Nobel Peace Prize Signals New Beginning For Pugwash

Sidebar: Plugging into Pugwash It would be reasonable to assume that last month's awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and Pugwash president and cofounder Joseph Rotblat represents something of a glorious swan song. The conferences and Polish-born physicist Rotblat, 87, were honored by the Nobel Committee last month in Oslo, Norway, for their nearly 40-year effort "to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics" (K.Y. Kreeger, The Scientist, Nov. 13, 1995, page 1). But as Rotblat and the group's many thousands of members and admirers point out emphatically, their work is hardly over. The challenges to peace and disarmament in the post-Cold War world are different-and in many ways more difficult-they maintain. Although nuclear disarmament remains Pugwash's main concern, the subjects tackled at annual conferences and workshops have branched out in a number of directions. "The range of issues and topics has expanded greatly, particularly with the considerable interest that people have in environmental issues and in some of the problems of developing countries," says United States Pugwash Committee cochairwoman Judith Reppy. She is an associate professor in the science and technology studies department and assistant director of the peace studies program at Cornell University. "The future that we have to be concerned with is the problems of the developing world-the disparity of income, the hunger-all of the discords that arise from poverty," observes former Pugwash secretary general Martin Kaplan. Before this position, Kaplan, a microbiologist, was director of research and development at the World Health Organization. He is now head of Pugwash's Geneva office. SCIENTIFIC HIPPOCRATIC OATH: "The time has come to formulate guidelines for the ethical conduct of scientists," said laureate Joseph Rotblat in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture in Oslo last month. Since 1957, in by-invitation-only meetings, Pugwash organizers have brought together a Who's Who of eminent scientists and scholars dedicated to nuclear disarmament, among a growing list of other topics. Their ranks have included such science luminaries as the late chemist and two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling. Conference participants attend as individuals rather than governmental or institutional representatives, preferring a low-key approach. In this way, the conferences have fomented an open atmosphere for discussion. They have been credited with wielding substantial behind-the-scenes influence on global anti-weapon and peace treaties of the past 35 years. Pugwash "was a major East-West communications channel at a time when most channels, even official ones, were very badly plugged or nonexistent," notes Herbert York, the first director of the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons lab and now chancellor, emeritus, of the University of California, San Diego. Over the years, the mix of Pugwashites has evolved with the changing social and scientific climate. "In the very beginning it was essentially all physicists," recalls Pugwash secretary general Francesco Calogero, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome. "Nowadays it has expanded to scientists from all disciplines: About one-half come from the natural sciences and one-half from the social and political sciences." NEW CHALLENGES: The end of the Cold War has meant a readjustment of the Pugwash agenda, according to Harvard's Steven Miller. Recently, the issues tackled at Pugwash conferences have also broadened. Steven Miller, director of the International Security Program at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and cochairman of the U.S. Pugwash Committee, points to the agenda of last year's annual meeting in Hiroshima as an example of this expansion. Miller specifically refers to the sessions on such newer issues as security in the Asia-Pacific region and energy-environment-development interactions, in addition to the more traditional sessions on nuclear weapons, reducing proliferation, and arms trade. The conferences take their name from the tiny Canadian village of Pugwash, Nova Scotia, where the first such meeting was held. Pugwash was the site of the summer retreat owned by U.S industrialist Cyrus Eaton, who sponsored the first conference. The impetus for the group's initial get-together was discussion of the ideas put forth in the "Russell-Einstein Manifesto," a 1955 document issued by Albert Einstein and British philosopher Bertrand Russell declaring the threat of thermonuclear weapons. Among the signers of the manifesto were 10 scientists who were or would become recipients of Nobel Prizes, including Pauling (chemistry, 1954; peace, 1962); Frederic Joliot-Curie (chemistry, 1935), and Max Born (physics, 1954), as well as Einstein (physics, 1921) and Rotblat. Even before the first Pugwash conference, Rotblat took a personal stand against nuclear weapons. In 1944, he walked out on his research at the Manhattan Project laboratory in Los Alamos, N.Mex. "When it became evident, toward the end of 1944, that the Germans had abandoned their bomb project, the whole purpose of my being in Los Alamos ceased to be, and I asked for permission to leave and return to Britain," wrote Rotblat in a 1985 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article (August, pages 16-19). But not before U.S. officials accused him of being a spy. He easily refuted their allegations and was allowed to