The IAEA, the UN, and the 1958 Pugwash Conference in Austria

An Attitude of Caution: The IAEA, the UN, and the 1958 Pugwash Conference in Austria

✣ Elisabeth Röhrlich

Introduction

In July 1955, an emphatic appeal warning of the dangers of nuclear weapons was published in London. The text was drafted by noted British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell and signed by ten other prominent scientists, among them Albert Einstein, who had attached his signature a few days before his death in April 1955. Confronting the growing East-West con- ﬂict and the destructive power of the hydrogen bomb, the appeal called on the governments of the world to renounce nuclear weapons. The text stated that, to avert the dangers of nuclear war, “distasteful limitations of national sovereignty” had to be accepted. In this spirit, the eleven scientists underscored that they had signed the document as “human beings” and not as members “of this or that nation.” The appeal, soon to be named, after its prominent initiators, the “Russell-Einstein Manifesto,” became the founding document of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs—more commonly known as Pugwash. The organization was named after the village in Nova Scotia where the ﬁrst conference was held. Since then, the conferences have continued to convene regularly. The manifesto is one of the prime examples of campaigns against nuclear weapons by scientists and their call for “One World or None.”1 However, the international regulation of nuclear technologies was by no means exclusively a Pugwash concept in the 1950s. This goal united the many

1. “The Russell-Einstein-Manifesto,” 9 July 1955, in Andrew G. Bone, ed., The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 28, Man’s Peril, 1954–1955 (London: Routledge, 2003) pp. 247–272. For the history of the manifesto, see Lawrence Wittner, The Struggle against the Bomb,Vol.2,Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Disarmament Movement, 1954–1970 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 5–7. For the early history of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, see Joseph Rotblat, History of the Pugwash Conferences (London: Pugwash Continuing Committee, 1962).

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campaigns of different countries’ scientists, and the basic idea of internation- alizing the atom was embodied in the United Nations (UN) as well as in other contemporary international organizations. The most significant among these was the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), launched in Vi- enna in 1957 as an autonomous international organization and related to the UN through a separate agreement.2 The mid-1950s formed a crucial phase in the history of both the transnational actor Pugwash and intergovernmental organizations concerned with nuclear matters. This article shows that the institutionalization of the international nuclear order in the 1950s resulted in a growing separation between transnational peace activists and intergovernmental organizations. As David Holloway has aptly written, nuclear weapons were “so central to the history of the Cold War that it can be difficult to disentangle the two.”3 But what conjoined the Cold War with the nuclear age was not just the dynamics of the arms race and the ubiquitous fear of nuclear war. The nuclear issue had prompted the formation of a system of international treaties and organizations from the beginning. The U.S. proposal to the UN Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC) presented by Bernhard Baruch in June 1946 was not only a plan for the international control of nuclear energy but also an early attempt to create a postwar world order. The U.S.-Soviet discord that followed the proposal has been interpreted as having had a significant influence on the origins of the Cold War. In fact, before the term “Cold War” was made popu- lar by Walter Lippmann in 1947, Baruch’s close adviser Herbert B. Swope had used it to characterize the tense atmosphere of the UNAEC negotiations.4 The problem of international order is central to some of the most stim- ulating questions in Cold War scholarship.5 More conceptual work is needed

2. On the history of the IAEA, see David Fischer, History of the International Atomic Energy Agency: The First Forty Years (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 1997); Lawrence Scheinman, The International Atomic Energy Agency and World Nuclear Order (Washington, DC: Resources for the Fu- ture, 1987); and Robert L. Brown, Nuclear Authority: The IAEA and the Absolute Weapon (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015). 3. David Holloway, “Nuclear Weapons and the Escalation of the Cold War, 1945–1962,” in Melvyn P. Lefﬂer and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War,Vol.1,Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 376. 4. Walter Lippmann, TheColdWar:AStudyinU.S.ForeignPolicy(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947); Larry G. Geber, “The Baruch Plan and the Origins of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Winter 1982), pp. 69–95; and Joseph Preston Baratta, “Was the Baruch Plan a Proposal of World Government?” The International History Review, Vol. 7, No. 4 (November 1985), pp. 592– 621. 5. Marc Trachtenberg, The Cold War and After: History, Theory, and the Logic of International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), esp. pp. 44–65.

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before we can clearly understand the origins of the international nuclear order, particularly before the turning points of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT).6 Scientists, many of whom were nuclear physicists and felt responsible for the creation of the nuclear bomb, played a crucial role in the development of this early international nuclear order.7 At the time of Pugwash’s founding, the role of scientists and their authority within the evolving international nuclear order was not yet evident. Moreover, today’s rather clear distinction between international governmental organizations (IGOs) and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) did not emerge until the late 1950s. The term “non-governmental organization” can be traced to the UN Charter of 1945, in which article 71 offers INGOs the possibility of obtaining consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). In the 1950s the individual international organizations of the UN family translated this guideline into con- crete rules and procedures.8 Although the transnational actor Pugwash did not gain consultative status with ECOSOC before the end of the Cold War, its activities responded to and interacted with the initiatives of intergovernmental organizations. Pugwashites had multiple roles and were often members of other international organizations. Furthermore, they were eager to inform UN senior officials of their recent publications, and they drafted outlines for the scope and functions of the international organizations.9 In the first postwar decade, the UN system was not yet firmly established and was still concerned with defining its future role in the international relations system. The founding of the IAEA in 1957 and the holding of the Second UN International

6. On the Cuban missile crisis as a turning point in Cold War history, see Marc Trachtenberg, ACon- structed Peace: The Making of European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 352–355. 7. Andrew Brown, Keeper of the Nuclear Conscience: The Life and Work of Joseph Rotblat (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 71–90. 8. Norbert Götz, “Reframing NGOs: The Identity of an International Relations Non-starter,” Euro- pean Journal of International Relations, Vol. 14, No. 2 (June 2008), pp. 231–258. 9. Pugwash gained consultative status in 1991. “List of Non-governmental Organizations in Con- sultative Status with the Economic and Social Council as of 1 September 2010,” United Nations Economic and Social Council, 1 September 2010, E/2010/INF/4, p. 58. Examples of the exchange of Pugwashites with the IAEA and the UN Secretariat include Linus Pauling to Dag Hammarskjöld, 16 February 1961, in Oregon State University Libraries, Special Collections, Linus Pauling Pa- pers, accessible online at: http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling/peace/corr/peace5.011.10 -lp-hammarskjold-19610216.html; and Carlos A. Bernardes to Hans Thirring, 21 September 1957, in Nachlass Hans Thirring, Zentralbibliothek für Physik Vienna, Austria (hereinafter referred to as Thirring Papers), B35-1508, p. 1.

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Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1958 lay the institu- tional groundwork for the international nuclear order. During that process of institutionalization, the boundaries between intergovernmental and transnational actors were drawn ever more sharply. To set the early history of Pugwash within the wider context of other international organizations concerned with nuclear matters, this article uses three major events dealing with the internationalization of nuclear energy as key examples: the Second UN International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva; the Third Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs in Vienna and Kitzbühel; and the Second IAEA General Con- ference in Vienna. All events took place in September 1958, two of them—the Pugwash conference and the IAEA general conference—in the same city. The occurrence of three huge events, all of them concerned with international cooperation in nuclear matters and attended by some of the leading experts in the field, so close to each other in time and location is unparalleled in nuclear history. This article begins by briefly outlining the major attempts at international control of nuclear energy from the end of World War II through the late 1950s. It then looks at the three nuclear conferences of September 1958 and examines their respective scopes and aims. The article then discusses the role of neutral states during the second half of the 1950s, focusing in particular on Austria, where the Pugwash Conference and the IAEA General Conference took place. The Austrian government was keen to host both events, seeing this as a means to strengthen its own role in international relations.10 The frictions that arose between the two events, and prevailing perceptions of Pugwash as a Communist endeavor, demonstrate how and why the ideological Cold War was often “fought on neutral ground.”11 To explain the growing divergence between transnational actors and intergovernmental organizations, the article traces the competitive dynamics that emerged between the Austrian Pugwash conference and the office of the IAEA’s Director General in Vienna. The article especially draws on records of the IAEA Archives in Vienna, which until now have been used only rarely by historians.

