Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs

The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs is an international organization that brings together scholars and public figures to work toward reducing the danger of armed conflict and to seek solutions to global security threats.

Cyrus Eaton, an industrialist and philanthropist, offered on July 13 to finance and host the conference in the town of his birth, Pugwash, Nova Scotia.

[5] Twenty-two scientists attended the first conference:[citation needed] Cyrus Eaton, Eric Burhop, Ruth Adams, Anne Kinder Jones, and Vladimir Pavlichenko also were present.

[citation needed] From the Soviet Union, Mikhail Ilyich Bruk (Russian: Михаил Ильич Брук; 1923 Moscow – 2009 Jurmala) attended as an English-Russian technical translator.

"[6] Pugwash's "main objective is the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical and biological) and of war as a social institution to settle international disputes.

"[7] "The various Pugwash activities (general conferences, workshops, study groups, consultations and special projects) provide a channel of communication between scientists, scholars, and individuals experienced in government, diplomacy, and the military for in-depth discussion and analysis of the problems and opportunities at the intersection of science and world affairs.

To ensure a free and frank exchange of views, conducive to the emergence of original ideas and an effective communication between different or antagonistic governments, countries and groups, Pugwash meetings as a rule are held in private.

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.

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".

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."

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".