return to Britain, where he spent the rest of his academic career working in nuclear medicine. (His Manhattan Project coworkers didn't know that he left in protest until dozens of years later. His excuse for leaving was that he was returning to Europe to be with his family, although in reality he hadn't been able to contact them throughout the war. In fact, after the war he discovered that his wife had died during the war.) Over the next decade, Rotblat became increasingly concerned with the gathering storm clouds of the nuclear arms race-the development of the hydrogen bomb and weapons stockpiling. Through his work as cofounder of the Atomic Scientists Association and in developing the "Atom Train," a traveling exhibition on the benefits and dangers of nuclear energy, he met Russell. This affiliation led to the drafting of the manifesto and, eventually, the Pugwash Conferences. Although there was no official linkage to Pugwash, science historians and nuclear-era analysts maintain that the organization has played an influential role in some of the world's most famous anti-weapons conventions. Through unofficial channels, Pugwash kept the lines of communication open among scholars on both sides of the Iron Curtain. This dialogue helped lay the foundation for such agreements as the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, and the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972. Political scientist Matthew Evangelista, a visiting scholar at Harvard's Kennedy School who is working on a book describing East-West relations, agrees that Pugwash has and does command a major influence. "One of the more recent areas where I think Pugwash workshops made a difference were those starting in the mid-1980s," he says. "These began to focus on issues not only related to nuclear and space weapons but also on conventional forces in Europe." He contends that former Soviet President Mikail Gorbachev's 1988 speech to the United Nations-which announced large unilateral reductions in Soviet conventional troops-was influenced, in part, by ideas put forth in those Pugwash get-togethers. In the almost 40 years since the first conference, there have been more than 200 Pugwash-sponsored meetings attended by nearly 10,000 individuals. Today the group publishes books, a newsletter, and conference proceedings. It has spawned the international Student Pugwash movement, and has offices and national committees in dozens of countries. Pugwashites of today convene under very different global circumstances from those surrounding the gathering of the first 22 conference participants in Nova Scotia. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, anticommunist groups warily eyed conference organizers. 'SOVIET DUPES': In the early days, Cold War hawks suspiciously eyed the activities of Pugwash scientists, recalls Martin Kaplan of the Geneva office. "When we first started having our meetings with the Soviet and Eastern European scientists, we were accused of being tools of the Russians and dupes of Soviet propaganda," Kaplan recalls. The end of the Cold War has affected Pugwash "in a profound manner," asserts Calogero. "During the Cold War, Pugwash functioned as a unique channel of communications between the intellectual communities of the East and West. Now there are many, many more opportunities for contact. In a sense this puts a challenge to us because, whereas in the past it was just enough to have a dialogue, now just having a dialogue is no longer an achievement in itself." Because of this, explains Calogero, Pugwash has taken a more in-depth analysis of some issues. "We have moved from meetings to projects, producing some books which are the result of more than one meeting." For example, in 1991 Pugwash produced a book on nuclear-arms verification, entitled Verification: Monitoring Disarmament (F. Calogero, M. Goldberger, S.P. Kapitza, eds., Boulder, Colo., Westview Press). According to Harvard's Miller, the end of the Cold War has had "a contradictory effect" on the Pugwash agenda. "In some ways what it has meant is that issues that Pugwash participants have supported and worked on for many years-comprehensive test ban treaties and the disposition of plutonium, for example-have become much more attainable than they were during the Cold-War period. "So, suddenly many of these issues went from being goals that were not at the center of policy agendas to goals that were actively being negotiated and pursued by mainstream governments. Some of the issues that were all-consuming [to earlier Pugwashites] now no longer occupy the central spotlight in East-West relationships." In his Nobel Peace Prize lecture, "Remember Your Humanity," Rotblat made a distinct appeal to his fellow scientists. "The time has come to formulate guidelines for the ethical conduct of scientists, perhaps in the form of a voluntary Hippocratic oath," said Rotblat. Inspired by a call by Nobel laureate Hans Bethe (physics, 1967), the oldest surviving participant in the Manhattan Project, to all scientists "to cease and desist from work creating . . . nuclear weapons," Rotblat called for "constant vigilance" in all areas of research. "The purpose of some government or industrial research is sometimes concealed, and misleading information is presented to the public. It should be the duty of scientists to expose such malfeasance. Whistleblowing should become part of the scientist's ethos." In addition to his entreaty to researchers, Rotblat, in his speech, made two other appeals. The first was to world nuclear powers to "bear in mind the long-term threat that nuclear weapons pose to humankind." Rotblat ended his lecture imploring his fellow citizens to strive for a "war-free world." Although he admitted that this general appeal "will be seen by many as a utopian dream," he pointed to the European Union as a coalition "within which war was inconceivable." 