10. On the history of Austrian foreign policy, see Günter Bischof et al., eds., Austrian Foreign Policy in Historical Context, Vol. 14, Contemporary Austrian Studies (New Brunswick, NJ: Translation Publish- ers, 2006). For the 1950s, also see Oliver Rathkolb, Washington ruft Wien: US-Großmachtpolitik und Österreich, 1953–1963 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1997). 11. David C. Engerman, “Ideology and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917–1962,” in Melvyn P.Lefﬂer and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War,Vol.1,Origins (Cambridge, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 33.

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International Frameworks for Nuclear Control, 1944–1958

In the rich body of literature on the history of the nuclear age, the term “nuclear order” is often used.12 The attempts to create a global nuclear order include treaties such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and international organizations such as the IAEA, initiatives that, in the light of proliferation dangers as well as safety and security risks, aimed to establish control systems for nuclear energy matters that go beyond the interests of individual states. The history and present state of the international nuclear order have received great attention from historians and political scientists. This is particularly true for scholarly examination of the NPT, which, in 1970, laid the foundation for an international nuclear nonproliferation regime that still shapes our world today.13 By contrast, scholars have paid less attention to the history of the international nuclear order before the establishment of the nonproliferation regime.14 In recent years, Gabrielle Hecht has shed new light on the complex structure and dynamics of the global nuclear order, a system of international and transnational connections that, in her view, is not built solely on diplomatic relations, international organizations, and treaties. She has introduced the concept of “nuclearity” to move beyond the East-West framework and to include the meaning of science, technology, geography, ex- ploration of source materials, and trade ﬂows in the analysis of international nuclear history.15 Despite the burgeoning scholarship, the beginnings of the

12. The notion of international nuclear order has been most prominently used by William Walker. See the debates on international nuclear order in David S. Yost, “Analyzing International Nuclear Order,” International Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 3 (2007), pp. 549–574; and William Walker, International Nuclear Order: A Rejoinder,” International Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 4 (2007), pp. 747–756. On the history of the nuclear order, see William Walker, A Perpetual Menace: Nuclear Weapons and International Order (London: Routledge 2012). 13. Historical research on the NPT is often motivated by its policy relevance. See, for example, Har- ald Fischer et al., Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Global Order (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Francis J. Gavin, “Same As It Ever Was: Nuclear Alarmism, Proliferation, and the Cold War,” International Security, Vol. 34, No. 3 (2010), pp. 7–37. On the history of the NPT, see the recent anthology edited by Roland Popp, Liviu Horowitz, and Andreas Wenger, Negotiating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty: Origins of the Nuclear Order (New York: Routledge 2017). 14. There are a few important exceptions; notably, Scheinman, International Atomic Energy Agency; Fischer, International Atomic Energy Agency; and Bernhard G. Bechhoefer, “Negotiating the Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency,” International Organization, Vol. 13, No. 1 (December 1959), pp. 38–59. On the beginnings of the international nuclear order in the context of approaches to world government, see also Waqar Zaidi, “A Blessing in Disguise: Reconstructing International Relations through Atomic Energy, 1945–1948,” Past and Present (2011), Supplement 6, pp. 309–331. 15. Gabrielle Hecht, “A Cosmogram for Nuclear Things,” Isis, Vol. 98, No. 1 (March 2007), pp. 100– 108; and Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Nuclear Trade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

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system deserve new attention. This task can benefit from new studies on the history of international organizations, a research field that for a long time has been primarily the reserve of political scientists. The end of the Cold War and the growing interest in processes of globalization have sparked new interest in this field among historians.16 The first attempts to establish international control of nuclear energy date to 1944, when Niels Bohr tried unsuccessfully to convince Franklin D. Roo- sevelt and Winston Churchill to inform Iosif Stalin about the bomb project and, in that way, to initiate diplomatic talks with the Soviet Union on postwar nuclear control.17 Bohr, the Danish émigré and Nobel Prize-winning physicist, had a high opinion of his Soviet colleagues and is an important example for the initial role of scientists in creating an international nuclear order. Bohr’s ideas also had a great influence on Joseph Rotblat, a Manhattan Project physicist and founding member of Pugwash.18 In December 1945, the foreign minis- ters of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union proposed to establish an international atomic energy commission within the framework of the newly founded UN. The first resolution ever adopted by the UN General Assembly, on 24 January 1946, traced back to this three-power proposal and established the UNAEC.19 Less than half a year later, in June 1946, the U.S. representative to the UNAEC, Baruch, proposed the creation of an International Atomic Devel- opment Authority (IADA) to maintain managerial control or ownership of all potentially dangerous nuclear energy activities.20 Baruch’s plan was the first effort to create an international institution fully devoted to nuclear matters. With his proposal, the U.S. representative introduced a revised version of

16. Sunil Amrith et al., “New Histories of the United Nations,” Journal of World History, Vol. 19, No. 3 (2008), pp. 251–274. 17. Martin J. Sherwin, “Scientists, Arms Control, and National Security,” in Norman A. Graebner, ed., National Security: Its Theory and Practice, 1945–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 105–122. 18. Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 30; and David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p.118. 19. Resolution adopted by the United Nations General Assembly 1(I), 24 January 1946. 20. For the history of the UNAEC and the Baruch plan, see Joseph I. Lieberman, The Scorpion and the Tarantula: The Struggle to Control Atomic Weapons, 1945–1949 (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1970); and Gerber, “Baruch Plan,” pp. 69–95. For an early history of the negotiations, see Bern- hard B. Bechhoefer, Postwar Negotiations for Arms Control (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1961).

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the Acheson-Lilienthal Report based on the advice of senior scientists, most notably J. Robert Oppenheimer.21 The distinction, elaborated in the report, between dangerous and non-dangerous nuclear activities henceforth characterized most of the initiatives for international nuclear regulation. Baruch’s proposal called for a strong international nuclear control system or, as he put it, “an international law with teeth in it.” He advocated an “internationalism that protects” and underscored that people were “unwilling to be fobbed off by mouthings about narrow sovereignty,” which he saw as “today’s phrase for yesterday’s isolation.”22 Five days after Baruch’s speech to the UNAEC, Andrei A. Gromyko presented the Soviet counterproposal, which called for a ban on nuclear weapons before establishing an international control system. More- over, Baruch’s attempt to overcome the right of veto was unacceptable to the Soviet government.23 Deadlocked by continuing disagreement between the Soviet Union and the United States, the UNAEC was formally dissolved in 1952, having been ineffective for three years.24 After Stalin’s death in March 1953 and in the wake of the development of the hydrogen bomb by both the United States and the Soviet Union, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower put forth a new initiative at the UN General Assembly to build an international atomic organization. In his speech in December 1953 —the so-called Atoms for Peace speech — Eisenhower proposed the establishment of an International Atomic Energy Agency “under the aegis of the United Nations.” The Atoms for Peace proposal resulted in three main initiatives. First, it led to bilateral agreements through which the United States supported the civilian nuclear ambitions of its allies. Second, the initiative gave rise to a UN conference series on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, the ﬁrst of which took place in Geneva in 1955. Third, after three years of multilateral negotiations among initially eight (later twelve) states, Atoms for Peace was instrumental in the creation

21. Barton J. Bernstein, “The Quest for Security: American Foreign Policy and International Con- trol of Atomic Energy, 1942–1946,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 60, No. 4 (March 1974), pp. 1003–1044. On Oppenheimer, see Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird, American Prometheus: The Tri- umph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Knopf, 2005). 22. United States Atomic Energy Proposals: Statement of the United States Policy on Control of Atomic Energy as Presented by Bernard M. Baruch, Esq., to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, Department of State Publication No. 2560 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1946). 23. For the Soviet reaction on Baruch’s proposal, see Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, pp. 161–165. 24. Fischer, International Atomic Energy Agency, pp. 18–23.

