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Origins of Pugwash
THE
first half of Pugwash's four-decade history coincided with some of the
most frigid years of the Cold War, marked by the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban
Missile Crisis, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the Vietnam War. In
this period of strained official relations and few unofficial channels,
the fora and lines of communication provided by Pugwash played useful
background roles in helping lay the groundwork for the Partial Test Ban
Treaty of 1963, the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty of 1972, the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, and
the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993. Subsequent trends of generally
improving East-West relations and the emergence of a much wider array
of unofficial channels of communication have somewhat reduced Pugwash's
visibility while providing alternate pathways to similar ends, but Pugwash
meetings have continued until the present to play an important role in
bringing together key analysts and policy advisers for sustained, in-depth
discussions of the crucial arms-control issues of the day: European nuclear
forces, chemical and biological weaponry, space weapons, conventional
force reductions and restructuring, and crisis control in the Third World,
among others. Pugwash has, moreover, for many years extended its remit
to include problems of development and the environment.
Starting in January 1980,
for example, Pugwash's series of Workshops on nuclear forces provided
an off-the-record forum where not only military and civilian analysts
but also some members of the official negotiating teams compared notes
and sought solutions to obstacles in the official negotiations (28 Workshops
of this series have been held until now, most of them in Geneva, Switzerland).
The Pugwash chemical and biological warfare Workshops -- 27 of them since
1974 -- have similarly engaged technical experts from the official negotiating
teams, as well as academic and industry experts; this series led in early
1987 to the first visit of Western chemical weapons specialists to an
Eastern European chemical-production complex, and Pugwash contacts were
also instrumental in setting up the first access by a U.S. expert to the
medical records associated with the disputed 1979 anthrax outbreak in
Sverdlovsk. The Pugwash study group on conventional forces, which originated
in the European Security Working Group of the 1982 Pugwash Conference
in Warsaw, held 11 meetings, and played a pioneering role in developing
concepts for restructuring conventional forces and doctrines into modes
less suited for attack, and in gaining credibility for these concepts
with Eastern as well as Western military planners and policy makers.
While Pugwash findings reach
the policy community most directly through the participation of members
of that community in Pugwash and through the personal contacts of other
participants with policy makers, additional means of airing Pugwash ideas
are also used. A Pugwash Newsletter -- distributed worldwide to policy
makers, past Pugwash participants, and libraries -- contains communiques
issued by the Pugwash Council, descriptions of and reports on Pugwash
meetings, and, with the authors' permission, excerpts from commissioned
and proffered papers presented at these meetings. (The reports on the
meetings are written by participant/rapporteurs and do not quote or commit
other participants.) The Proceedings of Annual Conferences are published
regularly and distributed to Pugwashites and governments. And Annals of
Pugwash, containing an anthology of papers presented at Pugwash meetings,
have also been published and distributed as ordinary books.
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