Scientists for Peace in Germany
Jürgen Scheffran
The end of World War was a crucial point in the history of science, and for many scientists it was a personal turning point. In the United States, the Manhattan Project had absorbed an enormous amount of scientific resources. In Nazi Germany, a large number of scientists had been involved in the war efforts and many became guilty of war crimes. While the German engineers involved in the V2 missile program helped the superpowers to build their missile arsenals after the war, the team of German nuclear physicists who had worked in the atomic bomb program had a different fate. Other than their American colleagues they had failed to achieve the program goal, either intentionally in order to prevent Hitler from acquiring the bomb, as Werner Heisenberg suggested, or due to physical miscalculations and insufficient equipment and funding. Their internment at Farmhall in the UK at the end of the war did not unearth the full truth, but documented their moral dilemmas and inner conflicts. After the war, they continued their work under constraint, hoping that they could use their knowledge about nuclear fission for “peaceful” purposes.
Russell-Einstein Manifesto
In the 1950s, the Cold War escalated and the nuclear arms race posed a threat to peace and life on earth. A number of prominent scientists became engaged against the growing threat of war, among them Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein. The Russell-Einstein Manifesto, published on July 9, 1955, warned in drastic words of a nuclear disaster and called for new thinking to prevent it: “We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?” The signatories of the Manifesto, among them Joseph Rotblat who had left the Manhattan Project in 1944, founded the international Pugwash movement in 1957. Pugwash used its scientific contacts to mediate in the East-West conflict and in 1995 received the Nobel Peace Prize together with Rotblat.
In Germany, too, scientists recognized their responsibility for society and went public. Only a few days after the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, a number of Nobel Prize laureates, among them Otto Hahn as one of the initiators, launched the “Mainau Declaration” in which they warned of the mis-use of nuclear energy and expressed their opposition against the nuclear arms buildup: “We, the undersigned, are scientists of different countries, different creeds, different political persuasions. … We see with horror that this very science is giving mankind the means to destroy itself. By total military use of weapons feasible today, the earth can be contaminated with radioactivity to such an extent that whole peoples can be annihilated. … All nations must come to the decision to renounce force as a final resort. If they are not prepared to do this, they will cease to exist.”
Göttingen Declaration of 18 Nuclear Physicts
When the Adenauer government and its energetic Defense Minister, Franz-Josef Strauss, envisaged a nuclear-equipped German Army, they harvested protest from the elite of nuclear physicists. On the initiative of Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker, the Göttingen Declaration was issued on April 12, 1957, in which 18 nuclear scientists argued against German nuclear weapons. They declared:
“1. Tactical atomic bombs have the same destructive effects as normal atomic bombs. … 2. There is no limit known to the possibility of increasing the destructive effect on life and property of strategic atomic weapons. … We know that it is very difficult to draw political consequences from these facts. Since we are not politicians, one might deny us the right to judge these questions; however, our activity in pure science and its applications, which brings us into contact with many young people in this field, has bestowed upon us a responsibility for the possible consequences of this activity. This is why we cannot keep silent in these political matters… We think that today a small country such as the Federal Republic [of Germany] can protect itself best and promote world peace by renouncing explicitly and voluntarily the possession of atomic weapons of any kind. Be that as it may, none of the undersigned would be ready in any way to take part in the production, the tests, or the application of atomic weapons.”
The German government discredited the scientists as naïve but the echo in the press was enormous and the peace movement promoted the declaration. Later, the Initiative of the Göttingen 18 became the Vereinigung Deutscher Wissenschaftler (VDW, Union of German Scientists), the German Pugwash affiliate. Today, the VDW annually honors scientists who oppose and uncover dangerous developments and bear personal risks for their engagement with its Whistleblower Award. In 2006, the award was issued to Ted Postol for his critical assessment of the US missile defense program.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the campaign against nuclear explosions, which polluted the environment with radioactivity and threatened the health of life on earth, became a focal point of the international scientists and peace movement. Scientists played an important role in this campaign, in particular the professor of chemistry and signatory of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, Linus Pauling. With his petition he raised media and public awareness of the health impact of radioactive fallout. The success of the campaign became most visible in 1963 when the United States and the Soviet Union negotiated the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which bans nuclear tests in the atmosphere, under water, and in outer space, while underground nuclear tests were still allowed. In 1962, Linus Pauling, who had already received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to this success.
Foundation of Peace Research Institutes
The 1960s brought about an institutionalization of peace research, e.g. through the foundation of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) or the Stockholm Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). In Germany, in the context of the students’ movement and the social-liberal coalition, peace research was established through the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Friedens- und Konfliktforschung (AFK, Work Program in Peace and Conflict Research), which acted as a coordinating office for peace researchers, and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung (DGFK, German Society for Peace and Conflict Research) in 1970, which facilitated state support for peace research. This provided a framework for the establishment of the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) and the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (IFSH). Increasingly, scientific-technical approaches found their way into peace research and conflict studies, first of all at the Max-Planck Institute in Starnberg, founded by von Weizsäcker (MPI zur Erforschung der Lebensbedingungen der wissenschaftlich-technischen Welt). With its fundamental study Kriegsfolgen – Kriegsverhütung (Impacts and Prevention of War), a new standard was set for the study of the consequences of nuclear war.