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of the IAEA in Vienna in 1957.25 Although the IAEA was an offspring of the ideological West, the Soviet Union helped to set it up.26 By the mid-1950s, several organizations within the UN family had established frameworks to discuss the pressing question of how to control nuclear energy for both military and civilian applications. Whereas the UN Disarma- ment Commission made only limited progress in the 1950s, initiatives promoting international cooperation on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, such as the IAEA and the Geneva Conferences, were more successful.27 Moreover, apart from international developments, regional initiatives established corner- stones for the nuclear order. In Europe, these included the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), founded by the Treaties of Rome in 1957, as well as the European Nuclear Energy Agency that was established as the nuclear agency of the Organization for European Cooperation in the same year.28 In addition to the intergovernmental initiatives, non-governmental organizations played an integral part in creating the international nuclear order in the 1950s. Because of the high scientiﬁc reputations of numerous participants and the diverstity of participants’ national backgrounds, the early Pugwash conferences are of special relevance in this regard. However, in the existing literature on the beginnings of the international nuclear order, the interplay of international organizations and non-state actors is only brieﬂy hinted at and still remarkably underresearched.29 Akira Iriye has convincingly argued

25. For the history of Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace speech and the full text, see Ira Chernus, Eisen- hower’s Atoms for Peace (College Station: Texas University Press, 2002). Also see Ken Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006). 26. On the “polyvalent significance” of Atoms for Peace, see John Krige, “Atoms for Peace, Scientific Internationalism, and Scientific Intelligence,” Osiris, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2006), pp. 161–181. The eight negotiating states were the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Belgium, South Africa, Australia, and Portugal. In 1956 the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Brazil, and India joined the group. See Elisabeth Röhrlich, “Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace: The Speech That Inspired the Cre- ation of the IAEA,” IAEA Bulletin, Vol. 54 (4 December 2013), pp. 3–4; and Elisabeth Roehrlich, “The Cold War, the Developing World, and the Creation of the IAEA,” Cold War History,Vol.16, No. 2 (Spring 2016), 195–212. 27. On the UN disarmament negotiations, see Spyros Blavoukos and Dimitris Bourantonis, “Calling the Bluff of the Western Powers in the United Nations Disarmament Negotiations, 1954–55,” Cold War History, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Summer 2014), pp. 359–376. 28. On the European frameworks for nuclear energy matters, see John Krige, “The Peaceful Atom as Political Weapon: Euratom and American Foreign Policy in the Late 1950s,” Historical Studies in Natural Sciences, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2008), pp. 5–44. On the defense of Europe and nuclear sharing, see Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace, pp. 146–200. 29. David Holloway, in Stalin and the Bomb, p. 354, briefly notes that Pugwash came into being at the same time the First Geneva Conference took place. Akira Iriye mentions the Russell-Einstein

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that in the twentieth century both international governmental and international non-governmental organizations created a “global community” and represented the “vision of one world.”30 Quantitative studies support this argument by showing that the increase in NGOs paralleled the growth of the UN system.31 The development of two research strands—one focusing on transnational activism toward “one world” and the other on international nuclear relations and diplomacy—is the result of the separation of intergovernmental organizations and non-governmental organizations that has prevailed since the late 1950s. In a thought-provoking article, Norbert Götz points to the connections between the emergence of NGOs and the “design of the world order.” Whereas Götz is primarily concerned with the history of the term “NGO,” which he takes to be “a marker of difference” vis-à-vis intergovernmental organizations, this article draws particularly on Götz’s argument that NGOs in the post-1945 era were “constructed as actors on the margins of the international stage.”32

The Nuclear-Themed Conferences of September 1958

The year 1958 was a pivotal one for the institutionalization of the international nuclear order. In July and August 1958, the Geneva Conference of Experts, composed of representatives from eight countries, was an important step on the pathway to the LTBT ﬁve years later.33 In September 1958, three other large-scale nuclear conferences took place. The Second UN International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy was held in Geneva from 1 to 13 September. The Third Pug- wash Conference on Science and World Affairs took place in the Tyrolean

Manifesto in the context of postwar intergovernmental organizations. See Akira Iriye, Global Commu- nity: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), p. 429. 30. Iriye, Global Community, p. 429. 31. John Boli, Constructing World Culture: International Non-governmental Organizations since 1875 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 14. 32. Götz, Reframing NGOs, p. 233. 33. On the history of the LTBT, see Glenn T. Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Test Ban (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981). On scientists and the test ban, see Evangelista, Unarmed Forces, pp. 60–61; and Benjamin P.Greene, Eisenhower, Science Advice, and the Nuclear TestBan Debate, 1945–1963 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).

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village of Kitzbühel and ended with a final session in Vienna (14–20 Septem- ber). The second General Conference of the IAEA convened in Vienna from 22 September to 4 October. There was a complex interplay between the three events, their organizers, participants, and agendas. The sheer size of each conference made it almost impossible for the organizers of the individual conferences not to refer in one way or another to the two other conferences. For instance, each IAEA staff member who attended the UN Geneva conference was obliged to write a memorandum on “all formal and informal” participation in the conference, including “their personal contacts, their observations, and their impressions.”34 The office of the agency’s director general wanted to use the UN conference to promote the IAEA’s interests and to “make itself known, seen, and heard of as much as possible” in Geneva.35 The three conferences of September 1958 differed in their aims and objectives. The Second Geneva Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy resulted from Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace proposal. A first conference had taken place at the United Nations Office at Geneva (UNOG) in August 1955, until then the biggest international gathering of scientists the world had ever seen.36 As a result of this success, the UN General Assembly called for a second conference to take place in September 1958.37 This second conference exceeded the size of the first and was described by Life magazine “as the biggest scientific show of the atomic age”38 and deemed a “monster conference” by Time magazine.39 It featured scientific symposia as well as commercial exhibitions and attracted more than 100,000 spectators. The de- classification of U.S., British, and Soviet research on controlled nuclear fusion was one of the major scientific outcomes of the conference.40 One of the Soviet delegates, Vasilii S. Emel’yanov, presented a four-volume edition of scientific papers on nuclear fusion, research that had earlier been classified. Most notably, the Geneva Conferences of 1955 and 1958 revived scientific exchange

34. Paul Jolles to David Fischer et al., 19 September [1958], in IAEA Archives, Vienna, Austria, Box 6363, Reading File Jolles 5, p. 1. 35. Paul Jolles to Brian Urquart, 6 December 1957, in IAEA Archives, Box 6363, Reading File Jolles, p. 1. 36. On the First Geneva Conference, see Krige, “Atoms for Peace,” pp. 174–180. 37. Resolution adopted by the United Nations General Assembly 912 (X), 3 December 1955. 38. “U.S. Steals Atomic Show: As Exhibits Make Hit, Salesmen Seek Orders at Geneva,” LIFE, September 1958, pp. 94–96. 39. Fifty Years of Magnetic Conﬁnement Fusion Research—A Retrospective (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 2008), p. 4. 40. Ibid.

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in the international physics community and led to regular contact between U.S. and Soviet physicists.41 The Third Pugwash Conference took place in the week between the end of the UN conference in Geneva and the beginning of the IAEA general conference. It was organized by the Pugwash Continuing Committee, which—with the exception of Dmitrii Skobel’tsyn—featured only scientists from Western countries before 1963.42 Unlike the UN conference in Geneva and the IAEA general conference in Vienna, the Pugwash conference was not held under the auspices of an intergovernmental organization, and, in the spirit of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, its participants were supposed to attend the conference as individuals rather than on behalf of their respective governments. Nonetheless, the Continuing Committee took advantage of the fact that many of the participants had joined their national delegations in Geneva prior to the Pugwash gathering. A major reason for holding the Pug- wash conference in Europe was that many of its participants would be coming from Geneva—the close venue helped keep travel expenses low.43 Although most of the Pugwashites had participated in the Geneva Con- ference before coming to Vienna, far fewer of them joined the following IAEA General Conference (Homi J. Bhabha, India’s most politically inﬂuential nuclear physicist, was among the exceptions). The Pugwash conference was titled “The Dangers of the Atomic Age and What Scientists Can Do about Them,” and its program featured topics such as the perils of nuclear war and nuclear weapons tests, disarmament, education, international cooperation, and the responsibility of scientists.44 A major outcome of the conference was a resolution known as “The Vienna Declaration,” which touched on issues such as the necessity to end war and the arms race, the promotion of nuclear disarmament, the internationalization of science, and the responsibility of scientists.45 A concluding public event in the Wiener Stadthalle featured distinguished scientists such as Russell and attracted about 10,000 people.46

41. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, p. 363; and Paul R. Josephson, Red Atom: Russia’s Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), pp. 175–176. 42. Rotblat, Pugwash, pp. 14–23. 43. Joseph Rotblat, Science and World Affairs: History of the Pugwash Conferences (London: Dawson, 1962), pp. 15–17; and Joseph Rotblat, Pugwash: A History of the Conferences on Science and World Affairs (Prague: Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, 1967), p. 18. 44. Eugene Rabinowitch, “The Third Pugwash Conference,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November 1958, p. 338. 45. “Vienna Declaration,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November 1958, pp. 341–344. 46. Joseph Rotblat, “Fifty Pugwash Conferences: A Tribute to Eugene Rabinowitch,” Pugwash Newslet- ter, Vol. 37, No. 2 (December 2000), p. 54.

