52nd
Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs
10-14 August 2002
UC, San Diego, La Jolla, CA
Report of the Secretary General
George W. Rathjens
13 August 2002
As I believe most of you
realize, this will be my last report as Pugwash Secretary General.
In the circumstances, I intend to focus not mainly on the events of
the last year, but rather on those of the whole five years I have
served as Secretary General, weaving in comments about particular
workshops that I think might be of special interest. I would note
here that we have had excellent reportage of the work-shops during
these years and that many of the best papers have been published,
largely due to the work of Jeffrey Boutwell. I will in no sense attempt
to cover all that ground. I intend to conclude with observations about
future challenges.
My focus will be particularly on the United States, in part because
we are meeting here, and because an unusually large fraction of you
are from this country: mainly though because it is the only super-power
in the world and because, since the election of President Bush, the
policies of the American government have moved so dramatically and
so far towards unilateralism.
Should we, in hopelessness, rail against this or alternatively confine
our activities largely to problems in which the Bush Administration
is likely to be so little interested as to not get involved? In my
view, quite the contrary, a point I will develop in my concluding
remarks, but I feel I should say now that I see no basis at this time
for believing that President Bush and most of those in the next couple
of levels down in his Administration will experience a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus
kind of conversion or epiphany.
Now, I would turn to the events of the last five years, first commenting
briefly on changes in the international scene and then on what Pugwash
has tried to do in the context of that changing scene.
The Cold War is over, and in my view, was so a dozen years ago. But
this has not been fully reflected in important circles in the United
States and Russia, and most particularly in a large part of the arms
control and disarmament community, including Pugwash.
Even as recently as in the last several years we have heard and read
much about balanced force reductions in Russian and American nuclear
stockpiles: reductions from tens of thousands of nuclear warheads
by factors of around two and of operationally deliverable strategic
nuclear warheads down to the range of 2000 or so, as if such reductions
were militarily and politically meaningful. I, in contrast, believe
that very likely there is a threshold of delivery capability above
which there is essentially no political and/or military utility
in increasing force levels--and to which there would be advantage
in reducing them because of the likelihood of reduced damage should
nuclear weapons be used destructively and because of the greater cost
and likely greater possibility of accidents and/or proliferation with
high force levels. I would suggest that the threshold level may be
in the range of 50 deliverable weapons for the United States (and
Russia)--and perhaps as low as zero for the U.K. and France. Others
will certainly disagree with my number of 50, but I come up with it
believing that other states’ political-military decisions regarding
the use of force are not likely to depend significantly on whether
the United States retains a capability of delivery of 50 nuclear weapons
or 2000: for example, Iraq’s again taking aggressive actions
against its neighbors. I believe, however, that at some lower level,
perhaps in the range of 10 to 20 weapons, Japan, South Korea or Taiwan
might so question the American security guarantee under which they
now live as to decide to acquire national nuclear capabilities. And,
I’m not at all sure that that’s a happy trade-off: having
the United States (and perhaps Russia) reducing their effective nuclear
capabilities down to the range of a dozen weapons each if the price
is the emergence of new nuclear powers in the Far East and/or Southwest
Asia.
The other most important change in the international scene I have
already alluded to: the emergence of the United States as king of
the hill, with an Administration committed to unilateralism and with
a phobic reaction to international arms control and disarmament agreements,
both existing and prospective; and with a belief in the continuing
and perhaps expanded utility of a broader range of nuclear capabilities,
not so much for deterrence or other political purposes, as for actual
use for preemptive attack including most especially against hard-to-destroy
targets.
Consider the American withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. The Administration
had come to believe, quite misguidedly in my view, that a National
Missile Defense that would be both technically effective and worth
deploying could be built. It then decided that continuing adherence
to the ABM Treaty would be an inhibiting factor in the realization
of its objective but would have no corresponding effect on Russian
aspirations--or on those of any of the other successor states to the
Soviet Union. None were in a position economically to pursue such
a program, nor would the ABM Treaty have any inhibiting effects on
any other nation since no others were either parties to the Treaty
nor had any apparent interest in developing defenses that would be
affected by it. Discounting, then, the opinion of other nations--and
many Americans--the Administration could logically conclude that the
Treaty was outmoded and disadvantageous to the United States, while
having no meaningful effect on the aspirations of any other state.
So, why not withdraw from it?
And, why negotiate seriously with Russia--or any other state--on reductions
in strategic arms or, for that matter, about many other issues, given
that other states would generally be far more constrained by economic
and technological limitations in what they could do than would be
the United States?
