) said that the US had to regain her particle physics supremacy.

Keyworth’s address coincided with a wave of publicity over the Regan anti-missile project, also known as the beam weapon program. “Certainly most particle physicists found the idea both absurd and abhorrent, and reacted strongly against the presidents proposal. Keyworth castigated them… and appealed to each member of the physics community ‘to consider what part you can play in making beam weapons a working proposition.’

A new monster accelerator was being planed by the US to dwarf CERN, called the “superconducting super collider”, or the “Desertron”.