In the sense of: we didn't know splitting the atom would change warfare forever, back when Einstein and others published on it. We don't know if there are discoveries of similar impact lying in wait somewhere. If China gets to such a discovery first, we are in Sputnik territory, to say the least.
The LHC which is doing much of the particle physics discovery is in Switzerland and France, if you need to be reminded, not the US.
The first strong force theory was published by Hideki Yukawa in Japan in 1935 (which won him the nobel prize) ... so uh, not exactly a sputnik problem.
Sputnik problems (and the nuclear race) are engineering and industrial races, not fundamental physics ones.
Which is ironically an example of particle collider science happening overseas primarily because the US relinquished its lead on scientific discovery, despite having a similar-scale particle collider practically finished and ready to go [0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
The amount of continuous effort (and budget) that goes into just keeping CERN up and delivering is non-trivial. I live nearby and sometimes chat with folks working there (its >15,000 folks although not all do science).
If you're reaching for examples of spare time activities, this was squeezed into 20 minutes of downtime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e1eLe1ihT0
https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/beginnings...
Much science is done by international (i.e., borderless) cooperation between teams of scientists, as well. Science is becoming, and ultimately should be, nationless.
Very few endeavors are as truly international as this because the problems are so hard to even explore, and the machines required to do so are the most complex and highly engineered on Earth. Lets not lose that international spirit in science because the blowhard narcissists who run our countries would find that temporarily useful to them.