Pugwash, Nukes and Peace

NATURE|Vol 458|2 April 2009 OPINION produces intense international hand-wringing. Washington, Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing must may fear. As long as nuclear weapons remain, Danger does lurk there, largely owing to undertake concerted diplomacy to instil polit- the United States will extend its deterrence Pakistan’s political crisis and reluctance to ical-strategic confidence in the region in ways umbrella to its allies. To reassure Japan of this, formalize the territorial status quo with India. that reduce rather than raise the salience of leaders in Wash ington, Beijing and Tokyo Stimuli for conflict emerge from Pakistan; nuclear weapons. must undertake more forthright strategic competitive logic and political imperatives The Long Shadow offers useful guidance dialogues. Framing such dialogue with an may lead both states to brinkmanship. As to this end. None of the authors urges US explicit objective of creating conditions for suggested in the chapters on India, by Rajesh retrenchment from the region or rethinking of incremental, verifiable steps towards nuclear Rajagopalan, and on Pakistan, by Feroz Hassan Japanese, South Korean or Taiwanese nuclear disarmament would add an important Asian Khan and Peter Lavoy, both countries recog- abstinence. Acquisition of nuclear weapons dimension to the global effort to live up to the nize that nuclear weapons make a war between by these countries would only exacerbate promise made in the 1968 Nuclear Nonprolif- them unwinnable. Yet they remain unable to insecurity and reduce US commitments to act eration Treaty, the future of which has come transform this recognition into a confident to defend peace and stability there. Instead, into question. peace that would empower Pakistan’s civilian greater effort must be made to enhance the The shadow in this volume’s title refers to leaders to press the army and intelligence serv- transparency of intentions and capabilities, the chastening threat of nuclear war. The com- ices to concentrate on internal security rather bolster conventional deterrence and foster plexity and particularity of the nuclear story than nurturing low-intensity violence in India unity in dealing with North Korea. in each country surveyed reminds us that the and Afghanistan. Leaders in the United States and China people responsible for preventing the darkness The comparative advantage of The Long together hold a key. China will not become of nuclear war would benefit from the light Shadow emanates from the chapters on more cooperative and transparent and limit that careful scholarship can provide. The illu- Japan, China, South Korea and North Korea. its strategic build-up if the United States mination offered in The Long Shadow should Paradoxically, in northeast Asia the threats does not clarify that it is prepared to accept be welcomed. ■ of direct conflict are low, but concerns about China’s nuclear deterrent. This would mean George Perkovich is vice-president for studies at the nuclear future are high. This suggests the limiting missile defences and certain non- the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace political, more than the specifically military, nuclear strike capabilities. Sino-American and is a co-editor of the book Abolishing Nuclear importance of these weapons. strategic accommodation need not devalue Weapons: A Debate. Michael Green and Katsuhisa Furukawa the US extended deterrent, as some in Japan e-mail: [email protected] write in the book that nuclear weapons are increasingly present in Japanese thinking, but not as war-fighting instruments or protection against existential threat. “Rather, it is the specter of political and strategic entropy Pugwash, nukes and peace that would be associated with a collapse of the US extended deterrence commitment that is After years of backsliding on nuclear-weapons the 1955 Russell–Einstein Manifesto against animating strategic thinking in Japan.” North proliferation by the world’s superpowers, nuclear weapons, which gave rise to the first Korea’s bomb and improved Chinese capa- President Barack Obama has stated that he Pugwash Conference at the height of the cold bilities reopen “the old question of whether intends to “make the goal of eliminating all war in 1957. Rotblat dedicated more than half the United States would protect Japan even at nuclear weapons a cen- a century to the fight to the risk of inviting nuclear strikes against US tral element” in nuclear The Strangest Dream abolish nuclear weap- cities”. Some Japanese strategic thinkers policy. His recently Film directed by Eric Bednarski ons. In 1995, he and the worry that the United States might “con- appointed chief science Produced by the National Film Pugwash organization clude a bilateral arms control agreement with adviser, physicist John Board of Canada shared the Nobel Peace Beijing that endorses protection of Chinese Holdren, spent ten years Prize. limited nuclear strike capability against as chairman of the exec- Joseph Rotblat: A Man of Conscience Two edited collec- the US”. They