Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs are a series of meetings that seek the elimination of nuclear weapons and peaceful solutions to conflicts. The Pugwash Conferences have influenced a number of treaties leading to nuclear disarmament. In 1995, the conferences were awarded a share of the Nobel Prize for peace, along with Joseph Rotblat. Rotblat, a Polish-born British physicist, served as secretary-general of the conferences from 1957 to 1973 and as president from 1988 to 1997.
The annual conferences are a series of meetings, workshops, and discussion groups that aim to reduce the danger of armed conflict and seek to solve global problems through cooperation. Participants in the conferences have included important figures in scientific research and education; holders of government office; and scientific or arms-control advisers to governments. They attend as private individuals, not as representatives of their countries, to ensure frank and flexible discussions. The conference meetings take place in private.
The Pugwash Conferences arose from a famous manifesto, or proclamation, in 1955 by the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell and the German-born American scientist Albert Einstein. The Russell-Einstein manifesto called upon the scientists of the world to meet and discuss the threat that nuclear weapons posed to civilization.
The Canadian-born American philanthropist Cyrus Eaton funded the meeting that Russell and Einstein had suggested. Eaton hosted the meeting in July 1957 at his summer home in the Canadian fishing village of Pugwash, Nova Scotia. Pugwash was Eaton’s birthplace. The 1957 conference at Pugwash set in motion what would become one of the most influential peace movements in modern history. Twenty-two scientists from 10 countries attended the first Pugwash Conference in 1957. Today, the conferences have from 150 to 250 participants from all over the world.
A group called the Pugwash Organization arranges the conferences and chooses the participants. The organization has offices in London; Rome; Geneva, Switzerland; and Washington, D.C.
