10 



vitb specific reference to Europe and high-energ>- physics was discussed at the 

 meetiug of the Executive Committee of lUPAP iu September 1950 in Cambridge, 

 Massachusetts. In December 1950, a commission for scientific cooperation met at 

 Geneva for the planning of a European institution independent of UNESCO, which, 

 after all, was a worldwide organization. As a result of the meeting, funds were made 

 available, immediately by Italy, and soon afterward by France and Belgium. The 

 total sum collected was verj- modest, about $10,000; it was, however, sufficient 

 to initiate the first steps for arriving at the planning and construction of a large 

 particle accelerator. 



At the beginning of 1951 a small office at UNESCO was established to work 

 out the constitution of a working group of European physicists interested in the 

 problem. Two goals were immediately established: a long-range, very ambitious, 

 project of an accelerator second to none iu the world, and in addition the construc- 

 tion of a less powerful and more standard machine which could allow at an earlier 

 date experimentation iu high-euergj' physics by European teams. A council of the 

 provisional organization was created whose task was the nomination of the officers 

 responsible for the appointment of the remainder of the staff and for planning the 

 laboratory. 



In July of the same year, 1952, an international nuclear physics conference was 

 held in Copenhagen; on that occasion the type of accelerators to be built as the 

 main goal of the new European organization was amply discussed. The decision 

 was taken to explore the possibility of constructing a lOGeV proton-synchrotron 

 which, at that time, represented the biggest machine in the world. 