fear this would decouple the utive committee for the in the Nuclear Age tions on Rotblat were United States from Japan. Pugwash Conferences by Martin Underwood published soon after his Kang Choi and Joon-Sung Park describe on Science and World Sussex Academic Press: 2009. death in 2005 at the age how South Koreans have an “excessive fear Affairs, the peripatetic 144 pp. £17.95 of 96. As yet there is no of nuclear threat” combined with a “fear of annual meeting of sci- substantial biography, abandonment” by the United States, and its entists and statesmen to Professor Pugwash, The Man Who although one is being opposite, “fear of entrapment”. They argue discuss ways to control Fought Nukes: The Life of Sir Joseph prepared by the writer that South Korea’s fear of abandonment “could nuclear weapons. It is Rotblat Andrew Brown. Now, soar if the United States tacitly accepted North named after the Cana- by Kit Hill Rotblat is the focus of Korea’s nuclear weapon status”. Conversely, dian village of Pugwash, Ryelands: 2008. 80 pp. £8.99 The Strangest Dream — a the fear of entrapment “would linger as long Nova Scotia, where its Canadian documentary as the public believes that a US military strike first conference was held film (http://tinyurl.com/ on North Korea is possible”. under the sponsorship of a wealthy Canadian cnehl3) made to celebrate the centenary of his Doubts about the credibility of extended philanthropist, Cyrus Eaton. birth — which is intelligent, vivid and all the deterrence were much greater during the The late Joseph Rotblat would have been more powerful for its restraint; and the subject cold war, as Green and Furukawa and Choi heartened by these recent political develop- of two brief but interesting books — Martin and Park document. Still, policy-makers in ments. Rotblat was the youngest signatory of Underwood’s Joseph Rotblat and Kit Hill’s 575 © 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved OPINION NATURE|Vol 458|2 April 2009 Professor Pugwash, The Man Who Fought Nukes. Both authors are physicists who knew Rotblat personally. Hill is a long-standing collaborator in British Pugwash, as men- tioned in the foreword by UK Astronomer Royal Martin Rees. Underwood worked as a postdoc with Rotblat on the linear accelera- tor at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. Their books aim to introduce Rotblat’s life and work to distinct readerships — with uneven results. Ironically, it is the director of the film, Eric Bednarski, who, despite having missed meeting his subject in the flesh, brings Rotblat alive. Rotblat’s first words on screen express his attitude to his science. Speaking in the pre- cise, Polish-accented English he learned in wartime Britain in his thirties, he says: “If my work is going to be applied, I would like myself to decide how it will be applied.” Not for Rotblat the seductive idea that scientists have no responsibility for the uses to which their discoveries are put. Ethics were as important to him as experiments. Born in 1908 into a religious Jewish family in Warsaw, reduced to penury by the First World War, Rotblat was forced to Joseph Rotblat won a Nobel prize for his work on nuclear disarmament with the Pugwash organization. become an electrician after leaving school. Eventually he entered academic physics United Kingdom under a cloud of suspicion attributed to individuals, so they could speak through evening school, worked under a from US intelligence that he was a spy for the relatively freely. The result, notes Underwood, professor trained by Marie Curie and, in Soviet Union. A trunk of his papers mysteri- is that Pugwash was instrumental in achiev- mid-1939, left Poland for the University of ously disappeared in transit from Los Alamos, ing the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty Liverpool, UK, to conduct nuclear-physics presumably into the archives of the Federal in 1963 and, in 1972, both the Biological research under James Chadwick, discoverer Bureau of Investigation. Some other bomb- Weapons Convention and the Anti-Ballistic EGGITT/AFP/GETTY J. of the neutron. Atomic fission had just been making physicists felt qualms in 1945 and Missile Treaty. It also helped mediate between discovered in Germany, and even before leav- even protested to the authorities, but only Moscow and Washington DC during the ing Poland, Rotblat had privately visualized Rotblat had the “courage” to risk his career Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and established that fission could lead to an atomic bomb. for his convictions, observes Pakistan Pug- strong links with the Soviet leader Mikhail Wrestling with his conscience — like Albert wash nuclear physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy in Gorbachev, who admired Rotblat, at the Einstein in 1939 — and leaving behind his the film. “He was not the kind of man to be time of Gorbachev’s arms negotiations with Polish wife, who was eventually told what to think,” says Rotblat’s US President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

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