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Almost immediately after the end of the Pugwash conference in Vienna, the second general conference of the IAEA took place in the same city. The general conference serves as one of the agency’s two policymaking organs, representing all member-states and meeting annually, normally at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna. When the IAEA held its second general conference there in late September and early October 1958, it faced several troubling issues. The agency’s director general, former Republican congressman William Sterling Cole, was confronted with both the vanishing enthusiasm of his own compatriots toward the IAEA and the fading support of other countries.47 A year earlier, in the fall of 1957, Senator Joseph McCarthy had publicly opposed the IAEA as a perilous concession to the Soviet Union, sarcastically stating that it would have been “a good deal easier” to “send a shipload of atom bombs to the Communist empire.”48 Bertrand Goldschmidt, pioneer of the French nuclear program, considered it a grave mistake to have established the IAEA as an “almost completely autonomous body,” rather than as a subordinate working unit of the United Nations. UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld resented the IAEA for not acting “under the wing of the UN.”49 The general conference was thus a decisive moment for the IAEA, one in which its relations to other intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations had to be deﬁned. At the international conference on the IAEA statute, held at UN Headquarters in New York in the fall of 1956, NGOs were allowed only limited participation.50 At the ﬁrst and the second IAEA general conferences, no NGO representatives had the right to address the assembly, but the 1958 conference approved rules designed by the agency’s board of governors that granted certain NGOs consultative status to the IAEA. In 1959 the agency granted such status to nine NGOs that had applied for it after

47. William Sterling Cole to Lewis Strauss, 16 July 1959, in Colgate University Library, Sterling Cole Papers, Folder 9, p. 3. 48. Richard J. H. Johnston, “President Target at G.O.P. Seminar,” The New York Times,2October 1957, in NARA, RG 326, Records of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC): Records Relating to the Formation of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1953–1957, Box 17. 49. Max Isenbergh to Philipp J. Farley, 22 May 1958, in NARA, RG 59: General Records of the Department of State. Ofﬁce of the Secretary: Ofﬁce of the Special Assistant for the Secretary of State for Atomic Energy and Outer Space, Box 141, IAEA Policy-Position-Proposals. 50. “Conference Serving Arrangements for the Conference on the Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency,” n.d., in United Nations Archives New York (UN Archives), Series 370 (Bunche Files), Box 20, File: 8 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—Conference on Statute— Administration—Organization 29/3/1956–12/10/1956.

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being invited to do so by the board of governors. Pugwash was not among them.51 Following the agency’s consolidation, a competitive dynamic evolved between the office of the IAEA’s director general and other international organizations, notably the United Nations and the UN Secretariat. Cole felt pressure from some of the agency’s governors for the IAEA to coordinate at least some of the UN’s nuclear-related activities, including the work of the Radiation Committee and the Administrative Committee on Coordination.52 After the Second Geneva Conference, the agency’s board of governors and the office of the director general also aimed to take on more responsibility in the preparation of further UN Conferences on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, especially the conferences’ scientific programs.53 Moreover, some UN specialized agencies, such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, regarded the IAEA as a competitor in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.54 The tensions emerging between agency departments and some UN organizations led to a bizarre situation in which the IAEA and the UN Secretary General each had a Scien- tific Advisory Committee (SAC) composed of the same scientists. However, the UN Secretariat regarded the IAEA’s scientific advisory board as a “new and separate committee” and therefore expected “no conflict of interest” to be caused by this overlapping of personnel.55 Within the young IAEA, the role of SAC was controversial. Its creation had been proposed by the Soviet delegation in 1957, but U.S. officials, who were afraid that SAC could eventually undermine the power of the U.S. director general, initially opposed it. The East-West controversies about SAC

51. Raymond Spencer Rodgers, “Non-governmental IAEA Representatives,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 1961, p. 24. 52. Martin Hill to Dag Hammarskjöld, 25 April 1958, in UN Archives, Series 370 (Bunche Files), Box 19, File: 10 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Administrative Committee on Co-ordination on Atomic Energy Questions Subcommittee; and Paul Jolles to Andrey Galagan, 19 August 1958, in IAEA Archives, Box 6363, Reading File Jolles 5, p. 1; and Paul Jolles to William Sterling Cole et al., 20 August 1958, in IAEA Archives, Box 6363, Reading File Jolles 5, pp. 1–2. 53. A. Dollinger to Ralph Bunche, 20 February 1959, in UN Archives, Series 370 (Bunche Files), Box 19, File: 12 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Advisory Committees—Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy and Scientiﬁc, p. 1. 54. Jacob Hamblin, “Exorcising Ghosts in the Age of Automation: United Nations Experts and Atoms for Peace,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 47, No. 4 (October 2006), pp. 737–742. 55. Telegraph from Ralph Bunche, 18 September 1958, in UN Archives, Series 262, Box 5, File 4: IAEA-SAC Correspondence 1958–1963; and Telegraph from A. Dollinger, n.d., in UN Archives, Series 262, Box 5, File 4: IAEA-SAC Correspondence 1958–1963.

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were solved eventually, but the United States was not able to prevent its creation.56

Neutral Austria and the Third Pugwash Conference

No matter how international their membership and scope, international organizations are bound to their location. The creation of a new international organization inherently raises the question of where to establish its headquarters. When examining the emergence of nuclear institutions in the 1950s, the matter of location is of primary importance. Besides sharing a focus on nuclear matters, all three conferences of September 1958 took place in neutral countries. Swiss neutrality gained international recognition at the 1815 Congress of Vienna, and Austrian neutrality was the result of international developments after World War II. Following a change in leadership in the Soviet Union and ten years of four-power military occupation, during which negotiations on the fate of Austria had been overshadowed by the German question, Austria regained its national sovereignty on 15 May 1955 with the signing of the Aus- trian State Treaty. On 26 October of the same year, it declared itself a neutral state.57 In the postwar era, both Austria and Switzerland pursued policies of “neutrality” that relied heavily on international organizations. Austria became a member of the UN soon after the country’s declaration of neutrality. Switzer- land, however, did not join the UN until 2002, even though it served as the seat of UNOG from 1946 on. The nuclear question was a primary subject for several of the new international organizations that emerged after 1945, and it affected the Swiss and Austrian policies of neutrality in signiﬁcant ways. Science, especially nuclear science, offered an opportunity for international cooperation that would become a pillar of national identity. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva and the IAEA in Vi- enna demonstrated how internationalism, science, neutrality, and national

56. See the IAEA Board of Governors records on the creation of SAC: IAEA/GOV 214; IAEA GOV 229; IAEA PR 58/31 (all IAEA Archives). 57. Arnold Suppan et al., Der österreichische Staatsvertrag 1955: Internationale Strategie, rechtliche Rel- evanz, nationale Identität / The Austrian State Treaty 1955: International Strategy, Legal Relevance, National Identity (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2005); Gün- ter Bischof, Austria in the First Cold War, 1945–1955: The Leverage of the Weak (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1999); Michael Gehler, “From Non-Alignment to Neutrality: Austria’s Transformation during the First East-West Détente, 1953–1958,” Journal of Cold War Studies,Vol.7,No.4(Fall 2005), pp. 104–136; and Andrew E. Harrod, “Austrian Neutrality: The Early Years, 1955–1958,” Austrian History Yearbook, Vol. 41 (2010), pp. 216–246.

