Report of the Pugwash Conferences

Washington DC Culture Center
November 11, 2009
By Jeffrey Boutwell

I can't resist but start with the recognition that today is Armistice Day – the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month: it was supposed to be the war to end all wars, but as we know that was not to be the case.

It's fitting that the snippet of the documentary film you just saw about Joe [Joseph] Rotblat and Pugwash ends with the Pete Seeger song Last Night I Dreamed the Strangest Dream, about wars ending. And I have to tell you that not only is the Pugwash movement – the Pugwash organization – dedicated to eliminating nuclear weapons but it was part of Joe Rotblat's credo that hand-in-hand with that had to be the abolition of war as a social institution.

It's not enough just to get rid of the tools of violence; we have to get rid of the violence itself – in whatever guise, whatever form that might take – individual against individual, ethnic group against ethnic group, nation state against nation state – and until we reach that stage our work will only be half done. Now if we get into a discussion later about what is the most feasible way to try and eliminate nuclear weapons, I will argue that they can't be eliminated before war itself has been abolished. Because as long as nuclear weapons exist they will one day be used. But that doesn't negate the importance of moving ahead – institutionally, societally, psychologically, in whatever form we can – to abolish war as a social institution.

I'm going to pretty much throw out the prepared talk with slides that I had put together, because the 10 minutes that you saw of the film so accurately and wonderfully describes just who Joe Rotblat was as a person. He was the only scientist to voluntarily leave the Manhattan Project, which he did in December of 1944 when it was apparent the Nazis were not going to be able to acquire the bomb before the end of the European Theater Conflict, and that had been Joe's main motivation for joining the Manhattan Project in the first place.

He was Polish; he had left Poland in August of 1939, shortly before the Nazis invaded. Unfortunately his wife was not able to get out; he never saw her again. He dedicated the rest of the war years to working with Britain and the United States on having a nuclear weapon purely for deterrence purposes should Hitler acquire it. Hitler couldn't acquire it, so Joe left the Manhattan Project in December of 1944 and suffered for the rest of his life – he was subject to House Un-American Activities investigation in the 1950s, he was persecuted in the press, the FBI went through his belongings as they were shipped out of Los Alamos, and forever after he was hounded and tainted by some for having been a traitor, for having left the Manhattan Project.

Any of you who had the pleasure and honor of meeting Joe Rotblat, you truly were in the presence of one of the world's great figures. I want to pay homage tonight to the relationship he and Mr. Ikeda had for many years, to the work SGI and Pugwash did together.

As the film mentioned and as we heard in the introduction, Pugwash works very much under the radar. We bring together scientists, policy makers, military officials, for very quiet meetings among parties in conflict – the Iranians and Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis, Koreans and Chinese and Japanese. We bring these folks together, creating a space for dialogue, much like SGI does, but among elite scientists and policy makers, to share ideas in a non-confrontational forum that they can then take back to their governments to try and find a way out of the conflict scenarios and the conflict traps that they find themselves in.

So we work sub rosa, having these people meet under the Chatham House Rule, with no press. We're not a public organization, we're not a grassroots organization, we don't try and stimulate or motivate public opinion per se in support of the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, not, say, like the People's Decade does. We don't have those types of tools – frankly we don't have those types of resources: it's not what we do best, other folks do that far better than we do.

Nonetheless I would posit that if we are going to get to a world without nuclear weapons we need public support. We need public support pushing the political leaders, not only the administration, say, of Barack Obama who has made this a centerpiece of his policy. But the political realities are that in order to get there we have to have important treaties ratified like the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty; if there is a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty that will need to be ratified, and it's an incredibly difficult political chore getting 67 votes in the Senate to ratify these treaties. So we have to have the type of bipartisan, across-the-political-spectrum support for these goals and these initiatives that will come from public opinion.

And I'd like to have some discussion from you and ideas from you as to how organizations like SGI or Pugwash or others can bring these to the fore, because the reality is, and we all know it, that nuclear weapons are not at the top of most people's agenda in terms of what they wake up every morning and worry about: it's jobs, it's the economy, it's health care, it's climate change, it's many other things that are much more immediate on the 6 o'clock news in terms of framing what they worry about and what they are most concerned with.

So how do we tap into what should be an incredible anxiety and apprehension about the devastation that nuclear weapons can cause, and put this at the top of people's personal agenda so that they work hard for it and tirelessly for it in support of leaders like Barack Obama?

I had a fascinating discussion with the group of young people here before this evening's session, and one of the points from that that I do want to make is that political leadership can make a real difference. As you saw on the film, I think Mikhail Gorbachev played the central role in the 1980s in ending the Cold War and dismantling the iron curtain that divided Europe, and by extension making sure that we would not have a World War III involving NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It took incredible political courage and sagacity on his part to recognize this was not a viable path for the Soviet Union. There has been a lot of turmoil in Russia and within the former Soviet states since then, but I would argue that they are far better off now and have a much brighter future than they did under the old Soviet regime, so Gorbachev played an incredibly important role in that.

In my own field of Middle East politics, I would say the same for Yitzhak Rabin who took a tremendous risk for peace in 1992/93 by reaching out to the PLO and Yasser Arafat, to a terrorist organization, and saying I want you to be a legitimate peace partner and I will work with you to try and make peace in the Middle East. As we all know, unfortunately Rabin was assassinated by one of his countrymen and did not have the opportunity to put that into place, and Israeli domestic politics being what they are things went sour after Rabin was assassinated. The other two folks I've always been most admiring of are Sadat and Begin back in the late 1970s with Camp David and the initial breakthrough in Israeli-Arab relations with the Camp David Accords and Egyptian-Israeli normalization, and as we know in effect Sadat paid for that with his life when he was assassinated in 1981. So decisive political leadership can make a difference.

