“We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you can not, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”
--- From the Russell – Einstein manifesto issued on 9th July 1955
Introduction
In the tumultuous decades of the Cold War, very few efforts of reclaiming humanity across the iron curtain fructified. Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs is a legitimate claimant of such a glorious heritage. Upon on a realisation that a humanity fragmented in nations and ideologies may turn their pivotal advances into nuclear nightmare, the leading scientists of that age set up this informal platform for dialogue, co-operation and advocacy for a nuclear-free world.
The Pugwash Conferences take their name from the location of the first meeting, which was held in 1957 in the village of Pugwash, Nova Scotia, Canada. Financed and facilitated by an American philanthropist Cyrus Eaton, the first conference was stimulated by a Manifesto issued in 1955 by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein -- and signed also by prominent scientists like Max Born, Percy Bridgman, Leopold Infeld, Frederic Joliot-Curie, Herman Muller, Linus Pauling, Cecil Powell, Joseph Rotblat, and Hideki Yukawa -- which called upon scientists of all political persuasions to assemble to discuss the threat posed to civilization by the advent of thermonuclear weapons.
New Delhi was the original choice of Bertrand Russell as the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was willing to host such an initiative in concurrence with his earnest support to universal disarmament. However, two international events—the Suez Canal crisis and the Hungarian uprising—made the political situation unstable, and Russell decided to cancel the meeting.[1]
Attended by 22 scientists (7 from the USA, 3 from the Soviet Union, 3 from Japan, 2 from the UK, 2 from Canada, and one each from Australia, Austria, China, France and Poland), the meeting in Pugwash evolved into an movement as 'an awareness of the social and moral duty of scientists to help prevent and overcome actual and potentially harmful effects of scientific and technological innovations'.[2]
From that beginning evolved both a continuing series of meetings at locations all over the world -- with a growing number and diversity of participants -- and a rather decentralised organisational structure to coordinate and finance this activity. By late 2002, there have been over 275 Pugwash Conferences, Symposia, and Workshops, with a total attendance of over 10,000. The purpose of the Pugwash Conferences is to bring together, from around the world, influential scholars and public figures concerned with reducing the danger of armed conflict and seeking cooperative solutions for global problems. Meeting in private as individuals, rather than as representatives of governments or institutions, Pugwash participants exchange views and explore alternative approaches to arms control and tension reduction with a combination of candor, continuity, and flexibility seldom attained in official discussions and negotiations.[3]
Mission
Pugwash focuses on those problems that lie at the intersection of science and world affairs. Its conferences are informal exchanges between scientists, scholars and policymakers around the world where they participate in their individual capacities. The discussions lead to a meaningful sensitization of those who matter in the crucial decision-makings. The mission of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs is to bring scientific insight and reason to bear on threats to human security arising from science and technology in general and above all from the catastrophic threat posed to humanity by nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.
Pugwash advocates universal and complete disarmament of all the weapons of mass destruction – nuclear, chemical, and biological and space weapons. It supports partial arms control and reduction measures only as a requisite first step towards total elimination and moreover, a complete transformation in mindset to put an end to war as a legitimate and rationale recourse for solving issues.
In addition to seeking the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction, Pugwash objectives also include the reduction and strict control of conventional weaponry and the elimination of war and other forms of armed conflict. The Pugwash agenda also extends to ways of alleviating the conditions of economic deprivation, environmental deterioration and resource scarcity and unequal access, which are deplorable in themselves and which give rise to resentment, hostility and violence throughout the world.
To realize its mission, Pugwash uses several persuasive efforts at the level of government officials, scientists, and also general public through Pugwash publications, press statements and mass conferences. This pattern has been followed by the Pugwash conferences or committees at national and institutional levels. University level Pugwash units and Students’ Pugwash groups play a significant role today in disseminating policy alternatives for a safer and peaceful world. Its decentralized structure adds to the efficacy of Pugwash debates in reaching to the policy community.
The Pugwash Conferences have received many international awards: in 1987, they were awarded the Olympia Prize by the Onassis Foundation (US$ 100,000, shared with the Archaeological Society of Greece), and the Feltrinelli Prize by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Lit. 100,000,000 -- awarded every four years for work having a high moral and humanitarian value). In 1989, UNESCO awarded to the Pugwash Conferences the Einstein Gold Medal. In 1992, The Albert Einstein Peace Prize (US$ 50,000) was awarded to Hans Bethe and Joseph Rotblat, who donated his half to the Pugwash Foundation.[4]
It was in recognition of its mission that Pugwash and its co-founder, Sir Joseph Rotblat, were awarded the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and in the longer run to eliminate such arms” Sir Rotblat was founding member of the Pugwash Conferences, and also a participant physicist in the Manhattan Project. His reservations about a nuclear arms race led him to leave the Manhattan Project in 1944. The Norwegian Nobel Committee hoped that “the award of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1995 to Rotblat and to Pugwash will encourage world leaders to intensify their efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons” In his acceptance speech, Joseph Rotblat touched the core of audience by reiterating the words of Russell-Einstein manifesto – “remember your humanity !”
Five Decades of Pugwash: Roles and Experiences
The initial decades of Pugwash history coincided with some of the most frigid years of the Cold War, marked by the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the Vietnam War. Pugwash came to play an important informal channel of information and views while being vigilant about being balanced.
