Forty Years of Pugwash

by Mike Moore


©1997 All rights reserved.

ON August 6, five days into the annual meeting of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in Lillehammer, Norway, Shoji Sawada, a retired Japanese physicist, spoke.

Fifty-two years ago, he said, he was 13 years old and living in Hiroshima, some 1,400 meters from ground zero. One moment he was asleep; the next, he was trapped in a crushed house. He wriggled free and finally stood in the daylight, except there was no daylight. The morning sun was blocked by brown air that changed to yellow and then cleared. The city in which he lived had become rubble.

He heard his mother call his name, faintly. She was buried somewhere in the remnants of the house. She said she was trapped by beams or pillars and could not move. Sawada tried to pull the debris away, but it was beyond his strength.

Fires began, first small, then larger. As flames neared the house, Sawada's unseen mother urged him to flee, to survive, to "become a good person by studying well." Finally she ordered him to "Get away now."

"As I escaped," said Sawada, "I said 'Forgive me, mother.' That was the last conversation I had with my mother."

As Sawada spoke of August 6 in Hiroshima and the aftermath, his voice grew thick with emotion, becoming lower in pitch and slower in rhythm. One could not call Sawada's brief remarks the high point of the seven-day Pugwash meeting. That would trivialize them. But for many of the participants in a pointedly intellectual meeting, Sawada's comments reminded them with plain and direct words why they had become Pugwashites in the first place.

A Way Out

THE Lillehammer meeting occurred in Pugwash's fortieth year, a symbolic watershed that inevitably meant considerable time was devoted to looking back at the organization's history as well as forward to Pugwash's role in the next century.

Pugwash had its origins in the post-Hiroshima ferment in Western scientific circles over the divisive question: Do scientists have a special, morally compelling role in shaping public policy regarding nuclear energy?

Most Western scientists seemed to answer the question with an unequivocal "no." Scientists did science, which was presumably value free. Politicians and other decision-makers did public policy, which was anything but value free.

Nevertheless, within months of Japan's surrender, the Bulletin, the Federation of American Scientists, the Atomic Scientists Association of Britain, and other organizations were founded, all committed to doing whatever they could to influence public policy in an attempt to prevent or short-circuit a nuclear arms race while promoting the peaceful uses of atomic energy.

In 1955, Albert Einstein, the world's best known scientist, and Bertrand Russell, the acerbic British mathematician and philosopher, reacted to the testing of thermonuclear devices by the United States and the Soviet Union by issuing "A Statement on Nuclear Weapons," now universally called the "Russell­Einstein Manifesto."

After taking note of the "titanic struggle between communism and anti-communism," the destructive power of the H-bomb, and the amount of lingering radiation that a full-scale nuclear war would produce, the manifesto asked: "Shall we put an end to the human race: or shall mankind renounce war?"

To promote the second alternative, the manifesto called upon the world's scientists to "assemble in conference to appraise the perils that have arisen as a result of the development of weapons of mass destruction."

The first such meeting was in July 1957 in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, in the summer home of Cyrus Eaton, an "icy" (to quote Fortune) Cleveland industrialist. In business affairs, Eaton operated in a take-no-prisoners mode. But he was also something of an intellectual, a self-styled global peacemaker, and a long-time admirer of Lord Russell.

Eaton had a canny grasp of the ways of the press and the easily exploited affection newsmen had for stories with an offbeat angle. If a group of scientists came together to save the world in "one of the great metropolises," said Eaton, it "would be but one of a number of events competing for public notice." But the group might attract more attention if it met in a "relatively remote and quiet community," say an obscure hamlet of 800 souls.

Twenty-two scientists attended the first meeting-seven from the United States, three from the Soviet Union, three from Japan, two from Britain, two from Canada, and one each from Australia, Austria, China, France, and Poland.

Joseph Rotblat, a Manhattan Project physicist who left the project in December 1944, was a key player in drafting the manifesto and organizing the first Pugwash Conference.

At 89, Rotblat presided over the fortieth-anniversary general meeting of Pugwash as president. It would be his last meeting as presiding officer. He would step down at the end of the meeting, turning the presidency over to Sir Michael Atiyah, a mathematician who has held a variety of distinguished posts at Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge.

In his presidential address, Rotblat told the Lillehammer audience of 250 or so that no one quite knew what to expect in 1957. A "furious" arms race was under way, and both East and West were generating "hostile propaganda and mutual recrimination." Western scientists were "sharply divided" over Cold War issues. The conference organizers were "worried that this divergence would be exacerbated in a confrontation with Soviet scientists."

But there was no confrontation. Rotblat said that was because the scientists knew one another, either personally or through their scientific publications, and they had respect for one another's scientific integrity. And, too, the first Pugwashites had "decided from the beginning that we would approach these problems in the scientific spirit of rational analysis and objective inquiry."