I would here make a side comment about negotiations with the Soviet
Union at the height of the Cold War. We had some success in the ABM,
SALT and START negotiations, but these were all carried out under
very special conditions that are unlikely to obtain at any time during
at least the foreseeable future (except possibly as between India
and Pakistan). There was an extraordinary degree of symmetry in the
situation of the two superpowers. Both appeared to be able to run
a competitive race in missile delivery capability and neither had
an effective ABM defense capability or much prospect of developing
one that could not be easily countered at less cost by adversary improvements
in offensive capabilities. By analogy one might have thought that
if the ABM Treaty made sense, why not negotiate similar treaties on
anti-aircraft defense and anti-submarine warfare? This was never even
tried. The Soviets had too much of a lead in the former and the United
States too much of a lead in the latter. We talked a little in the
early 70s about limiting work on, and deployment of, multiple independently
targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), but never even got to the point
in those days of negotiations about them. The United States was so
far ahead that the American military was unwilling to foreswear what
they saw as an advantage, and the Soviets were not interested in being
frozen in a position of inferiority.
And, if we got nowhere with these problems of asymmetry in bilateral
negotiations with the Soviets, consider how poor the prospects must
be for serious negotiations with the Russians, given the asymmetries
that now exist; and, worse yet, how poor the prospects must be for
progress in multilateral negotiations, given the classic problem of
n>2 game theory: the possibility of coalitions. (And this may be
a problem even in the Indo-Pakistani case: the possibility that other
significant powers might get involved, perhaps China siding more or
less with Pakistan and Russia more or less with India.)
Does this mean that approaches to arms control and disarmament through
negotiated agreement are outmoded? Not quite. There is still the possibility
of agreements that are unambiguously advantageous to all parties to
them, even if the advantage to some may be greater than to others.
Controls on exports of some kind of weapons and/or of critical components
to third parties are examples; and dealing with the problems of loose
nukes, inadequately protected fissionable materials, and loose, impoverished
scientists and engineers in Russia with weapons expertise is another.
And, there is the possibility that the American administration would
go along with limitations and/or reductions in arms that it might
not consider narrowly advantageous to it if other parties would make
concessions to American interests in unrelated areas.
But I do suggest that the era of ABM/SALT/START kinds of agreements
that dominated the thinking of many of us throughout the Cold War
has come to an end, at least in so far as the United States might
be involved.
I turn now to the questions of criteria for deciding on the allocation
of Pugwash’s efforts to different problem areas.
- Pugwash should focus
on problems of importance, and, in general, since it is an international
organization, on those of direct concern to more than one country.
This seems so obvious as to hardly merit mentioning.
- It should concentrate
its efforts in areas where it has comparative advantage over other
like-minded organizations. This turns out to be a very difficult
proposition or dictum for it to live by, and I think it is only
fair to say that the majority of our Council members do not agree
with me on this matter. It is especially troublesome that with respect
to most nuclear weapons issues, where Pugwash once had a probable
lead over other NGOs, this is no longer the case. At least, the
CISAC (Committee on International Security and Arms Control) of
the US National Academy of Sciences and the analogous group of the
Russian Academy can typically mobilize groups with more expertise
than can Pugwash. (I call your attention to the lean participation
of Russians here, including the fact that only one was scheduled
to be in the working group dealing most directly with nuclear weapons
issues--and, because of visa problems, he did not get here). The
only significant areas where I think we now have an unequivocal
comparative advantage over other NGOs are in chemical and biological
warfare.
- Pugwash must concentrate
its efforts generally on what I will call knife-edge problems: on
decisions where the forces on the two sides of an argument are close
to being in balance: problems where possible Pugwash involvement
might be instrumental in pushing the decision one way or the other--and
on a time-scale measured in months or years; not one measured in
decades. The uncertainties about world politics are just too large
(and the personal discount rates of most of us are just too high.)
If I had more time, I
would here get into a systematic discussion about criteria for measuring
success of our efforts. As it is, I will do so only episodically as
I discuss a selected sample of those workshops we have had in the
last five years. I would, though, mention that such an assessment
is, I think, highly desirable. I have proposed, with essentially no
receptivity, that Pugwash would benefit by having an audit or visiting
committee largely composed of non-Council people to review and evaluate
its work.
I will turn first to two work-shops that we had in Paris in May and
December 1998.
