By Ejaz Haider

The Friday Times, Lahore
Vol. XI No. 25
August 18-24, 2000

 

EDITOR'S NOTE: Ejaz Haider is News Editor at The Friday Times. He attended the 50th Annual Conference, his first Pugwash meeting. He researches defense and nuclear security issues and writes extensively on Pakistan's politics and regional security.

THE 50th Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs titled, "Eliminating the Causes of War," met at Queens' College, Cambridge, UK from August 3-8. The annual conference was attended by over 150 participants from 45 countries around the world.

The Pugwash Conferences are eponymous with Pugwash, a small village in Nova Scotia, Canada, where the first meeting was held in July 1957. The meeting, which brought together 22 eminent scientists from 10 countries of the world, was hosted by an American philanthropist, Cyrus Eaton, who was born in the village of Pugwash. The stimulus for the meeting was the 1955 Russell-Einstein manifesto, signed at the time by nine other eminent scientists, including Nobel Laureate Sir Joseph Rotblat, who, according to Mike Moore, editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, today "embodies Pugwash". The Manifesto by Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell, known originally as "A Statement on Nuclear Weapons," was a response to the testing of thermonuclear devices by the United States and the Soviet Union. Since the first meeting at Pugwash, there have been over 250 Pugwash conferences, symposia and workshops and the number of living "Pugwashites" around the world stands close to 3000 (for more information, see "About Pugwash").

Interestingly, as Dr Zia Mian points out: "The...irony is that 'Pugwash' could actually have been 'Delhi'. The meeting set up after the Einstein-Russell manifesto was planned for Delhi, at the invitation of Homi Bhabha and [Jawaharlal] Nehru. Russell is said to have sent out the letters of invitation to Delhi. But then things came unstuck. Thus the meeting moved to Pugwash, with Eaton paying the bill."

When it began campaigning against nuclear weapons and in favour of nuclear weapons arms control and disarmament in the late fifties, Pugwash brought together the finest expertise in the field despite opposition and criticism by policymakers and "realist" strategists. It provided the expertise and the alternative paradigm (which looked at security as a holistic concept not in terms of balance of terror but in terms of "humanity". As the Manifesto said: "Shall we instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? Remember your humanity, and forget the rest...") when the developed world, especially the United States, began to think in terms of some kind of nuclear weapons arms control. This mindset was the basis of the breakthrough Pugwash got with the signing of the PTBT (Partial Test Ban Treaty) of 1963 within six years of the first meeting. The movement played a significant role in providing expertise and stimulus for the negotiations and signing of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) of 1972, the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) of 1972 and the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) of 1993.

The work over four decades finally managed to create what has come to be known as the "nonproliferation norm". In 1995, at the NPT Review Conference, that norm was established when the RevCon extended the treaty indefinitely. The same year, in October, Joseph Rotblat, then President of Pugwash, and the Pugwash Conferences for Science and World Affairs, won the Nobel Prize for Peace in two equal parts. This was a great moment for Pugwash Conferences, not only for its ability to bring the best experts in the world together and campaign consistently against proliferation of nuclear weapons, but also because it had evolved as a forum which could speak on these matters from what has been described as the "policy-relevant" angle. The following year, 1996, saw negotiations on, and the signing of, the CTBT (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty). The treaty was to be ratified finally in September 1998. The norm Pugwash had helped establish, taking advantage of its own expertise, but more significantly of the changed mindset in official circles which allowed it to bring that expertise to bear on policymaking, had finally crystallised.

It had everything going for it. And then the unimaginable happened with first India's and then Pakistan's nuclear tests. South Asia had cocked a snook at the developed world, especially the Club of Five, and the "norm". The going from thereon has been tough for Pugwash, as was clear from the closing address of Sir Michael Atiyah, President of Pugwash, at the recent annual conference. Among other problems, Atiyah listed the decision by the US Administration to carry on with the "highly controversial US missile defense program [which] raise[s] the grim prospect of a renewal of the nuclear arms race." "Other dangerous developments on the world scene include the failure of the US Senate to ratify the CTBT, certain changes in Russian nuclear doctrine, further nuclear proliferation, and the latent danger of terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction, including biological and chemical."