"The mutual trust and friendship built between Pugwashites over the years are chiefly responsible for our success, for the fact that we are still going strong after 40 years," said Rotblat. Pugwash has had "none of the internal squabbles and dissensions that bedevil other organizations with similar objectives and often lead to their early demise, or to their becoming sterile."

Pugwash has experienced considerable success. Once dismissed by Western power brokers and political science "realists" as a collection of fuzzy idealists with a leftist bias, Pugwash has organized 229 meetings of experts, most of them small symposiums and, more recently, workshops. The arms control community generally credits Pugwash as having contributed greatly to the philosophic and technical underpinnings of arms control-nuclear, chemical, and biological.

Pugwash scientists and scholars, says Bernd W. Kubbig, of the Peace Research Institute in Frankfort, Germany, "functioned as icebreakers during the Cold War and also during the Vietnam War." They constituted an "epistemic community" with "an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge."

In particular, says Kubbig, Pugwash was instrumental in bringing Soviet policy makers around to the idea that nuclear-armed nations should cooperate in achieving strategic stability, an insight that undergirds the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as well as all subsequent strategic arms treaties.

In 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the use of atom bombs against Japanese cities, Pugwash and Rotblat received the Nobel Peace Prize. Francis Sejersted, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said at the Oslo ceremony that one of Pugwash's greatest achievements was its ability to "more distinctly and consistently than anyone else" steer clear of the mirror-image pitfalls of hysteria and apathy so common during the Cold War.

"While painting a clear picture of the great dangers, [Pugwash and Rotblat] at the same time insisted that there was a way out. They have kept the vision of a nuclear-free world alive, while working unwearyingly for specific arms-limitation measures in the short term. By doing so, they have enabled us to adopt a rational attitude both to the dangerous situation and to our own disquiet."

An Extended Family

THE meeting in Lillehammer was a symbolic homecoming for three members of the Bulletin's immediate family-Leonard Rieser, chairman of the board of the Bulletin, Ruth Adams, editor of the Bulletin in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the author, the Bulletin's current editor.

Long before the end of World War II, Eugene Rabinowitch, a member of the Manhattan Project in the Chicago laboratory where the first sustained chain reaction took place, was among a small group of Chicago-based scientists who were trying to project what the post-war world would be like.

Nuclear energy, they believed, would be a boon to humankind in many ways-from medicine to energy. But it would also provide the basis for new kinds of weapons capable of virtually unlimited destruction. After the war, they said, scientists would be morally compelled to assume a high degree of responsibility for their inventions; they would have to persuade policy makers and politicians that these weapons should never again be used in war. In Los Alamos, Joseph Rotblat was developing similar ideas.

Rabinowitch, who died in 1973, was a founder of the Bulletin in 1945 and he helped Rotblat get Pugwash under way in 1957. In the official Pugwash group photo from 1957, he stands, smiling, between A.M. Kuzin, of the Institute of Biophysics in Moscow, and G. Brock Chisholm, the former director-general of the World Health Organization. Ruth Adams, then Rabinowitch's assistant editor, was at the first Pugwash meeting, too, near the beginning of a still-vibrant career oriented toward making the nongovernmental community into an ever more potent force for peace.

The confluence of interests between the Bulletin and Pugwash over the decades has seldom flagged. The late Bernard Feld, for instance, was a former editor-in-chief of the Bulletin and a Pugwash stalwart who attended 87 meetings and became secretary-general. The late Harrison Brown, another editor-in-chief of the Bulletin, was a member of Pugwash's Continuing Committee, now called the Pugwash Council.

The Lillehammer conference was, in fact, a kind of homecoming for many Pugwashites-a yeasty, celebratory, and even joyous coming together of an extended family, a meeting of old friends and a renewal of high-octane discussion and debate. By common consent, the Norwegian hosts were unfailingly gracious; the food plentiful and superb; the hotel comfortable and old-fashionedly picturesque; the setting, ringed by low, rippling mountains, gorgeous; and the weather, sunny and warm, simply spectacular.

But beneath the surface were hints now and then of a free-floating unease regarding the future of Pugwash. Was the organization too white, too male, too Western, too gray-haired? How could more women be encouraged to participate? How could it attract more scientists from the developing world? How could it induce greater numbers of young people to take an active interest in its issues?

And precisely what should its issues be now that the Cold War is history? Should Pugwash continue its traditional focus on nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons? Or should it downplay its historical concerns a bit and tackle even more vigorously a broad range of environmental, political, and economic issues? But if it goes too far down that road, would it dilute its expertise? Would decision-makers continue to listen to its analyses if it strayed too far from its core areas of expertise?

Pugwash's governing body, the council (at the moment, 23 men and three women), wrestled with these questions before the general meeting began and then threw them out for debate during a plenary session.

