Einstein, Gorbachev and the Need for New Thinking

Without nuclear disarmament the non-proliferation regime is at stake

“The splitting of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”
(Albert Einstein)

Hundred years ago, in 1905, Albert Einstein published five articles that changed the world. Most famous became his formula E=mc² that equates energy and mass, with a factor given by the square of the speed of light. The enormous size of this factor demonstrates how much energy is stored even in small amounts of mass. What started as pure thinking became a precondition for the nuclear age.

It took more than three decades before the full implications were recognized. The discovery of the nuclear chain reaction in 1938 induced a chain of events that merged with World War II. Einstein’s concern that Nazi Germany could build the bomb lead the inventor of relativity theory to relativize his pacifism and write a letter to US President Roosevelt about his concerns. With the Manhattan Project, the US launched a crash program to build the bomb. In a rather short period and four decades after Einstein’s discovery, the validity of the energymass formula was demonstrated by the nuclear mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, proving that scientific thinking can have dramatic political implications.

In the decade after the war, until his death in 1955, Einstein observed the escalation of the nuclear arms race that brought the world close to the brink of nuclear annihilation. The above statement warned about the dangers of old thinking in the nuclear age and demanded a new thinking compatible with the new realities. In the last days of his life, he signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto which became the founding document of the Pugwash movement. The famous pledge “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest” discards nuclear weapons and nuclear war as acts against humanity.

The new thinking that Einstein requested was buried under the madness of the Cold War which produced tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, many times enough to eradicate life on Earth. It took another three decades until the quest for new thinking found a counterpart in the political arena. Since Mikhail Gorbachev came into power in 1985, the world has transformed at a breathtaking pace. Only four years later, the Soviet Empire collapsed in chaos, but with hardly any violence. Like Einstein, Gorbachev showed how important thinking can be for changing the world.

After the end of the Cold War, the bomb had lost its justification, if there ever was one. Since the early 1990s, a global movement called for the abolition of all nuclear weapons, in accordance with Gorbachev’s 1986 plan for nuclear elimination by 2000. INESAP used the 1995 Review and Extension Conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in New York to push for a nuclear-weapon-free world with its report “Beyond the NPT” (see article by Wolfgang Liebert, Martin Kalinowski and myself ), together with many NGOs who founded the Abolition 2000 Network. Joseph Rotblat vehemently spoke out against nuclear weapons and for the responsibility of scientists, and later in 1995 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (see announcement of his publication “Science and the Bomb” in this Bulletin).

The growing abolition movement contributed to the end of nuclear testing in China and France, clearing the path for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which however left loopholes for modernizing the nuclear arsenals. In a collaborative effort, a Model Nuclear Weapons Convention was drafted and presented at the NPT Prepatory Committee meeting in New York in 1997, which demonstrated that problems of nuclear disarmament could be resolved in principle and has since proven useful to further discussions on the path to a nuclear-weaponfree world.

Despite all efforts, those who do not want to give up the power they assign to nuclear weapons countered the quest for nuclear abolition. The new arms race from 1998 included nuclear and missile testing by India and Pakistan, missile testing by North Korea and Iran, new missile defense programs as a consequence of the Rumsfeld Commission 1, the quest for space dominance by the US Space Command and the Rumsfeld Commission 2, and finally the terror attacks of 9/11. These were used by US President Bush to justify an enormous arms buildup and a series of wars. The continued downward trend is indicated by the ongoing bloody war in Iraq, the outing of A.Q. Khan’s global nuclear proliferation network, the withdrawal of North Korea from the NPT, the nuclear cat-and-mouse game over Iran’s ambiguous nuclear program.

Being a living manifestation of old thinking, Bush has miserably failed in so many fields of foreign policy. After more than three years of the “war on terror,” Bin Ladin is still alive and the Al Quaeda network operational. Despite the continued military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the situation is explosive. Threatening nuclear proliferators did not prevent North Korea and Iran from pursuing their nuclear ambitions, rather gave them more reasons to build a nuclear deterrence against foreign interventions. Missile defense is far from being operational, not even testable, despite the doubling of the budget and the initial deployment of some interceptors. And the world’s image of the United States has severely suffered after the initial wave of solidarity shown after 9/11. Like the closely coupled enemies of the East-West Conflict, Bush and Bin Ladin depend on each other to legitimate their strategies. The mindsets of Jihads and Holy Wars are opposites to the new thinking that is needed to resolve global problems.

This year’s NPT Review Conference is another opportunity to revive new thinking, 100 years after Einstein’s discoveries, 50 years after his death and the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, 60 years after the end of World War II and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and 10 years after the 1995 NPT extension. Under current circumstances, the prospects for progress are poor. When the disarmament obligations under NPT Article VI are not fulfilled, the whole non-proliferation regime is at stake.

With this 25th issue, the INESAP Information Bulletin continues to raise the flag for a more peaceful and sustainable world without nuclear weapons. The articles deal with obligations for nuclear disarmament and the need for a nuclear regime change (Hal Feiveson, Anatoli Diakov, Eugene Miasnikov, Dingli Shen, Fernando de Souza Barros), or promote the nuclear-weapon-free world and the abolition movement (Doug Roche, Zia Mian, A. H. Nayyar, M. V. Ramana, Alyn Ware, Peter Weiss, Ron McCoy, Colin Archer, Janet Bloomfield, Pamela Meidell). In the Einstein Year, the responsibility of scientists is covered by David Krieger, Joseph Rotblat and the Scientists for Global Responsibility. Current nuclear proliferation risks are discussed by Hui Zhang, Matthias Englert, Soyoung Kwon and Glyn Ford, while the risks of the emerging missile defense and space race are raised by Dave Webb, Bernd Kubbig and Keiko Nakamura.


Jürgen Scheffran
Champaign, April 16, 2005.