Scientific-technical aspects gained even more attention in the early 1980s, when the escalating arms race between the superpowers and the growing peace movements in Europe and the United States mobilized millions of people. Students and scientists discussed the interrelationship between science and war and peace. At many universities in Germany seminars and lectures were held (e.g. the seminar “Physics and Armament” at Marburg University in 1981, which had a lasting impact on my own personal development and career). Besides the intense exchange of student groups which organized national meetings, the Münster Forum Naturwissenschaftler für Frieden und Abrüstung (Scientists for Peace and Disarmament) offered a framework for engagement.
Ways Out of the Arms Race
A focal point for all the scientificallyoriented activities was the congress “Responsibility for Peace” in Mainz on July 2/3, 1983, and the declaration of the Mainzer 23, which was widely covered by the media (not the least because of the involvement of Pauling and many others). The declaration states: “In this situation which is threatening our existence, like many colleagues in the United States, we call on the governments of the nuclear weapons states to immediately freeze the nuclear arsenals both in the East and in the West.” The 3,000 participants assembled in Mainz discussed the whole thematic spectrum: SS-20, Pershing-2 and Cruise Missiles; missile accuracy, first strike, nuclear testing, nuclear impacts, chemical and biological weapons, space weapons, military research; ambivalence and dual-use of high-tech; arms control and disarmament.
The Mainz congress was the most visible expression of the active engagement of scientists and became the starting point for a number of new activities in the following years. An important aspect was the understanding of the complex linkages between military and technological, which was communicated to a wider audience. Examples are a brochure on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which was distributed several ten thousand times, or a poster series on various themes related to advanced military technologies. In 1983, the Bund demokratischer Wissenschaftler (BdWi, Federation of Democratic Scientists) published the journal “Wissenschaft und Frieden” (Science and Peace), which is the largest journal on peace research in German to this day. The Mainzer 23 later merged with the NaturwissenschaftlerInnen- Initative ‘Verantwortung für den Frieden (Scientists Initiative ‘Responsibility for Peace’), which held a number of conferences and brought the peace engagement of its members to science, public, and politics. At the Göttingen conference against space weapons in 1984, a Model Treaty on the limitation of the military use of space was presented, which became subject to a debate in the German Parliament. During the debate on SDI, the movement became increasingly international, as manifested at the 1986 conference in Hamburg “Ways Out of the Arms Race,” when more than 4,000 participants watched a transatlantic satellite conference.
Establishment of Research Groups in Science, Technology, and Security
At the same time, some younger scientists in this field went through a professionalization process. This was supported by a new funding program in arms control by the Volkswagen Foundation in 1984, which attracted a new generation of researchers. The first scientists acquired their PhD in arms control and peace research at science or engineering departments. Institutional funding opportunities allowed to establish several research groups at universities, including the Interdisciplinary Research Group Science, Technology and Security (IANUS) at Technical University of Darmstadt, the Center for Science and International Security (CENSIS) at Hamburg University, the Schleswig- Holstein Institute for Peace Research (SCHIFF) in Kiel, and the Bochum Verification Project. In the mid-1990s, these groups created the Forschungsverbund Naturwissenschaft, Abrüstung und internationale Sicherheit (FONAS, Research Federation Science, Disarmament and International Security), which organizes regular workshops in Berlin in order to provide scientific expertise for political decision-makers. With the Disarmament Working Group in the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft (DPG, German Physical Society), it became possible to establish this research within a larger professional organization. In recent years, the framework project on preventive arms control was a focal point of FONAS work.
The 1990s also brought the foundation of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists For Global Responsibility (INES), which demonstrated the East-West unification of the scientific community during an international congress in Berlin in 1991.
Besides the euphoria about the possible peace dividend, new concerns were raised about new wars and the spread of weapons (in particular in the Gulf War).
In the context of the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, the important topic of sustainable development gained attention which was the main focus during the INES Conference in Amsterdam in 1996, but again traditional peace themes pushed to the forefront. In 1993, the International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation (INESAP) was founded, which presented its Study Group report Beyond the NPT — A Nuclear-Weapon-Free World at the Review and Extension Conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in New York in 1995, under the leadership of Joseph Rotblat. And today, nuclear abolition is still of utmost relevance, despite or because of the policy of the Bush Administration.
Other global risks in the energy and environmental sector may increasingly become a source of conflicts and uncertainties, as was vividly demonstrated by the human-induced disaster of the hurricane Katrina in the Southern United States. For the future, it will be important to attract young scholars to peace and security research and give them the means to make a living in this field. An major step toward this end is the continued funding by the Deutsche Stiftung Friedenforschung (DSF, German Foundation for Peace Research), even though the total funding is rather limited. To raise more interest among students, teaching plays a central role. A number of teaching courses have been developed in recent years as well as Master programs at the University of Hamburg and the Marburg Center for Conflict Research.
The newly founded, DSF-funded Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker Centre for Science and Peace Research at the University of Hamburg strengthens the integration of science-oriented research and teaching. In the tradition of Einstein, Rotblat, and Pauling, linking scientific competence with the responsibility of scientists for the societal consequences of their research and sustained peace remains a major concern. Knowledge without responsibility is as problematic as responsibility without knowledge. This article is an expansion of Jürgen Scheffran’s contribution to the INESAP seminar “Scientists Role in Achieving a World Free of Nuclear Weapons” at the World Peace Forum in Vancouver, June 27, 2006, and is based on an article in the German quarterly Wissenschaft & Frieden 1/2006.