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identity were bound together in both Switzerland and Austria.58 Examining the beginnings of the IAEA in Vienna as well as the background of the Third Pugwash Conference in Austria offers interesting insights into this complex interplay. After the Soviet Union joined the multilateral negotiations to create the IAEA in late 1955, the speciﬁc question of where to establish the new organization’s headquarters came to the fore.59 The Soviet Union insisted on a neutral state and proposed Geneva, Vienna, or Stockholm. In the United States, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and especially its chairman, Lewis L. Strauss, strongly lobbied for a U.S. location, whereas the State De- partment was more inclined to accept a neutral site.60 For John Foster Dulles and many senior ofﬁcials, Geneva initially was the front-running candidate for the IAEA’s headquarters, but by 1956 the preferred site was increasingly Vienna. This was due in part to the fact that the Austrian government had responded enthusiastically to the Soviet proposal to base the agency in Vi- enna. The U.S. State Department, which considered Austria to be “strongly anti-Communist” and “part of the Western World,” felt it was of the utmost importance not to create the impression that Austria was “dropped politically by the West.” Even though Geneva had distinct practical advantages over Vi- enna, the State Department argued that supporting the newly neutral state and ensuring that it felt encouraged by the United States were far more important.61 The U.S. position ultimately gained support from the governments of other Western countries, many of which initially had reservations about the

58. For the Swiss example, see Bruno J. Strasser, “The Coproduction of Neutral Science and Neutral State in Cold War Europe: Switzerland and International Scientific Cooperation, 1951–1969,” in “Science and National Identity,” special issue, Osiris, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2009), pp. 165–187. On the role of other neutrals, see, for instance, Mikael Nilsson, “Amber Nine: NATO’s Secret Use of a Flight Path over Sweden and the Incorporation of Sweden in NATO’s Infrastructure,” Journal of Contemporary European History, Vol. 44, No. 2 (2009), pp. 287–307. 59. Here I draw on Elisabeth Röhrlich, “Die Gründung der International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Wien: Österreich, die atomare Herausforderung und der Kalte Krieg,” in Wolfgang L. Reiter, Juliane Mikoletzky, Herbert Matis, and Mitchell Ash, eds., Wissenschaft, Technologie und indus- trielle Entwicklung in Zentraleuropa im Kalten Krieg (Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2017), pp. 339–368. 60. Gerard C. Smith to Lewis Strauss, 15 May 1956, pp. 1–3, in NARA, RG 59: General Records of the Department of State, Office of the Secretary, Office of the Special Assistant for the Secretary of State for Atomic Energy and Outer Space, Box 139, File: 10.15 IAEA Headquarters Location 1955– 1959, II. 61. “Austrian Interest in Selection of Vienna as Permanent Site for IAEA,” 24 May 1956, in NARA, RG 59: General Records of the Department of State, Office of the Secretary, Office of the Special Assistant for the Secretary of State for Atomic Energy and Outer Space, Box 139, File: 10.15 IAEA Headquarters Location 1955–1959, II; and Report from U.S. Embassy in Austria, n.d., in NARA, RG 59: General Records of the Department of State, Office of the Secretary, Office of the Special Assistant for the Secretary of State for Atomic Energy and Outer Space, Box 139, File: 10.15 IAEA Headquarters Location 1955–1959, I. Also see Elisabeth Röhrlich, “To Make the End Time Endless: The Early Years

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fledgling and untested neutrality of Austria. In contrast, nonaligned India was one of the earliest supporters of an Austrian location for the IAEA.62 The Austrians’ work toward the establishment of the IAEA was first and foremost an effort to regain international prestige and thereby, as a report of the Austrian Foreign Ministry put it, to reenter “the blood circulation of the world.”63 Austria, which had a history of hosting major international conferences, strove to use this tradition to its advantage. Fostering scientific cooperation was regarded as an excellent tool in achieving this aim, especially given the widespread perception of nuclear science as a symbol of modernity and progress. The presence of IAEA officials was expected to provide some protec- tion for the neutral state, given its geographical location at the edge of the Iron Curtain.64 Hosting the Third Pugwash Conference in Kitzbühel and Vienna in September 1958 was in line with Austrian thinking about the IAEA. Hans Thirring, an Austrian physicist and pacifist, was the liaison between the Pug- wash Continuing Committee and the Austrian individuals and institutions sponsoring the event. Thirring had already participated in the first Pugwash conference in Nova Scotia in 1957.65 He was a member of the Austrian delegation to the IAEA, in which, from the outset, he had shown great interest. Even before the agency came into being, Thirring shared his ideas with the IAEA Preparatory Commission and tried to raise awareness about the responsibility of scientists.66 Thirring had good contacts with Bruno Kreisky of the Socialist Party of Austria (SPÖ). At that time Kreisky served as state secretary for foreign affairs and as secretary general of the Theodor Körner Foundation, which was affiliated with the SPÖ. Thirring managed to convince Kreisky to have the foundation support the Pugwash conference with a generous grant.67 Thirring was not the only Pugwashite whom Kreisky knew on a personal level. The

of Günther Ander’s Fight against Nuclear Weapons,” in Günter Bischof, Jason Dawsey, and Bernhard Fetz, eds., The Life and Work of Günther Anders (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2014), pp. 48–49. 62. Bertrand Goldschmidt, “The Origins of the International Atomic Energy Agency,” in International Atomic Energy Agency: Personal Reﬂections. A Fortieth Anniversary Publication (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 1997), p. 9. 63. “Amtssitz der IAEO in Wien: Überblick über die Bemühungen des BKA, AA,” 24 January 1958, in Archives of the Austrian Foreign Ministry, Völkerrechtsbüro Vienna, 536378-VR/58, p. 23. On Vienna as a site for international conferences, see also Eric Frey, “Konferenzplatz Wien: Vienna as an International Conference Site,” in Günter Bischof et al., eds., Global Austria: Austria’s Place in Europe and the World (New Orleans: UNO-iou Presses, 2011), pp. 147–161. 64. “Amtssitz der IAEO in Wien,” pp. 23–24. 65. Rotblat, Pugwash, pp. 13–14. 66. Carlos A. Bernardes to Hans Thirring, 21 September 1957, in Thirring Papers, B35-1508, p. 1. 67. Hans Thirring to Bruno Kepnik, 26 July 1958, in Thirring Papers, B35-1483.

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physicist Victor Weisskopf, a Jewish refugee from Austria, who had been a member of the Manhattan Project and later a director of CERN, had, like Kreisky, been involved in the socialist youth organizations in interwar Vi- enna. From early in his political career, Kreisky, who later became Austria’s longest-serving federal chancellor, had pursued a foreign policy that aimed to reposition the small, neutral state in the international system. Kreisky was clear about his support of the West in the second half of the 1950s. He differed in this from Federal Chancellor Julius Raab, a member of the Austrian People’s Party, who expressed a less U.S.-friendly interpretation of neutrality. Raab sought closer communication with the Soviet Union to emphasize Austria’s neutrality, whereas Kreisky stood out as a clearly Western-leaning member of the Austrian government. At around the time of the Third Pugwash Conference, Kreisky was involved in the organization of another significant international event in Aus- tria. He participated in and was one of the initiators of confidential meetings to organize a counterprogram to the Communist World Youth Festival, which was to take place in Vienna the following year. For Chancellor Raab, hosting the festival was in compliance with Austria’s neutrality. To develop a coun- terinitiative, Kreisky teamed up with some well-known anti-Communists, including C. D. Jackson, Eisenhower’s former propaganda adviser and chief promoter of Atoms for Peace.68 Jackson was a member of the so-called Circle of Meran that organized the counterfestival, a fact that underlined Kreisky’s anti-Communism as well as his close contacts with high-ranking individuals in the United States.69 Kreisky was keen to counter the perception of Pugwash as a Communist initiative. Shortly before the Austrian Pugwash conference began, he asked Thirring to get in touch with Norman Thomas, a socialist and Pugwashite from the United States whom Kreisky considered to have “great merits in combating anti-Pugwash feelings in official U.S. circles.”70 Thirring shared Kreisky’s concern that Pugwash was seen in many Western countries as a Communist endeavor.71 However, cables from the U.S. embassy in Vienna on the Pugwash conference indicate that Thirring was perceived as a reliable

68. On C. D. Jackson’s role in the development and promotion of Atoms for Peace, see Ira Chernus, Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace. 69. Elisabeth Röhrlich, Kreiskys Außenpolitik: Zwischen österreichischer Identität und internationalem Programm (Vienna: V&R Vienna University Press, 2009), pp. 143–151. 70. Thirring to Mrs. Nicolussi, 26 August 1958, in Thirring Papers, B35-1494. 72. Hans Thirring to Dr. Lorenz, Vienna, 20 June 1958, in Thirring Papers, B35-1498.

