Founded on October 22, 1945 by Manhattan Project Atomic Scientists-as the action arm of the same movement that produced the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, FAS celebrated its 50th anniversary with a successful two-day retreat at the Airlie House Conference Center in Airlie, Virginia.
Although no longer a Federation of Chapters-its last two chapters, Union of Concerned Scientists and the Southern California Federation of Scientists, became independent organizations in 1970-it has continued as a membership organization with a tax- deductible arm.
The anniversary retreat was a working meeting at which nine different briefing workshops took place on diverse subjects: weapons of mass destruction, U.S. security and governance (including conventional arms sales, secrecy and defense budget reduction), the global environment, drug abuse, ethics of scientists and scientific credibility, foreign policy, issues of human capability and society, science advice to government, issues of information technology and society, international health and infectious disease surveillance.
Lester R. Brown of World Watch Institute received the FAS Annual Public Service Award for 1995 with a plaque that read:
Agricultural Ambassador
Public Interest Pioneer
Educator Extraordinaire
Global Guru
His acceptance, and our after dinner dialogue with him, symbolized FAS's emergence into global security issues generally on the occasion of our 50th anniversary.
A special citation was provided to John P. Holden, former elected FAS Chairman, to reflect his key role, over two decades, in sustaining and strengthening Pugwash, without which, it was argued, Pugwash would not have secured its half of this year's Nobel Peace Prize or Joseph Rotblat, Pugwash's steward, the other half.
John's plaque read:
The Best That America Can Over
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
(One Quarter)
A major purpose of the working celebration was to secure suggestions for further FAS Cusp Projects- projects run by experts off-site-but through the Federation. A half-dozen of these are underway and another half-dozen under negotiation.
Once organized, it is believed that such projects, where necessary, can secure the funding for in-house staff.
So far, these projects include: global food sustainability; international organizations' health activities, global systemic risk (i.e. risk of economic collapse), the micronutrient project (i.e. improving the healthfulness of food), drug policy and science advice to government.
Frank von Hippel is directing and carrying out work related to: nuclear test ban, deep cuts (disarmament), reforming Russian "plutonium cities" and the fissile material production cut-off.
Barbara Rosenberg is directing and carrying out work on biological and chemical weapons. In particular, the FAS Working Group on biological warfare and its Subgroup on Use and Detection are supplying the Ad Hoc Group of Negotiators with advice on verification protocol issues on this subject.
And Steve Morse of Rockefeller University is directing our work on FAS ProMed, a very successful effort to organize a world-wide system for early detection of emerging infectious diseases. This project has set up an effective international e-mail network- which has received much press.
Through a subsequent world-wide conference in Italy that it is organizing in cooperation with the Rockefeller Foundation, FAS ProMed plans to have the work taken over by an international health organization.
This project is staffed at FAS by Dorothy Preslar who, in addition, has persuaded a foundation ta provide a grant to extend the work to surveillance of some animal diseases as well-important for its own sake and because animal diseases are related to our own.
Jeremy J. Stone's work, recently, has turned on such diverse subjects as developing a dialogue with Iran, developing a campaign to persuade scientists everywhere to drop out of work on further weapons of mass destruction, and promulgating a new method of securing international agreement as to the illegality of nuclear weapons-about which you will be hearing more in the next newsletter.
Stone has also recently put a good deal of work into a unique conference on climate change, to be held in December by FAS, in conjunction with the World Bank, to investigate whether Bank loans should, or should not, reflect the dangers of CO2 emitted by such projects .
FAS Treasurer Charles C. Price and former FAS Fund
Chairman Richard Garwin at the annual meeting
The value of science to civilization has never been more clear, nor have the dangers of its misuse been greater.
The Federation is concemed with so placing science in the national life that it may make the maximum contribution to the welfare of the people.
The need for a more active political role of the scientist has been brought into sharp focus by the atomic bomb. An immediate concem of the Federation must therefore be the problem of atomic energy.
We Therefore Hold These Aims:
1. In the particular field of atomic energy, to urge that the United States help initiate and perpetuate an effective and workable system of world control based on full cooperation among all nations.
2. In consideration of the broad responsibility of scientists today, to study the implications of any scientific developments which may involve hazards to enduring peace and the safety of mankind.
3. To counter misinfommation with scientific fact and, especially, to disseminate those facts necessary for intelligent conclusions conceming the social implications of new knowledge in science.