Barack Obama has made some important steps in that direction – his Prague speech in April of this year calling for and espousing the goal of a nuclear-weapon-free world, the first time a sitting President has ever done that, I mean it's light years away from what even Bill Clinton was willing to say, and I had a lot of hopes for Clinton in the 90s at the end of the Cold War, which weren't realized, but we won't get into that.

Obama has come out four-square in support of that goal, but he needs to do much more. It is easy to say that, at the same time recognizing that he has so many competing demands on his time from climate change to the health care reform, to getting the economy back on track, to just reasserting a cooperative, collective US partnership with the rest of the world. He's got a lot of kind of frayed ends to mend in terms of America's relations with countries around the world, but if we're truly going to move this goal of eliminating nuclear weapons forward, Obama does have to do a lot more.

One of the things we discussed about in our session with the students before this talk tonight was about Obama going to Hiroshima. No sitting American President has ever gone to Hiroshima or Nagasaki and made a speech about nuclear weapons. We are the only country that has ever used them in wartime and the Japanese are the only country which has ever suffered their use in wartime, I mean how symbolic and how appropriate for a President like Barack Obama who has great international credibility to go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and reiterate the goal of a nuclear-weapon-free world and say that the United States – as both a country that has some moral responsibility for having used them in war, but also continues to be the preeminent nuclear power in the world – that we're going to take the lead and take a combination of unilateral steps and also work with the Russians and the Chinese and the French and the British, the original nuclear weapons states, to begin to greatly reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles, to put things in place like the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, other nonproliferation measures, a no-first-use policy, that we will never be the first ones again to use nuclear weapons. It would take that kind of, I think, galvanizing, harrowing call on behalf of a sitting President to galvanize public opinion both in this country and around the world.

I was going to give you some more background on Pugwash but the movie really did that very well. Pugwash started out as an organization primarily of scientists, of physicists, people who'd worked on the respective bomb programs in World War II. It has expanded greatly, so we now have chapters in around 50 countries around the world and we have as many, if not more, policy experts, military leaders, even business people in Pugwash as we do scientists, because frankly the nuclear weapon problem is no longer a scientific and technical problem like it was in the 1950s and 60s. There was still much uncertainty back then about radiation effects and “circular error probable” and blast effects and how effective these things would be. We now know that nuclear weapons are truly a genocidal or homicidal weapon, that if they are ever used they will be indiscriminate, and that they will, to my mind, fall fully under the UN Convention on Genocide. Whoever uses them, I think, should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity and for engaging in genocide: if a nuclear weapon isn't a genocidal weapon, what is?

But Pugwash has expanded its agenda, expanded its participant base a lot in the 52 years that we have now been in operation, and we work as much in regions of conflict, as I mentioned before, with Iranians, Israelis, Pakistanis, Indians, in those places where the risk of conflict is at its highest and nuclear weapons are present and could be used if conflict ever breaks out.

But as I said before, we do work very much under the radar. We had a series of fascinating meetings last year that involved [Mojtaba] Hashemi Samareh, who is the top advisor to President Ahmadinejad of Iran, meeting in Europe, over a series of four meetings with top US officials including Bill Perry and others but totally out of the limelight, just as in a back-channel way of trying to make more transparent the Iranian view of the nuclear impasse and the US view. The domestic politics being what they are both in Iran and in the US we haven't made much progress since then, and I'm afraid we won't until the power struggle going on within Iran sorts itself out.

If you've been following the news of the Iranian acceptance – supposed acceptance – of the deal of sending enriched uranium to Russia to be fabricated into fuel rods for a medical research reactor in Tehran, but now they seem to be reneging on that, or at least haven't fully moved to accept it as a solution to assuring the international community that the enriched uranium that they have will not be processed into military grade weapons material. Almost paradoxically, it looks as if Ahmadinejad is the moderate within the Iranian debate, that he is in favor of moving ahead with this deal, whereas some of the revolutionary guards and the religious establishment are not in favor; it's tough to tell for sure, Iranian politics are not easy to decipher even for the experts – but until that sorts itself out we are probably going to be in a stalemate in terms of resolving the uranium issue.

But, at least for its part, Pugwash continues to create a space for dialogue, to provide the venues for people coming together to expurgate their views and to make their views better known to the enemy, and, as we talked about in our session before this meeting, demonizing the enemy is so important for security policies for generating support among domestic publics for military expenditures and for the continued role of nuclear weapons. It happens between India and Pakistan; it happens between Israel and Iran; it happens between North Korea and the outside world.

One of the participants in our discussion here earlier made the very valid point that nuclear weapons and the United States as a bogie man is probably the only legitimacy that the North Korean regime has in keeping a hold on its people. Certainly they don't provide the necessities of life or social cohesion or anything else, but as long as they can scare their populace into thinking that the United States might attack one day and therefore they need nuclear weapons to deter such an attack that's one way they stay in power. Well if the US and the other established nuclear powers themselves could begin to devalue the currency of nuclear weapons, to diminish the role that nuclear weapons have played in security policies for these many decades, we might be able to create a new mindset where people wouldn't see the supposed prestige, either technical or political, that comes from having nuclear weapons.

We also have to do some fundamental re-jigging of international politics. It's no longer credible that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council are the five original nuclear weapon states. How can you argue that France or Britain deserve a seat on the Security Council when countries like Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, Japan, Germany don't? It's all based on nuclear weapons and having nuclear weapons. So we need new ways of resolving disputes, adjudicating disputes in the United Nations, of ending violence between countries; and for its part Pugwash Conferences tries to work below the radar in bringing people together, but it's going to take a lot of public support as well, and that's where groups, including organizations like SGI, are so important.