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and “staunch independent.”72 In the wider context of anti-Communist suspicions during the conference preparations, the choice of specific conference topics proved to be contentious. Whereas Western scientists and politicians— especially from the United States and Britain—wanted to emphasize “the problems of radioactivity in the peaceful and military uses of atomic energy,” their Soviet counterparts aimed at highlighting the problems of the arms race.73 The U.S. opposition to disarmament initiatives had already caused the demise of the UNAEC a few years earlier and was one of the most delicate questions in East-West negotiations. In the eyes of many Westerners, it was not a desirable question to put at the top of the Pugwash conference’s agenda. The British Foreign Office feared that the Pugwash Continuing Committee would invite mainly scientists who were “more favourable to the Soviet than the Western thesis on disarmament.” Moreover, the Foreign Office was afraid that the recently published report of the UN Scientific Committee on Radia- tion would strengthen the Pugwashites’ campaign against nuclear tests.74 As Astrid Forland has pointed out, in the 1950s the notion of “disarmament” was somewhat vague and was also used for initiatives that today would be described as nonproliferation or arms control measures.75 Weisskopf wanted to use Pugwash as a forum to “explain to the Russians what disarmament really means and to make them understand that total disarmament is against their own interests.”76 For the Austrian sponsors of the Pugwash conference, the concluding public event in Vienna was more important than the closed sessions in Kitzbühel. The large event was funded by the City of Vienna and opened by Austrian Federal President Adolf Schärf. Again, this appeared to be an excellent means to emphasize the country’s new postwar image as an international meeting place. Bertrand Russell in his speech referred to his grandfather, who had participated in the 1855 Vienna conference to end the Crimean War.

72. “Austrian Invitation for Atomic Scientists Meeting,” 23 April 1958, in NARA, RG 84: Foreign Service Posts Austria, Mission to the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1957–1961, Pugwash Conferences—Pugwash. Box 2. 73. W. Tapley Bennett, Jr., to the Department of State, Washington, DC, 5 May 1958, in NARA, RG 84: Foreign Service Posts Austria, Mission to the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1957–1961, Pugwash Conferences—Pugwash, Box 2. 74. “Dangers of Atomic Radiation: Plans to Hold Third Pugwash Conference in Vienna at Same Time as the General Conference of the IAEA,” September 1958, in The National Archives of the United Kingdom, FO 371/135530. 75. Astrid Forland, “Negotiating Supranational Rules: The Genesis of the International Atomic Energy Agency Safeguards System,” Ph.D. Diss., University of Bergen 1997, p. 36. 76. Victor Weisskopf to Isidor Rabi, 6 July 1960, Library of Congress, Isidor Rabi Papers, Box 8: Correspondence with Victor Weisskopf.

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This helped to underscore the city’s reputation as an international hub that the supporters of locating the IAEA and the Pugwash conference in Vienna had aimed to create. However, this appeal to a wider audience was an unusual turn for Pugwash, and the size of the Vienna event was never reproduced at later conferences.77 Some Pugwashites, including Eugene Rabinowitch, were not enthusiastic about the publicity aspects of holding large events such as the one in Vienna.78

The IAEA and the Pugwash Conference in Kitzbühel and Vienna

The formative years of the international nuclear order showed indistinct and fluid boundaries between UN actions, bilateral and multilateral activities, and the proposals of scientists, forming a complex interplay of discussions on var- ious levels and in diverse settings. Moreover, the different initiatives and organizations faced the task of specifying their respective scopes, objectives, and relations. With the “Vienna Declaration” of September 1958, the Pugwashites sought, among other things, to define their relationship to the IAEA. Under the heading “Technology in the Service of Peace,” the declaration called for strengthening assistance to developing countries through better international cooperation in the use of peaceful applications of nuclear energy. In this context, the declaration referred to the IAEA as an international organization that aimed to help “the nations of the world” increase their material welfare. This reference to the IAEA can be found even in an early outline of the “Vienna Declaration” drafted by U.S. and British members of the Continuing Com- mittee.79 At the heyday of international belief in the “peaceful atom,” the use of civilian nuclear applications to further worldwide economic development was supported by the Pugwash Conferences, the IAEA, and the UN alike. The office of the IAEA’s director general, however, aimed to distinguish the agency’s activities from the Pugwash event. The United States had filled the position of the IAEA’s first director general with the former chairman of the U.S. Congress’s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, William Sterling

77. Rotblat, “Fifty Conferences,” p. 54. 78. Bennett, Jr., to the Department of State, Washington, DC, 5 May 1958. 79. “Draft of a Statement (For Consideration at the Third Pugwash Conference at Kitzbuhel, Aus- tria),” 17 September 1958, in Oregon State University Libraries, Linus Pauling Papers, Special Collections.

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Cole. Thus, the office of the agency’s director general was U.S.-dominated from 1957 to 1961. Cole’s frequent in-depth correspondence with Lewis Strauss served as an important channel of information between the head of the IAEA and the former chairman of the AEC.80 The debate on the IAEA’s representation at the Kitzbühel conference il- lustrates the prevailing skepticism toward Pugwash within the office of the agency’s director general. In early August 1958, Rabinowitch, a member of the Continuing Committee, had suggested that Thirring invite to the Pug- wash conference a representative of the IAEA who could attend the Kitzbühel meetings and deliver a paper on the agency’s work. Thirring adopted Rabi- nowitch’s idea and contacted fellow Austrian Karl Gruber. Gruber’s check- ered political career had led him from the position of foreign minister to become Austrian ambassador in Washington, DC, where in the mid-1950s he had been the strongest advocate for locating the IAEA in Vienna. After the agency’s creation, Gruber was special adviser to Cole. In the summer of 1958, Thirring invited Gruber to represent the IAEA at the Kitzbühel meeting, thus informally including the agency in the Pugwash conference.81 Gruber told Thirring that he was unable to accept the invitation but suggested that the Pugwashite write an official letter of invitation to the IAEA director general.82 Thirring obliged, but Cole refused the invitation and ex- plained that a staff member, Wladimir Grigorieff, would attend the conference in his place.83 Thirring had hoped that a senior official of the agency, rather than a member of its scientific staff, would attend. Grigorieff, a U.S. national, had formerly been a scientist at Oak Ridge Laboratories and had only recently joined the IAEA. Despite his new affiliation, he had already gained experience representing the IAEA in official contexts; for instance, at the UN Family Day.84 The director general’s decision to send a subordinate to represent the IAEA at the Pugwash meeting was a political calculation and an early indica- tion of what would become an enduring ambivalence toward Pugwash. Paul R. Jolles of Switzerland, at that time IAEA deputy director, used his participation in the Second Geneva Conference to contact some Pugwashites, including Rotblat. Jolles’s experience in Geneva strengthened his skepticism

80. A collection of letters between Cole and Strauss can be found in Colgate University Library, Special Collections, Sterling Cole Papers. Strauss’s term as AEC chairman ended in 1958. 81. Hans Thirring to Karl Gruber, 8 August 1958, in Thirring Papers, B35-1496. 82. Karl Gruber to Hans Thirring, 25 August 1958, in Thirring Papers, B35-1495. 83. Sterling Cole to Hans Thirring, 6 September 1958, in Thirring Papers, B35-1303. 84. Paul Jolles to Mr. Kraczkiewicz, 20 June [1958], in IAEA Archives, Box 6363, Reading File Jolles 5, p. 1.

