The cuts, if contained in the fiscal year 1993 budget that President Bush will submit in January to Congress, could mean layoffs of hundreds of scientists, the early termination of several research efforts, and the delay or cancellation of several facilities being planned.
The comments of one member of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP), meeting last month to suggest ways in which DOE could trim its $628 million annual budget for the field, reflected the feelings of the physicists about their uncomfortable task.
"Whatever we do," declared Jonathan Dorfan, a researcher at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) at one point during the two-day meeting, "our preamble should contain an enormous primal scream of pain."
Sitting in the audience, Melvin Schwartz, a 1988 Nobel laureate in physics who returned to Brookhaven lab this year to direct its high-energy and nuclear energy programs, didn't mince words in describing HEPAP's ...