We had had an extensive discussion at the 1997 Lillehammer conference
of the American proposal that NATO be enlarged to include Poland,
Hungary and the Czech Republic, and the Council included in its Lillehammer
Statement a number of arguments against such an expansion. Most of
the Council--but not all--were, I believe, opposed to expansion; and
mobilizing opposition struck me as an extraordinary “knife-edge”
opportunity for Pugwash. All that would have been needed to defeat
the proposal was a dissenting vote by any one out of 16 (NATO) parliaments;
and how often is Pugwash likely to have 16 shots at killing a bad
idea? So, I, with the help of Venance Journé, organized the
May workshop in the hope that at least one parliament might be persuaded
to vote against NATO enlargement. It was too little, too late. But
why had Pugwash not taken up the issue before Lillehammer? Could it
have been because of its rule that all important decisions must be
made by consensus? If so, I suggest it is a strong argument for abandoning
this rule. But I doubt that this was the reason, since I am unaware
of any Pugwashites except Hugh Beach and myself vigorously opposing
NATO enlargement in 1997. Was it just blindness to opportunities or
general unwillingness in the Council to oppose the United States?
The second Paris workshop, a Franco-British initiative, was on nuclear
power. I was skeptical about this because I had been involved earlier
in two large American studies and a much larger 60-nation one, and
was unaware of significant new developments in the intervening years.
My skepticism was in large measure justified. Notwithstanding the
participation of some very highly qualified people and the production
of excellent papers, which were then collected in a book, I am unaware
of the workshop having had any impact on significant decisions by
governments or international institutions. Our scale of effort was
perhaps too small, but more significantly, the timing was, I believe,
not propitious. Still, I would count the effort at least a qualified
success in that we provided an opportunity for worthwhile, sophisticated
exchanges between people, some of whom had not been previously acquainted;
and we brought new expertise into the Pugwash fold, something I have
felt should be an important secondary objective of all of our activities
I turn now to two workshops that we had in Havana in October 1998
and February 2001 on public health and medical research. I had initiated
these mainly as a bridge-building effort between Cuban scientists
and the broader international community, including particularly Americans,
at a time when it seemed opportune. Even though the Bush Administration,
many right-wing Republicans, and many Miami Cubans had been strongly
opposed to normalization of Cuban-American relations, sentiment for
it was growing in the American Congress, much of the business and
agricultural communities, and among many other Americans. It seemed
like another “knife-edge” opportunity. I picked public health
and developments in the pharmaceutical industry as topics for discussion
because these, particularly the former, were areas where Cuba quite
clearly led the developing world. I cite this effort here particularly
because I think it the best example in my experience as Secretary
General of follow-through to work-shops. Jeffrey Boutwell produced
the first of our Issue Briefs, and it has been widely distributed,
including to all members of Congress; and he, Ken Bridges of the Harvard
Medical School, and Elliot Schiffmann of the US National Cancer Institute
met with a number of members of the US Congress and their aides to
discuss the workshops and the importance of terminating the US embargo
of Cuba. The fact that three Cubans whom we invited to this meeting
were denied visas suggests that we still have work to do, but it does
seem to me that our efforts relating to Cuba deserve high marks. We
have been on the right side of a battle that can be won.
Now, brief comments on two workshops we had in Sigtuna, Sweden.
The first, in October 2000, was to inform Europeans about American
programs for anti-ballistic missile defenses and, most notably, to
mobilize discussion of U.S. National Missile Defense efforts. This
seemed sensible because the NMD proposal seemed nonsensical to most
technically informed Americans and to a number of European governments,
and it seemed likely that Pugwash might, considering its large European
constituency, have some advantage over US NGOs in trying to stop this
foolish program. Moreover, it seemed likely that upgrading of radar
stations in the UK and Greenland would be important parts of the program,
so we made an effort, as it turned out, a successful one, to get highly
qualified participants from these two countries, including, I believe,
unprecedentedly, an Inuit woman from Greeenland who was active in
opposing upgrading of the Thule radar. We produced an Occasional
Paper based on the workshop. Whether or not our efforts will have
any impact remains to be seen.
The second Sigtuna meeting, with emphasis (at the Swedes’ request)
on tactical nuclear weapons, had an unexpected pay-off for this audience
in that one of the background papers was the one you heard discussed
here by Mike May. On the basis of my reading of it, and the exceedingly
favorable reaction to it in Sigtuna, I urged Mike to present it here,
and with his permission, am now trying to get hearings built around
it before the US Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees.
In early September, 2001 we had another workshop, this one in Como,
Italy, on Nuclear Stability and Missile Defenses. With the September
11 terrorist attacks just a few days later against the World Trade
towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, world attention
shifted to those events, and one can only speculate about whether
the Como workshop had, or ever will have, any direct impact on international
affairs. I mention the workshop with a particular point in mind. I
had made a special effort to get participants who could knowledgeably
discuss the domestic politics of decision-making as regards weapons
development, acquisition, deployment and use, where there are very
powerful actors with radically different views involved. I hit the
jackpot, particularly as regards the United States. We had not only
Steve Miller, who is always very good on such topics, but 5 or 6 other
Americans with great knowledge. In addition, we had very informative
interventions from several other countries.