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about the upcoming Pugwash conference in Austria. This suspicion especially applied to the topics of the Kitzbühel meeting, which had already triggered debates within the U.S. administration during the preparatory phase of the conference. In a letter to Cole, Jolles quoted from the Pugwash agenda and noted the topics “danger of war and nuclear tests,” as well as “relaxation of ten- sion and disarmament problems.” Jolles concluded that the agency’s attitude to the Pugwash conference should be one “of caution.” Although the participants of the Pugwash conference were scientists, Jolles believed the conference’s purpose was political. He argued that the IAEA must not be mentioned “if, which seems likely, an appeal will be drafted ‘to humanity’ and issued by the conference.”85 For Jolles, the IAEA was an international organization primarily concerned with the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and therefore had no common ground with the disarmament calls of the Pugwashites. Grigorieff attended the Kitzbühel meeting as an “unofficial observer,” but in subsequent years the IAEA did not again send a representative to a Pugwash meeting.86 For both the U.S. State Department and the office of the IAEA director general, the Pugwash conference of 1958 complicated the situation for the agency’s general conference that same month. At the time, many of the IAEA’s future functions, responsibilities, and objectives were still vague. The multilateral negotiations to found the IAEA had been a groundbreaking step toward establishing an international nuclear order when compared to the demise of the UNAEC only a few years earlier, but this achievement was primarily due to the separation of IAEA negotiations from disarmament talks, a negotiating strategy in which the agency’s future role in nuclear disarmament initiatives was left in limbo. For the United States, the IAEA was not designed to be a disarmament agency. Therefore, senior State Department officials, as well as members of the office of the IAEA director general, expressed concern that the Pugwash conference’s call for disarmament could have unwanted effects on the IAEA’s general conference and on the public perception of the agency’s functions. The closeness in time and location of both events heightened fears that the IAEA might come to be associated with Pugwash and, following from this, be perceived as a disarmament organization. In addition, the U.S. embassy in Vienna worried that the ceremonial opening of the IAEA general conference, which took place shortly after the huge Pugwash event, would give the

85. Paul Jolles to William Sterling Cole, 8 September 1958, in IAEA Archives, Box 6363, Reading File Jolles, p. 1. 86. For the list of participants, see Rotblat, Pugwash, pp. 77–224.

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Pugwash statements even wider publicity.87 Austrian media coverage of the two events showed that the U.S. concerns were well-founded. The newsreel about the public Pugwash event in Vienna also reported on the opening of the IAEA general conference and stated that the IAEA delegates shared the warning appeals of the Pugwashites.88 To avoid this kind of coverage, the U.S. embassy in Vienna suggested that the United States Information Agency (USIA) give the sessions in Kitzbühel “as little attention as possible” and “use what- ever antidotes at hand” to counter positive reports on Russell’s appearance in Vienna.89 Given the Soviet Union’s continual efforts to put disarmament on the IAEA’s agenda, the U.S. State Department was particularly concerned that one of the Soviet delegates would use statements from the Pugwash conference at the IAEA general conference.90 These concerns were borne out when So- viet delegate Emel’yanov, one of the USSR’s leading nuclear scientists, sharply criticized the IAEA as an agency “set up mainly for propaganda reasons.” Emel’yanov suggested the agency should “draw practical conclusions” from the findings of the “eminent scientists” who had participated in the Pugwash conference. He thus pointedly ranked the authority of the members of Pug- wash above the authority of the IAEA and its officials, and he also depicted the “Vienna Declaration” as a statement equal to other international resolutions. Emel’yanov pressed this argument further when he referred to the example of his Norwegian colleague, Gunnar Randers, a former scientific adviser to both Cole and the UN Secretary General and chairman of the IAEA’s committee on isotope handling. Randers had participated in the Kitzbühel meetings and, ac- cording to Emel’yanov, had voiced “severe criticism of the agency’s activities” and, despite having recently worked for the IAEA, had supposedly announced he would not take “any further part” in it.91 (Randers, who in 1960 gained a seat on the IAEA’s board of governors, was, nevertheless, a supportive, if crit- ical, observer of the agency’s activities, as his articles in the Bulletin of Atomic

87. Bennett, Jr., to the Department of State, Washington, DC, 5 May 1958. 88. “Pugwash Conference,” 20 September 1958, in Austrian Film Archive, FT 44/61, no 2. 89. Outgoing Telegram, Foreign Service of the United States of America, 19 September 1958, in NARA, RG 84: Foreign Service Posts Austria, Mission to the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1957–1961, Pugwash Conferences—Pugwash, Box 2. 90. Halver O. Ekern to John H. Manley, 18 August 1958, in NARA, RG 84: Foreign Service Posts Austria, Mission to the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1957–1961, Pugwash Conferences— Pugwash, Box 2. 91. “Intervention of Mr. Emelyanov during the General Debate of Friday 26 September 1958 (Trans- lated into English by the Secretariat),” in IAEA Archives, Correspondence (T), United Nations— General, UN Consultative Committee on Public Information, Box 108.

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Scientists in the late 1950s and early 1960s show.)92 Emel’yanov’s references to Randers, a respected Western scientist, were an obvious effort to discredit the agency as an organization that lacked the support of leading scientists. His statements have to be seen in the context of discussions about the role of scientists in the agency, especially about SAC. However, the Soviet government was also skeptical about the Kitzbühel meetings, even though the Soviet Academy of Sciences sponsored the USSR’s participants. Like the U.S. government, Soviet officials feared that Pugwash would be difficult to control. All Soviet participants in the Pugwash conferences were carefully chosen by the government and had to report on their activities. Only from 1959 onward did the Soviet government develop a more open attitude toward Pugwash.93 In late 1960 a Pugwash conference took place in Moscow. Despite the Soviet Union’s ambivalence in 1958, Nikita Khrushchev sent an official greeting to the Pugwash conference, an example the U.S. government refused to follow.94 In addition, the Soviet embassy in Vienna invited the Pugwashites to a welcome reception. Thus, in a variety of ways, the Soviet Union tried to take advantage of the public attention Pug- wash received. Emel’yanov’s statement on the significance of Pugwash for the IAEA must also be seen in the wider context of defining the character and scope of the new international agency. From the time the IAEA negotiations began, the question of the agency’s character as a political, technical, and scientific organization, as well as the vague definition of the role of scientists, had pervaded the multilateral discussions. An early and revealing example of this was the “meeting of six governments,” which took place at the Palais de Nations in Geneva in August 1955 immediately after the First Geneva Conference and shortly before the Soviet Union officially joined the negotiations on the IAEA statute.95 The aim of the talks was to discuss the IAEA’s future role in international nuclear control and verification, especially the nature of nuclear safeguards. The “meeting of six governments” did not, however, involve high-level politicians,

92. Gunnar Randers, “International Atomic Energy Agency: The Scientist’s View,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 1959, pp. 163–167; and Gunnar Randers, “What about Vienna?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 1961, pp. 20–23. 93. Evangelista, Unarmed Forces, pp. 33–39. 94. “Third Pugwash Conference in Kitzbuhel,” John F. Rieger to U.S. Embassy, Vienna, 25 September 1958, in NARA, RG 84: Foreign Service Posts Austria, Mission to the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1957–1961, Pugwash Conferences—Pugwash, Box 2. 95. On these talks, see Elisabeth Roehrlich, “Negotiating Veriﬁcation: International Diplomacy and the Evolution of Nuclear Safeguards, 1945–1972,” Diplomacy and Statecraft, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2018), pp. 29–50.