In this period of strained official relations and few unofficial channels, the fora and lines of communication provided by Pugwash played useful background roles in helping lay the groundwork for the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, and the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993.
Subsequent trends of generally improving East-West relations and the emergence of a much wider array of unofficial channels of communication have somewhat reduced Pugwash's visibility while providing alternate pathways to similar ends, but Pugwash meetings have continued until the present to play an important role in bringing together key analysts and policy advisers for sustained, in-depth discussions of the crucial arms-control issues of the day: European nuclear forces, chemical and biological weaponry, space weapons, conventional force reductions and restructuring, and crisis control in the Third World, among others. Pugwash has, moreover, for many years extended its remit to include problems of development and the environment.
Starting in January 1980, for example, Pugwash's series of Workshops on nuclear forces provided an off-the-record forum where not only military and civilian analysts but also some members of the official negotiating teams compared notes and sought solutions to obstacles in the official negotiations (28 Workshops of this series have been held until now, most of them in Geneva, Switzerland). The Pugwash chemical and biological warfare Workshops -- 27 of them since 1974 -- have similarly engaged technical experts from the official negotiating teams, as well as academic and industry experts; this series led in early 1987 to the first visit of Western chemical weapons specialists to an Eastern European chemical-production complex, and Pugwash contacts were also instrumental in setting up the first access by a U.S. expert to the medical records associated with the disputed 1979 anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk. The Pugwash study group on conventional forces, which originated in the European Security Working Group of the 1982 Pugwash Conference in Warsaw, held 11 meetings, and played a pioneering role in developing concepts for restructuring conventional forces and doctrines into modes less suited for attack, and in gaining credibility for these concepts with Eastern as well as Western military planners and policy makers.
After the end of the cold-war, Pugwash broadened its role in fighting nuclear danger and war and has assumed a wider role in public opinion making. It has worked relentlessly to cater to new challenges emerging from weapons of mass destruction – from changed geopolitical equations of proliferation to the issue of non-sate actors. Pugwash has also incorporated non-conventional threats like HIV, Climate Change and other human security issues in its ambit. In its 2005 Hiroshima Declaration, the Pugwash Council urged to declare nuclear weapons immoral and illegal.
In 1991, Pugwash produced an American-European-Soviet book on verification issues, co-authored by imminent experts from the West and the East. In 1993, another project resulted in the publication of a Pugwash Monograph titled A Nuclear-Weapon-Free World: Desirable? Feasible?, edited by J. Rotblat, J. Steinberger and B. Udgaonkar. This book has been instrumental in opening a serious debate about the prospect of a complete elimination of nuclear weaponry.
In recent developments, the Pugwash Conferences and the Center for Strategic Research in Tehran co-sponsored an international conference in April 2006 covering both Iran’s nuclear energy programme and the issue of Iraq and regional stability. Pugwash attempts to adopt creative, democratic and dialogue-based approach to all the important challenges that the world faces today.
The urgency of revitalising nuclear disarmament was the theme of the 50th anniversary of meeting of Pugwash Conferences. Held at Nova Scotia, the same venue as of the first Pugwash meeting, a distinguished group of 25 international specialists on nuclear weapons issues converged to discuss a variety of measures. Under the auspices of the Pugwash Conferences and the Middle Powers Initiative, the group shared a common and strong belief that global cooperation on an entirely new scale will be needed to eliminate the many common threats to humanity, including nuclear weapons. The workshop provided concrete recommendations on issues like Devaluing Nuclear Weapons, US-Russian Nuclear Weapons Negotiations, Multilateral nuclear Weapons Treaties, Civilian Nuclear Energy and Nuclear Weapons, and Comprehensive Disarmament. The workshop committed itself for a Global Campaign to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons. [5]
Conclusion
Evaluating the role of Pugwash movement is replete with difficulties as most of its proceedings are intangible and unrecorded. The effect of private and informal dialogues, a characteristic of Pugwash initiatives, is difficult to judge. However, Pugwash has been credited with promoting a number of disarmament proposals leading to official treaties and initiatives. Besides, normative and discursive influence of Pugwash over scientists’ responsibility and ethics, and persuasive appraisal of dangers posed by continuing existence of weapons of mass destruction are widely recognized. The flexibility, informality and creative approach of adopting pragmatic steps towards making the disarmament ideal achievable are the major contributions that Pugwash experience has offered the world.
P K Sundaram is research Assistant with the Indian Pugwash Society, New Delhi. He can be contacted at pksundaram@gmail.com.
Endnotes -
[1] J. Rotblat, Scientists in the Quest for Peace: A History of the Pugwash Conferences, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. (1972)
[2] Statement by Joseph Rotblat on assuming presidency of Pugwash in 1988. www.ppu.org.uk/learn/infodoc/people/pp-rotblat.html as accessed on May 15, 2008
[3] “About Pugwash” http://www.pugwash.org/about.htm
[4] “Recent History” http://www.pugwash.org/about/history.htm
[5] “Policy Recommendations of the Pugwash 50th Anniversary Workshop” http://www.pugwash.org/reports/nw/pugwash-mpi/Pugwash-MPI-report.htm as accessed on May 15, 2008
|
Menu
Home
Publications
Pugwash India Backgrounders
Print
P K SUNDARAM
Asian Nuclear, Missile & Space Digest - Vol 1, No. 34
Space Security: Need for a Proactive Approach
India in a Changing Global Nuclear Order