Afterward, the council said the "nuclear peril, while somewhat abated, nonetheless persists-in the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons still deployed (many in rapid-response alert), in the archaic doctrines still calling for nuclear-weapons use even against non-nuclear attacks, in the continuing absence of firm commitments by any of the nuclear-weapon powers to give up these weapons on a specified time scale, in the risk of theft of nuclear weapons or nuclear-weapons materials from the widely dispersed and sometimes inadequately guarded stockpiles of these, and in the threat that all these circumstances pose to the global nonproliferation regime."

Pugwash operates according to a series of five-year plans, or "quinquenniums." For the next five years, nuclear weapons issues will remain priority number one. Pugwash will push for much deeper cuts in nuclear arsenals over the next few years and for the total elimination of nuclear weapons over "at most the next two decades." Other key agenda items:

• Abatement of the dangers from chemical and biological weapons. Although the world has a new Chemical Weapons Convention, many of the details for implementing the convention remain to be worked out. Meanwhile, the older Biological Weapons Convention needs stronger verification provisions.
• Further international monitoring and restriction of the trade in conventional arms. Special attention will be given to a comprehensive ban on the production, transfer, stockpiling, or use of anti-personnel land mines.
• Minimizing and finally eliminating the incidence of war itself. That involves, in part, "seeking creative ways for resolving disputes before they become armed conflicts and for ending quickly and with minimum destruction those armed conflicts that do break out."
• Working to "alleviate, around the world, the conditions of economic deprivation, environmental deterioration, political oppression and domination, xenophobia, and intolerance that so readily give rise to despair, resentment, hostility, and violence."
• Supporting ways to increase the effectiveness of the United Nations, regional multinational institutions, and nongovernmental organizations. Unless a "set of instruments and practices of global governance matched to the scale of global problems" is developed, it is not likely that Pugwash's other goals will be reached, the council said.

Lost Innocence

Forty years ago, Pugwash took on an enormous task. The Russell­Einstein Manifesto, the movement's guiding document, said that if humankind were to survive, nuclear weapons would have to be eliminated. Beyond that, war itself would have to be done away with, because the knowledge of how to build nuclear weapons would remain and a major war would inevitably lead to their production and use.

"There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom," said the manifesto. "Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal, as human beings, to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest."

Einstein died shortly after signing the manifesto. By the time of the first Pugwash meeting in July 1957, Bertrand Russell was too ill to travel to Nova Scotia. In the absence of Russell, Rotblat, one of the signers of the manifesto, co-chaired the meeting along with physicist Cecil F. Powell, another signer. Pugwash has had 47 general meetings since then and 182 smaller meetings. Rotblat has been at 164 of them. At 89, he embodies Pugwash.

In his final presidential address, Rotblat asked whether Pugwash had lived up to its expectations, whether it had done enough to persuade scientists that they had certain moral responsibilities regarding the consequences of their work.

"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."

Pugwash, said Rotblat, is an "exclusive body. Due to the modus operandi of Pugwash-mainly small groups sitting around a table to discuss specific issues in private-we can embrace only a tiny fraction of the scientific community." Some 3,360 people have participated in Pugwash meetings over the years, he added, and at least 400 have died. "This means that there are at present less than three thousand Pugwashites out of the world's scientific population of several million.

"How many of the latter have we imbued with our ideas? How many of them are now conscious of their social responsibility? I do not have the necessary statistical data for quantitative answers to these questions, but my feeling is that the answer would be: not a lot."

It was a poignant moment. Less than two years after he and the movement he helped create had received the Nobel Peace Prize, Joseph Rotblat was suggesting that he and Pugwash might not have done enough over the decades.

"Many scientists are still not willing to face reality; they continue the pretense of living in the ivory tower. Many of them are actually opposed to the involvement of scientists with anything they consider to be outside the field of pure science. Worse yet, they discourage, or actively hamper, young scientists from being concerned with the social impact of science. . . .

"It seems that we have a big task on our hands, a task to which we have paid too little attention in the past, to educate a significant proportion of the scientific community about the reality of science."

Moments later, after summarizing the history of the nuclear arms race and the involvement of scientists in it, Rotblat returned to his overarching theme, the social responsibility of scientists. What is needed, he said, recalling a theme as old as the Nuclear Age, is the "development in each of us of a new loyalty, loyalty to mankind." We must become, in some sense, "world citizens."

"Scientists are well qualified to take the lead in the education for world citizenship," said Rotblat. The ethics and logic of science are universal. "They transcend geographic frontiers and ideological divides. Respect for facts and abhorrence of prejudices are inherent in the scientist's morality. All this makes the scientific community a model for the world community of nations that we want to create."

One of the particular virtues of Pugwash is that each Pugwashite speaks for himself or herself rather than for a nation or even for an organization. That rule helps guarantee free-wheeling debate.

But as Rotblat wound up his last address as president, one could for a moment-because of his passion, his vision, his timbre of voice-imagine that he spoke not only for Pugwash, the organization, but for science itself. Or at least for an idealized conception of science as it ought to be, a vast, diverse, impossible-to-define enterprise that so greatly shapes the way we live, for better or for ill.

Mike Moore is editor of the Bulletin.