Interestingly, Atiyah's closing address, which was in the Pugwash spirit, went against the presentations in a plenary session by Russian and British speakers. While the British presenter listed the achievements of the United Kingdom in terms of reducing its stockpile of nuclear weapons, to rely as the UK now does - since the Strategic Defence Review of 1998 - only on four Trident submarines, he was clear about the need for a minimum deterrent. Moreover, he asserted that any further movement by the UK towards disarmament would depend on the other nuclear powers after they have reached the minimum level presently maintained by his country.

The Russian presenter not only defended his country's nuclear arsenal, but maintained that in view of the strategic asymmetry caused by the US missile defence programme, the growing inferiority of Russian conventional force strength, the higher costs of maintaining greater conventional forces, NATO expansion and US unilateralism - symbolised by NATO's war against Yugoslavia - the Russian Federation could not but rely on its nuclear forces. In fact, his entire presentation was an attempt to defend Moscow's official position, a far cry from the Pugwash agenda.

Atiyah's closing address was therefore a refreshing reminder of the Pugwash charter, symbolised by what the Russell-Einstein Manifesto said: "Shall we put an end to the human race or shall mankind renounce war?" Atiyah mentioned the need to take "bolder steps," calling upon the "nuclear powers to implement their 'unequivocal undertaking to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenal' made at the Sixth Review Conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty in April 2000." That is the catch. While South Asia's nuclearisation might have broken the norm, South Asia never really provided the real challenge to Pugwash, though it has now, in conjunction with other factors, brought the challenge closer, and sooner, to Pugwash.

Let us put it this way: Even if India and Pakistan had not tested, or the US Senate had ratified the CTBT, or the US government had not embarked upon the missile defence programme, or even the Russian Federation had not announced its greater reliance on nuclear weapons by rejecting the so-called doctrine of no-first-use, the challenge to Pugwash would still have come: how to move from nonproliferation to disarmament. The added irritants have only complicated the situation and threaten to unwind the whole system at greater speed then if none of the above had happened. Pugwash expertise and policy-relevant initiatives could work in an atmosphere where the leading countries came to appreciate the imperative of nuclear arms control. Given the gravity of the situation at the time - "the Cold War, marked by the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Vietnam War" - and the realisation by the Kennedy Administration of the need to do something to contain horizontal proliferation and introduce bilateral arms control, Pugwash could contribute to the effort. Having achieved the nonproliferation norm in a hypothetical situation in which all else would have stayed normal, the challenge would have been, as said, the movement from nonproliferation to disarmament.

That is where Pugwash would have largely lost its relevance to policymaking. The situation is now more complicated because our hypothetical situation does not exist and the nonproliferation agenda is today more threatened than ever before, notwithstanding the undertaking by the P-5 at the 2000 RevCon to move towards total disarmament. The question for Pugwash now is: Where does it go from here? This is not to say Pugwash Conferences should pack up and disappear, but that it should redraw its strategy on how to regain its effectiveness in the present situation. As a movement against nuclear weapons and war in general it can live on, but the question relates to its relevance to policymaking. That is what made Pugwash more prestigious and more prominent than other such efforts. That is what now threatens to reduce it to just one of the many fora that routinely point to the dangers of war and weapons of mass destruction without necessarily being able to do much to actually change the situation on the ground.

At his final presidential address to the 47th annual conference, Rotblat is reported to have said: "The questions that nag me are: Was there a need to have done more? Should we have done more? I cannot help feeling that the answer to both questions is yes. Yes, there was a need to have done more, and therefore, yes, we should have done more."

There is greater need today than when Rotblat spoke these words for Pugwash to do more. The fight lies not so much in the domain of technology and science - though that is very significant - but in the domain of strategy: How can the world get rid of the theory of deterrence, or can it? Or should it? After all, wars happened, and are likely to happen, even if there are no nuclear weapons. And as experts working in conflict zones say, statistically more people have been, and continue to be, killed by small arms than by weapons of mass destruction. These are difficult and complex questions and do not lend easily to Cartesian modes of analysis. It is a difficult task. Pugwash Conferences cannot do it alone or overnight. Its significance lay in being able to provide expertise and reach out to the policymakers. For any future progress, it will have to keep in mind the deteriorating security situation and come up with viable solutions. What made it different from other fora was its ability to translate its charter and its statements into achieved goals. It remains to be seen whether it can continue to do so in the present situation.