On Scientific Knowledge

This was an attempt to explain to the British diplomatic corps how to handle an international disagreement concerning scientific results.

I sent it to a member of staff at the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office on 18 March 2018.

The Russian Embassy in London do not seem to be behaving on Twitter in the same way the Russian government seem to behave on YouTube. Make of that what you will. [referring to the Russian Embassy tweet suggesting that Hercule Poirot was needed in Salisbury, implying that Sherlock Holmes wasn't up to the job, perhaps?]

Mind you, to accuse the head of state [Putin] of personally ordering people be killed, without saying how or why you know is probably absence of evidence, so they are within their rights to joke. The British government has the resources to do an analysis, and they should say why they won't let a Russian laboratory do one. It's science. Does the UK have a chief scientific officer anymore? There used to be a post like that, usually a well-apointed and internationally recognised (and respected) scientist.

The government's chief scientist should be liaising with a Russian counterpart with the aim of understanding all the different ways in which the results of the respective analyses disagreed. Then the scientific report should be fed to a group of ministers who talk to some similar group in Russia and share data, again with the aim of being avble to satisfactorily explain all differences of opinion between the two. And you go on like this, giving regular press conferences (probably daily) and tell the country what's going on.

Of course that's a complete waste of time if you know you're guilty as hell and are all going to spend the rest of your miserable lives in the Maize, so you don't do that. Instead you do what they're doing and try to start a 3rd world war before anyone notices! 😃