Dennis Whyte

I've worked with people from – it's like hard to throw a dart at a country on the map and not hit a country of people that I've been able to work with.

How amazing is that?

And even just getting small numbers of people to bridge the cultural –

and societal divides is a very important thing.

Even when it's a teeny fraction of the overall populations, it can be held up as an example of that.

But it's interesting that if you look at then that continued collaboration, which continues to this day, is that this actually played a major role, in fact, in East-West relations or Soviet-West relations.

is that back in the Reagan-Gorbachev days, which of course were interesting in themselves of all kinds of changes happening on both sides, but still like a desire to push down the stockpile of nuclear weapons and all that.

Within that context, there was a fairly significant historic event that at one of the Reagan-Gorbachev summits,

is that they didn't get there.

They couldn't figure out how to bargain to the point of some part of the treaty or the details of it anymore.

But they needed some kind of a symbol, almost, to say, but we're still going to keep working towards something that's important for all of us.

What did they pick?

A fusion project.

And that was in the mid-1980s.

So they basically signed an agreement that they would move forward to literally collaborate on a project whose idea would be to show large net energy gain in fusion's commercial viability and work together on that.

And very soon after that, Japan joined, as did the European Union.

And now that project, it evolved over a long period of time and had some interesting political ramifications to it.

But in the end, this actually also had South Korea, India, and China join as well too.

So you're talking about a major fraction of – and now Russia, of course, instead of the Soviet Union –

And actually, that coalition is holding together despite the obvious political turmoil that's going around on all those things.