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53rd Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs
Advancing Human Security: The Role of Technology and Politics

Halifax and Pugwash, Nova Scotia, Canada
17-21 July 2003

In July of 1955, the Russell-Einstein Manifesto was proclaimed.

In July of 1957, the first world meeting of scientists convened in Pugwash.

In July 2003, the 53rd World Conference and Pugwashites return 'home' to Canada, to Nova Scotia, to the Village of Pugwash . . . and to Cyrus Eaton's Thinkers' Lodge!

For pioneers of the Pugwash Movement, like Joseph Rotblat and Ruth Adams, this is truly a homecoming. Others of you have also been here before.

Yet for many, today is the very first direct connection with the place which gave its name to a great cause, a building which has been pictured like an icon around the globe, a locale that has become known to you as both a place and a concept.

This rather humble setting is where bridges were built, reaching across a perilous chasm of suspicion and confrontation, of military prowess and ideological contention. Thinkers' Lodge may be tiny, and the Village of Pugwash small, but in the 1950s the idea that brought 22 participants from 10 countries and both sides of the Iron Curtain to this place was giant: the need to "think in a new way".

The World Pugwash Movement was born here as the message in the Russell-Einstein Manifesto began to crystallize. Thinkers' Lodge shows it is neither how big a person or a place is, nor how modest its scale or humble its origins. It is always the commitment and the thinking of the people involved that make the difference.

This place, and what transpired here and grew outward around the globe, is a central part of humanity's story. After more than half a century of peril, the people of the world have still been spared devastation by thermonuclear weapons. The Pugwash Movement was no bystander, but an active contributor, to that result.

We now have the unique experience of hearing again here the same voices of Joseph Rotblat and Ruth Adams as they recount, on this day when we come "back to Pugwash", a perspective which only they possess because they were in this place at the creation of the Pugwash Movement.

Both Joseph Rotblat and Ruth Adams, participants in that inaugural Pugwash conference in July 1957, have lived lives of commitment to the highest ideals of the Manifesto. The Manifesto called upon scientists to assemble "in conference to appraise the perils that have arisen as a result of the development of weapons of mass destruction". Such a conference to discuss a resolution of that crisis would involve renunciation of war as a social institution, learning to think in a new way, and finding "continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom."

As we now approach the highlight for this day of remembrance in a lifetime of commitment - the messages of Jo Rotblat and Ruth Adams -- I also express on behalf of Thinkers' Lodge and our Pugwash Park Commission our gratitude for this opportunity to share this place and its legacy with all who come here. Visitors to Thinkers' Lodge discover what transpired here. They grasp how individuals of courage and people of vision confront the discouraging work we must still do in a world afflicted yet by a military-industrial-scientific juggernaut and by those imprisoned in its old ways of thinking.

When Cyrus Eaton and Joseph Rotblat, Ruth Adams, and the cluster of leading scientists first meet here at Thinkers' Lodge 46 years ago this month, their mission might easily have been abandoned in the face of such daunting odds, had they not been galvanized by the deepest commitment to building new bridges, thinking in new ways, fashioning a new reality from nothing but a dream.

My fellow Commission members and I express our profound hope that you will find that spark of higher inspiration that still lives in this place. One of our members, Dr. Giovanni Benciaglia, himself a nuclear physicist and a relative of Cyrus Eaton, was here for the second Pugwash conference in 1959 and has remained an active Pugwashite ever since.

Around that same time, Raymond Szabo, another of our Commission members, joined Cyrus Eaton as an executive assistant. Ray worked closely with Mr. Eaton until his death in 1979, and today in the United States he chairs the Cyrus Eaton Foundation, a benefactor of the Pugwash Movement, and is also vice-chairman of our Commission here in Canada.

A third member is Bryan Jamieson, a Nova Scotia banker and member of a notable local family that through three generations has been closely linked with the Eaton family. Mary Jamieson, of Pugwash, serves as our Secretary and Assistant Treasurer. Kathy Langille, the elected representative to Cumberland County Council from this municipality, is also Custodian of Thinkers' Lodge.

Margaret Eaton, a poet, schoolteacher and counselor in the neighbouring province of New Brunswick, is also a relative of Cyrus Eaton and a student of his life and serves as Archivist and Librarian of Thinkers' Lodge.

For my part, I first met Cyrus Eaton here at a family reunion in 1968, little thinking at the time that I myself would one day be chair of the very commission he created back in 1929, or that I would become a Pugwashite at the invitation of Jo Rotblat to participate in a Workshop on Education for Global Citizenship here in 1994.

The Pugwash Park Commission's mandate, under a charter enacted in 1929 by the Nova Scotia legislature, was to improve conditions in Pugwash and beyond. Thanks to big thinking here in the Lodge, 'beyond' in time came to include the whole world.

It was not the whole world perhaps, but certainly those who cared for it, who first came here in 1957. From that day unto this, our cause has been propelled an inspiring leader, a winner of the 1995 Nobel Peace prize, the President Emeritus of the World Pugwash Movement, an honourary member of our Pugwash Park Commission, an original signatory to the landmark Manifesto of 1955 which still inspires our greatest deeds today . . . Sir Joseph Rotblat.