Kommunikatoren im Kalten Krieg: Die Pugwash-Konferenzen, die Amerikanisch-Sowjetische Studiengruppe zur Rüstungskontrolle und die Grundlegung des ABM-Vertrages

In recent years, the discipline of International Relations has discovered natural scientists as transnational agents. The activities of the scientists who came together in the late 1950s within the framework of the Pugwash Conferences belong to this category. These scholars functioned as icebreakers during the Cold War and also during the Vietnam War. Sources which thus far have not been systematically evaluated show the historical significance of the Pugwash Conferences as a communications forum, but they also reveal their limitations. The idea of setting up a U.S.-Soviet Study Group on Arms Control and Disarmament was first put forward at the Pugwash Conference in Moscow in 1960. The two groups made a major contribution to two achievements of historic significance. The U.S.S.R. adopted the U.S. scientists' approach to arms control, and on the question of anti-ballistic missile systems (ABM) the Americans were able to bring about a radical change in the Moscow leadership's position. Pugwash and the Joint Study Group did much to lay the intellectual, conceptual, and political foundations for the policy of cooperative regulation of armaments between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. which was codified in the 1972 SALT I and ABM treaties. On the basis of Pugwash's history and past successes and its emphasis on long-term contacts and quiet diplomacy, it is of all existing transnational societal actors the one best suited to initiating new structures of scholarly cooperation. One of the major challenges confronting us at present is the need to conduct quiet scientific-political diplomacy with nuclear problem states like China, India, Pakistan, Libya, and Iran, and to do this over a long period of time, systematically and with a concentration on the most important questions.