From Hiroshima to Pugwash

From Hiroshima to Pugwash Kirk Willis (bio) Alison Kraft and Carola Sachse, eds. Science, (Anti-)Communism and Diplomacy: the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in the Early Cold War. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020. Pp. xvi, 356. isbn: 978-90-04-34015-2, us$195 (hb); 978-90-04-34017-6, Open Access (ebook). The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs were an unexpected yet enduring product of the High Cold War (1946–63). Unlike in 1815 or 1919, at war’s end in 1945 the world’s diplomats did not convene in their hundreds to redraw national boundaries, to establish new defence and security provisions, to set economic priorities, or even to point fingers and lay blame. Instead, naked facts on the ground in Europe and Asia prevailed, with victorious armies occupying territory, providing food, shelter, and medicine, overseeing the vexed matters of collaboration, displacement, and war crimes, and laying plans for reconstruction and economic recovery. From the very moment of Italian, German, and Japanese surrender, the deep pre-existing ideological differences between the victorious powers determined diplomacy and shaped recovery and military affairs. Even before the July 1945 Potsdam meeting, in fact, it had become clear that a final comprehensive peace conference would not be held, and the suspicion and distrust evident at that gathering quickly became a defining feature of European diplomatic and political life. In the spring of 1946 Stalin and Molotov denounced their former western allies as enemies of the Soviet Union, and Winston Churchill proclaimed the descent of an Iron Curtain from Stettin to Trieste. A hot war had become a cold one. As if these conditions were not challenge enough, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompted both sides of the stiffening and broadening division between East and West to commit to ever more sustained development of atomic weaponry and advanced delivery systems. Beginning formally after the first Soviet test in August 1949, a nuclear arms race flashed into life and what [End Page 181] might have otherwise been serious but manageable squabbles escalated into possible provocations of Armageddon—in Berlin, Korea, Czechoslovakia, and beyond—a danger made more likely by the utter breakdown of direct diplomacy between the Kremlin and the White House between 1946 and 1959. The rapid development of thermonuclear weapons in the early 1950s only heightened tensions and sharpened anxieties, especially about the environmental consequences of the above ground testing of such weapons. Indeed, very quickly a new term—“fallout”—entered the world’s vocabulary to describe the highly radioactive particulate residue of these explosions. Driven by atmospheric winds, these invisible yet deadly remnants quickly encircled the earth as wind currents carried remainders of tests conducted in Micronesia as far afield as the Scottish Highlands, the Dakota Badlands, and the Australian Bushlands. That the threat was real and serious, all recognized; how to limit or liquidate the danger bedevilled leaders of both East and West. One particular sub-set of concerned individuals were the world’s scientists, many of whom had played crucial roles in the development of nuclear technology in the years before, during, and after the war. Indeed, from the moment of the release of news from Hiroshima in the first week of August 1945 and, especially, after the Japanese surrender in the aftermath of a second detonation, physicists, chemists, metallurgists, and others hurried to discuss, to organize, and to prioritize. By the end of 1945, American scientists had formed the Federation of Atomic Scientists and begun publishing their widely read Bulletin. In short order, other national organizations of scientists sprouted up in places such as Britain, Canada, and France to begin to think through a host of pressing questions ranging from the feasibility of fashioning some kind of international control over atomic technology, to the prospects of the much-touted civilian applications of atomic energy, to the setting of professional standards concerning the open publication of nuclear-related research. To their surprise and dismay, however, it quickly became clear that scientists did not hear a single call to action, did not speak with a single voice, and did not see a single way forward to overcome the deep-seated ideological and political...

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