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

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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 sci- entists, 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). Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 20, No. 1, Winter 2018, pp. 31–57, doi:10.1162/jcws_a_00800 © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 31 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00800 by guest on 27 September 2021 Röhrlich 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 intergovernmen- tal 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 intergovern- mental 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 dy- namics 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 or- ganizations 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 at- tempt 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. 32 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00800 by guest on 27 September 2021 The IAEA, the UN, and the 1958 Pugwash Conference in Austria before we can clearly understand the origins of the international nuclear or- der, 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 au- thority within the evolving international nuclear order was not yet evident. Moreover, today’s rather clear distinction between international governmen- tal 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 in- ternational 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 intergovernmen- tal 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 found- ing 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. 33 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00800 by guest on 27 September 2021 Röhrlich 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 transna- tional 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 co- operation 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.
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