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senior officials, or diplomats. Instead, it brought together leading scientists. The United States was represented by Isidor Rabi, the Soviet Union by Sko- bel’tsyn, who later became a member of Pugwash and also participated in the Pugwash conference in Kitzbühel and Vienna. On 22 August 1955, in the opening session of the so-called six government meeting, Rabi emphasized that the group had met to “talk about a technical problem in a technical man- ner.”96 Nevertheless, the scientists joined the discussions on behalf of their respective governments. Even though the meeting’s venue was UNOG, it was not a UN event but one initiated by the United States and the Soviet Union. The United Nations simply provided the facilities. The UN Secretariat was informed only on a non-official level about the meetings, and Skobel’tsyn let Ralph Bunche know that the negotiations were “not UN business.” This view was shared by Skobel’tsyn’s U.S. counterpart, Strauss.97 The 1958 Second Geneva Conference was a scientific conference hosted by the UN to deal only with the “peaceful uses of nuclear energy.” The conference did not concern itself with the delicate question of nuclear disarmament, nor was it in any sense perceived as a Communist propaganda event. However, the conference had strong political implications, and the delegations were not composed solely of scientists. The U.S. delegation, for instance, was headed by Strauss in his function as the president’s Special Assistant on Atomic Affairs.98 Hammarskjöld’s official report characterized the conference as “entirely scientific and technological” and described the discussions as an “objective exchange” among scientists.99 An analysis by the Stanford Research Institute, however, expressed doubt that the conference was “a scientific con- clave without political implications,” arguing instead that “politics permeated the proceedings from beginning to the end.”100 Several factors back the latter interpretation; for instance, the connection of the commercial exhibition to national economic interests.

96. “Proposed International Atomic Energy Agency. Meeting of Six Governments. Verbatim Record, Held at the Palais des Nations, Geneva, on Monday 22 1955, at 10.30 a.m.,” 29 September 1955, in NARA, RG 326: Records of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC): Records Relating to the Formation of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1953–1957, International Affairs, IAEA: PV Documents 1955, Box 5, p. 2. 97. Dag Hammarskjöld to Ralph Bunche, handwritten notes, n.d., in UN Archives, File: 11 IAEA— Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy—Relationship Study—Miscellaneous Notes Secretary General— Bunche ca. 1955, Series 370 (Bunches Files), Box 22. 98. Second United Nations International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, List of Dele- gations, Geneva, 1–13 September 1958 (n.p.: n.d.), p. 189. 99. The Second United Nations International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. Report of the Secretary General, A 39/49, 16 October 1958, in UN Archives, Series 370, File: 16 IAEA—Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy—Second Conference 12.3.1956–17.11.1959, Box 22. 100. Ashton J. O’Donnell, “Atoms for Peace—On Trial,” SRI Journal, Vol. 3 (1959), pp. 10–23.

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The correspondence between the U.S. and Austrian organizers of the Pugwash conference shows how keen the Pugwashites were to avoid the impression that the participants attended the conference on behalf of their national governments. Whereas the Russell-Einstein Manifesto had been signed by only one scientist from a Soviet-bloc country, the Continuing Committee sought well-balanced participation of scientists from East and West. Notably, the organizers did not want to offend the Soviet Union by a large overrepresen- tation of U.S. participants, nor did they want to provoke U.S. “witchhunters” by inviting too many “liberal” scientists and thus reinforcing the prevailing perception of Pugwash as a “communist enterprise in disguise.”101 This invitation policy, however, resulted in the rejection of some scientists who wanted to attend the conference but were from a country that was already adequately represented.102 Most participants came from the then three nuclear powers, the United States (20 participants), the Soviet Union (10), and the United Kingdom (7).103 Shortly after the Pugwash conference, Rabinowitch published a report in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in which he discussed the broad political spectrum of the conference’s participants. He wrote that the Pugwash conference gathered “communists, radicals, conservatives, military realists, and ide- alistic paciﬁsts”—a group of “individuals with a wide spectrum of opinions,” united only by being scientists.104 Rabinowitch’s remarks on the political background of the Pugwashites hardly constituted a differentiated list of prevailing political orientations. His deeper concern was to respond to the widespread perception of Pugwash as being a Communist endeavor, and, without nam- ing names, he tried to make clear that Pugwash was an arena for Easterners, Westerners, and neutrals alike. However, despite India’s strong representation at the conference—including Bhabha—and despite neutral Austria’s support of the conference, antagonism between East and West dominated the event. Delegates from the United States and the Soviet Union clashed with one another, and participants from neutral countries tried to disengage from the con- ﬂicts.105 The Pugwash conference in Austria may have aimed at promoting a

101. Hans Thirring to Otto Nathan, 15 July 1958, in Thirring Papers, B35-1123. 102. Hans Thirring to Heinz Trampusch, 29 August 1958, in Thirring Papers, B35-1490. 103. Rotblat, Pugwash, pp. 87–89. 104. Rabinowitch, “The Third Pugwash Conference,” pp. 338–340. 105. Telegram from Hanson, Munich, to Stephens, USIA, 16 September 1958, in NARA, RG 84: Foreign Service Posts Austria, Mission to the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1957–1961, Pug- wash Conferences—Pugwash, Box 2.

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vision of one world, but it was one world made of two largely incompatible parts.

Conclusion

The skepticism toward Pugwash that prevailed in the office of the IAEA’s U.S. director general resulted from the aim of avoiding linkage between the IAEA and disarmament initiatives. In addition, the new agency—with its scope and agenda still being carved out—had to define its role and legitimacy in the new, still-evolving international nuclear order. Thus, competitive dynamics affected relations between the IAEA and the transnational actor Pugwash, as well as the agency’s relationship with other organizations and institutions of the UN system. Senior agency officials and members of delegations believed the IAEA should be the principal institution to set nuclear norms and agendas. The three “nuclear” conferences of September 1958—the Second UN Inter- national Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva, the Third Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs in Kitzbühel and Vienna, and the second IAEA General Conference—therefore mark a pivotal phase in the history of the international nuclear order and its early institutionalization. The conferences were hosted by organizations—the United Nations, the Pugwash Continuing Committee, and the IAEA—that all sought to play an active part in the creation of the nuclear order of the Cold War. In the 1950s the consensus was that humanity would benefit from the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. This is why the Second Geneva Conference, held at UNOG, did not trigger an ideology-laden debate between East and West. In the context of the “peaceful atom,” even the term “peace,” which in the ideological setting of the Cold War was the Soviet counterpart to U.S. “freedom” propaganda, turned out to be unproblematic for the West. In contrast, the IAEA general conference and the Pugwash conference involved more sensitive questions. For the Austrian government, the creation of the IAEA in Vienna and the invitation to host the Third Pugwash Conference were ele- ments of a policy that sought to strengthen Austria’s position in international relations. Because the Austrian supporters of the Pugwash conference regarded Austria not as ideologically “neutral” but as part of the democratic West, they were eager to allay anti-Communist suspicions about Pugwash. For the U.S.- dominated office of the IAEA director general, it was more important to dis- tance itself from the disarmament proposals of the Pugwashites (which related directly to the question of what the agency’s mandate was) than from their reputation as a Communist-leaning organization.

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Scientists were crucial actors in driving international nuclear relations in the second half of the 1950s. They underscored their social responsibility through publications and appeals; their scientific papers at conferences like the Second Geneva Conference increased the production of knowledge in the nuclear field; and their advice to international organizations like the UN and the IAEA had an impact on the agendas of these organizations. The three nuclear conferences of 1958, with their close links in time and location, were shaped by interplays of science and politics at a unique moment in nuclear history. The fact that the Pugwash conference of September 1958 took place between two other major nuclear-themed conferences provided it with an ex- ceptional opportunity to refer to the activities of international organizations. On the other hand, because of the complex and immediate links among the three conferences, the international organizations carefully defined their relation to Pugwash, often resulting in a strengthening of the boundaries between transnational and international actors, as the question of the IAEA’s representation at the Pugwash conference underlined. Although the international nuclear order of the Cold War underwent many changes in later years, the structural relation of scientific NGOs to intergovernmental organizations was more or less settled after this high point in September 1958.

Acknowledgments

Research for this article was supported by the Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Anniversary Fund, project number 14405) and the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies. I would like to thank Günter Bischof, Holger Nehring, Carola Sachse, Alison Kraft, the participants of the workshop “Writ- ing Pugwash Histories” (University of Vienna, 10–12 May 2012), Evan Pikul- ski, Anna Weichselbraun, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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