'LIVE WIRE': Berkeley's John Holdren gave the Nobel speech on behalf of the Pugwash conferences. Pugwash executive committee chairman John Holdren, the Class of 1935 Professor of Energy and Resources at the University of California, Berkeley, gave the Nobel lecture on behalf of the Pugwash conferences themselves. Holdren, whom York calls the current "live wire" behind U.S. involvement in international Pugwash affairs, listed six "troublesome features" of the post-Cold War world: tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that are still deployed; psychological residues of the Cold War mentality; further proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons; stocks of nuclear and chemical weapons made surplus by the end of the Cold War; local armed conflict; and the ravages of poverty that affect the security, economic development, and the environment of developing countries. The full text of Holdren's speech can be found at the Berkeley World Wide Web site: http://violet.berkeley.edu:80/manerg/ under the "What's new at ERG" heading. In Rotblat's call for a scientific Hippocratic oath, he asserted that this type of pledge would be "particularly valuable for young scientists when they embark on a scientific career." He also singled out the Student Pugwash USA group for taking up this idea in its campaign to obtain pledges from 1 million young people to work toward creating a world "where science and technology are used in socially responsible ways" (K.Y. Kreeger, The Scientist, Dec. 11, 1995, page 1). Names are being collected at the Student Pugwash home page, http://www.spusa.org/pugwash/pledge.html. In a symbolic gesture, 2,042 pledges-one for every nuclear-weapons test ever conducted-were presented to Rotblat by representatives from Student Pugwash USA during the December Nobel ceremonies. RESOLVING CONFLICT: Many Student Pugwash USA programs help young scientists deal with ethical dilemmas, notes director Sandra Ionno. But how can young scientists resolve the conflict of practical considerations such as keeping their jobs and getting funding with the risks associated with on-the-job ethical dilemmas? "It's not an accident that the title of our newsletter is 'Tough Questions,'" says Sandra Ionno, executive director of Student Pugwash USA. "We appreciate that these concerns are difficult. For example, we have a mentorship program where students have an opportunity to interact with people who have already gone through some of these choices. We brought in some whistleblowers who were able to talk honestly about their experiences." Roger Boisjoly, the former Morton-Thiokol Inc. engineer who in 1986 raised technical concerns over the launching of the space shuttle Challenger, has spoken at several Student Pugwash international and chapter meetings about his experiences. The shuttle subsequently exploded, resulting in the loss of the entire crew. Although Boisjoly's assessment proved accurate, his relationship with his employer deteriorated, according to published reports (E. Pennisi, The Scientist, Jan. 22, 1990, page 1; F. Hoke, The Scientist, May 15, 1995, page 1). He now runs his own "forensic engineering" firm, Boisjoly Engineering Ltd., in Mesa, Ariz. George Perkovich, director of the Secure World Program at the W. Alton Jones Foundation in Charlottesville, Va., which supports studies in nuclear-war prevention, says the legacy of Student Pugwash is to "create, augment, and inform a network of very talented young scientists and policymakers." NURTURING A NETWORK: Former student Pugwashites are starting to make inroads into science policy, reports foundation official George Perkovitch. Perkovich, who served as executive director of Student Pugwash USA from 1981 to 1983, cites Pete Didisheim, special assistant for science and technology to Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary, as an example of a former Student Pugwashite now in an influential governmental position. ONE-ON-ONE: Among her student Pugwash USA activities, associate director Susan Higman speaks to grad students about their research. But the real impact of both Student and senior Pugwash, maintain its members, is felt at the level of the individual-scientist to policymaker, mentor to student. "I've talked with a lot of students about everything from working with laboratory animals to such specific types of research as working with fetal tissue," notes Susan Higman, associate director of Student Pugwash USA. Higman left a neuroscience-research position to seek work on the societal implications of science and technology. "I think Pugwash's real influence comes in informal ways," says Reppy. "Generally it's a diffuse process, in which people discuss issues and take new ideas back to their countries." "Convening individuals who usually have access to their government and who will pass on the recommendations and suggestions of Pugwash has been our modus operandi," agrees Kaplan. "This is how we worked with the Soviet Union when it was frowned upon by the Cold Warriors and hawks of both sides." Sidebar: Plugging into Pugwash

Nobel Peace Prize Signals New Beginning For Pugwash

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