---
title: "Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs"
chunk: 2/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugwash_Conferences_on_Science_and_World_Affairs"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:24:07.269000+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Contributions to international security ==
Pugwash's first fifteen years coincided with the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the Vietnam War. Pugwash played a useful role in opening communication channels during a time of otherwise-strained official and unofficial relations. In 1965, addressing a meeting at UNESCO House in Paris, Robert Oppenheimer gave his tribute to Albert Einstein for the Pugwash movement. Oppenheimer confidently asserted: "I know it to be true that it [averting the disaster of the arms race] had an essential part to play in the Treaty of Moscow, the limited test-ban treaty, which is a tentative, but to me very precious, declaration that reason might still prevail."
It provided background work to the Partial Test Ban Treaty (1963), the Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968), the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), the Biological Weapons Convention (1972), and the Chemical Weapons Convention (1993). Former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara has credited a backchannel Pugwash initiative (code named PENNSYLVANIA) with laying the groundwork for the negotiations that ended the Vietnam War. Mikhail Gorbachev admitted the influence of the organisation on him when he was leader of the Soviet Union. In addition, Pugwash has been credited with being a groundbreaking and innovative "transnational" organization and a leading example of the effectiveness of Track II diplomacy.
During the Cold War, it was claimed that the Pugwash Conference became a front conference for the Soviet Union, whose agents often managed to weaken Pugwash critique of USSR and instead concentrate on blaming the United States and the West.  In 1980, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence received a report that the Pugwash Conference was used by Soviet delegates to promote Soviet propaganda. Joseph Rotblat said in his 1998 Bertrand Russell Peace Lecture that there were a few participants in the conferences from the Soviet Union "who were obviously sent to push the party line, but the majority were genuine scientists and behaved as such".
Following the end of the Cold War, the traditional Pugwash focus on decreasing the salience of nuclear weapons and promoting a world free of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction addresses the following issue areas:

Nuclear stability, nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation: 1. Traditional Nuclear Disarmament, US-Russia nuclear disarmament, nuclear weapons in Europe; 2. Nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, Israeli nuclear weapons, Iranian nuclear program, proposal for a Middle Eastern zone free of weapons of mass destruction, Arab attitudes towards nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation; 3. India and Pakistan nuclear relations, the effects of US India nuclear deal; 4. North Korea.
Regional security in regions where nuclear weapons exist or risks of nuclear proliferation are significant:  1. Middle East—general issues, the impact of the Palestinian problem and its relevance in the Arab world, the consequences of the so-called Arab spring and the growth of the Islamic movements and parties, Arab-Iranian, Arab-Israeli and Iran-Israeli relations; 2. South-Central Asia—traditional antagonism between India and Pakistan, the role of terrorist attacks in the worsening of such antagonism, US-Pakistani relations in general. The role of radical movements in Pakistan, reconciliation and peace in Afghanistan, talking to the Taliban (is it possible and how should be done?), Pakistani-Afghan relations.
The Pugwash movement has also been concerned with environmental issues and as a result of its 1988 meeting in Dagomys it issued the Dagomys Declaration on Environmental Degradation ().

== Nobel Peace Prize ==
In 1995, fifty years after the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and forty years after the signing of the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, the Pugwash Conferences and Joseph Rotblat were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly "for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms." The Norwegian Nobel committee hoped that awarding the prize to Rotblat and Pugwash would "encourage world leaders to intensify their efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons." In his acceptance speech, Rotblat quoted a key phrase from the Manifesto: "Remember your humanity."

== International Foundation for Science ==
From the 1965 Pugwash conference came a recommendation to establish the International Foundation for Science "in order to address the stultifying conditions under which younger faculty members in the universities of developing countries were attempting to do research". The organization gives grants to early-career scientists in low-income countries for work on local water resources and biology.

== Secretaries General ==
 Joseph Rotblat : 1957–1973
 Bernard Feld : 1973–1978
 Martin M. Kaplan : 1978–1989
 Francesco Calogero : 1989–1997
 George Rathjens : 1997–2002
 Paolo Cotta-Ramusino : 2002–2024
 Karen Hallberg : 2024–

== Pugwash Presidents ==
As of 2024, 14 individuals have served as Presidents of the Pugwash Conferences.