I turn now to what has been for me a perplexing anomaly about our
work of the last five years. In, I believe, all of the 19 annual conferences
in which I have participated, the working groups on nuclear weapons
issues have always been the most popular. Yet, we have had, since
I have been Secretary General, great, and increasing, difficulty,
in getting effective, knowledgeable people from the nuclear weapons
states, other than the United States, to participate in our workshops
on nuclear matters. Our meeting in Moscow on Strategic Stability last
month is dramatically illustrative. We had no one from China, India,
Pakistan or Israel; only one each from France and the UK; but 12 from
the United States; and while many Russians participated part time,
several of those with whom we have had the most useful discussions
in the past did not show up at all. With very little information about
possible participation even up to the day of departure for Moscow,
I seriously considered canceling the meeting.
In turning to what I think are some of the major programmatic areas
to which I believe the Pugwash Council should give urgent attention,
I begin with the questions of humanitarian intervention, sovereignty,
international security and human rights. My work in this area began
in the mid-1990s with a seminar that I and Carl Kaysen organized for
senior graduate students at MIT. It ran for about three years, more-or-less
concurrently with another effort by the two of us and more senior
participants on presenting the case for a volunteer UN military force.
Pugwash efforts emerged out of a workshop in Castellón de la
Plana, Spain that was ostensibly to be about the utility of NATO.
However, by the time we met in early July, 1999, the much-debated
allied intervention in Kosovo had become a hot topic, and much of
our July meeting focused on this.
This was followed by four more work-shops on intervention and sovereignty,
culminating in one in Pugwash, Nova Scotia in July 2001 held jointly
with the Canadian-managed International Commission on Intervention
and State Sovereignty. We had an unusually diverse group of participants
in these workshops, most from outside the usual Pugwash circles, including
notably two hard-to-get people with needed specialized knowledge of
international law. Two commendable volumes in our Occasional Paper
series were published in February 2000 and January 2001. Notwithstanding
our having had four plus meetings, I see this effort as very much
a work in progress. Most intervention efforts have not worked out
well: to cite extreme cases, those in the Congo in the 60s and those
more recently in Rwanda, Somalia and Haiti have left these countries
in scarcely better shape than before the interventions occurred. Yet,
more such problems are likely to be with us for as far into the future
as I can see. I remain deeply troubled about the criteria for intervention,
about who should be involved, and about post-conflict reconstruction
and governance.
Next, I would highlight the problems of terrorism. With societies
increasingly interdependent and in many ways increasingly fragile,
and with means of massive destruction and disruption becoming increasingly
available, I have little confidence that the problems can be largely
dealt with through denial of capabilities and physical protection
of valued assets. I suggest that the causes of terrorism, and which
kinds of actions even merit the sobriquet, ought to get a lot more
attention than they are now getting by governments and NGOs, and that
Pugwash can have a comparative advantage in considering them--and
those of intervention, as well--given the diversity of its constituency.
I would close by noting that during the years I have been Secretary
General we have commonly had at the end of the agenda for our Council
meetings an item, “Situation in Troubled Regions”, followed
by a short specific list, but I can recollect no instance of our ever
having gotten to this agenda item. I suggest that the Council should
in the future find time to do so, if necessary by extending its annual
meetings.
One of the problem areas which has not been on Pugwash’s troubled
regions agenda, but which I feel must be there, is sub-Sahara Africa,
given the AIDS pandemic, and that, in recent years, internecine slaughter
and genocide has resulted in an enormous number of fatalities; in
Rwanda and the Congo alone, roughly ten times as many as were produced
by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
This year, I suggested very seriously, and probably without precedent,
that, in light of the Bush Administration’s commitment to unilateralist
approaches to international affairs, the United States should also
be included in the Pugwash list of troubled regions.
But, I would now conclude my remarks by hypothesizing that with its
somewhat complex separation-of-powers kind of government and some
very powerful interest groups opposing many aspects of the Administration’s
policies, the United States might equally be in what I have characterized
as a knife-edge situation: one where there is in the public, in the
higher echelons of the military services and in the very evenly divided
US Congress, such strong and growing opposition to much of what the
Administration would like to do that there is a real possibility of
many of President Bush’s wishes regarding unilateralist approaches
to international relations and the use of force being largely thwarted--if
war in Iraq can be forestalled until after America’s mid-term
election this November. I much regret that I did not have the wit
to schedule for this Conference a panel discussion on this hypothesis.
I apologize for the length of my remarks. Thank you for your attention.
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