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To the Pugwash Community New Directions for Pugwash THE beginning of the year 2000 witnessed a number of developments that set in train a wide-ranging review of where and how Pugwash should be devoting its efforts regarding major threats to global peace and security. In the realm of nuclear weapons, Secretary General George Rathjens convened two high-level consultations to help him and the Pugwash Executive Committee think through just where Pugwash can marshal its resources to help the international community reverse a number of serious recent setbacks to the control and elimination of nuclear weapons. His report on these consultations, held in La Jolla in January and in London in March, can be found on the pages following, and members of the Pugwash community are invited and urged to respond with their thoughts and suggestions. Also in London in March, the Pugwash Executive Committee met and decided to create a five-member Pugwash Review Committee that will review the structure and operations of Pugwash and report their recommendations to the Pugwash Council prior to the holding of the 50th Pugwash Conference in Cambridge, UK from 3-8 August 2000. Members of the review committee include the four officers of Pugwash - George Rathjens, Michael Atiyah, Francesco Calogero, and Ana María Cetto - and Joseph Rotblat, President Emeritus. Here again, members of Pugwash have had the opportunity to inject their sentiments and suggestions into the review process via the website. Having been posted on the web since December 1999, the Pugwash Survey has elicited dozens of responses.
Pugwash Study Group on Intervention and Sovereignty This newly created study group met for the first time in Venice, Italy in December 1999 to discuss ways of building greater international support on the issue of when and where the international community should intervene in the internal affairs of a nation state. Papers from the Venice workshop were published in a new publication series, the Pugwash Occasional Papers (also available on the web) and a report on the workshop can be found on page 24. With the recent experiences of Kosovo and East Timor freshly in mind, and with the global community facing new challenges in Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and elsewhere, the Pugwash study group will work over the next several years to devise consultation and implementation strategies by which the international community can respond in more timely fashion to avert and reverse humanitarian disasters. Future meetings are planned for Como, Italy in September 2000 and in Castellón de la Plana, Spain in the spring of 2001.
Pugwash Newsletter on the Web More and more material published in the Pugwash Newsletter is posted on the Pugwash website, usually months in advance of appearing in print. We urge all members of Pugwash who are content to read the Newsletter via the web to let us know so that we can reduce the size of our mailings and save greatly on printing and postage costs. For their support of Pugwash in general and the Pugwash Newsletter in particular, we would like to thank the Italian National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Recherche – CNR), the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Cyrus Eaton Foundation.
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