4. To safeguard the spirit of free inquiry and free interchange of infommation without which science cannot flourish.
5. To promote those public policies which will secure the benefits of science to the general welfare.
6. To strengthen the intemational cooperation traditional among scientists and to extend its spirit to a wider field."
-Preamble, FAS Constitution
As shown below, FAS has often been catalytic on important issues while, of course, having had an effect, on a continuing basis, in conjunction with other groups, organizations, persons and entities of all kinds.
Among its achievements over the last 25 years are:
a). Frank Von Hippel's indefatigable work on fissile material since a 1982 newsletter right up to the point, and beyond, when, in June, 1995, international negotiation began on this issue. He has been with FAS since the early 1970s, serving as our elected Chairman for five years and as Chairman of our Fund for six. He has made contributions to science and society work in many different areas and is a key player in Russia, China, India and Germany in the world process of preventing the use of nuclear weapons.
b). John Pike's work, over the last 13 years, on Star Wars where he became its most visible opponent of the effort to wreck the ABM Treaty. This carried on the tradition of Stone, who had been from 1963 to 1972, a major instigator of the ABM Treaty itself.
Pike had a major impact on the scaling back of the B-2 bomber program. He invented a still-viable proposal ("Threshold Limits") actively considered by the Reagan Administration; uncovered much about intelligence satellites; had considerable success in urging international space cooperation and in shaping the Earth Observing System (EOS) from a small number of large satellites to a more secure program with larger numbers of smaller satellites.
c). Over the 25 years of his serving as FAS C.E.O., and the 33 years of work in intemational security, Stone has had quite a few tangible successes.
Besides his catalytic work, mentioned above, in laying a basis for the ABM Treaty in the U.S. and U.S.S.R.; he stimulated and led the first scientific exchange to the People's Republic of China, working out a return visit while having dinner with Premier Chou En Lai. He induced the scientific community to set up human rights groups in all of its professional societies including the National Academy of Sciences; and played a key role in the first Congressional defeat of a major weapons project (the B- 1 bomber). He also made major contributions to preventing the return of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and to resisting the Sendero Luminoso in Peru. He played a very salient, and frequently acknowledged, role in helping Andrei Sakharov in each of five hunger strikes from 1975 (when they met) through 1987 (when they met again in the Kremlin at a small meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev).
He created a "bear hug" strategy to avoid Star Wars that was, in the end, adopted by the Soviet Union and which made Start II possible (sometimes called the Sakharov finesse). Earlier he created a "shrink SALT II" approach that was offered by President Carter to Leonid Brezhnev at the June 1979 Summit. He stopped the CIA's twenty-year practice of opening mail from abroad. He has also invented two new legal approaches to preventing the initiation of the use of nuclear weapons (Congressional control by a Committee and a new approach to be discussed in the next newsletter).
d). Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, Professor of Environmental Science at SUNY, in Purchase, N.Y. has had a number of successes in championing, through international review conferences, the efforts to secure a workable verification system for the Biological Weapons Convention. And she has coordinated with Stephen Morse the ProMed (Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases) Campaign mentioned above with all of its promise for surveillance of diseases before they can really get started.
e). Lora Lumpe has worked effectively for transparency, accountability and restraint in U.S. and global arms export through publication of the Arms Sales Monitor, other writing projects, public speaking and media work. She was a key player in drafting, introducing and promoting the Code of Conduct on Arms Transfers Act and has also worked to expose and oppose taxpayer subsidies for weapons exports. She is constantly seeking to broaden the coalition of citizens working to reform U.S. export policies.
f. Steven Aftergood, directing the Project on
Government Secrecy, has played an influential role in
def1ning a new national security classification system.
His newsletter on govemment secrecy policy has been
acclaimed both by government officials and their
critics as an invaluable source of information and new
ideas for reducing unnecessary secrecy. Since
Aftergood uncovered the secret Timber Wind nuclear
rocket program in 1991, he has become the most
frequently cited critic of government secrecy
programs.
Mark Kleiman, director of FAS Cusp project on Drugs,
and John P. Holdren, former FAS Chairman, at the
annual meeting
Some events of the 1980's and 1990's, not mentioned above in conjunction with individuals were these:
On U.S.-Soviet detente and realism in U.S.-Soviet relations, a major successful project was a campaign to induce delegations of Congressmen and Senators to visit the Soviet Union by raising the question ("If you have never been there, how can you be sure your views are accurate?").
On U.S.-Soviet arms control, FAS ideas repeatedly reached the highest officials in the Soviet Union, especially after Gorbachev took over in 1985. FAS officials met with Gorbachev on a number of occasions and early urged support in America for his efforts to end the arms race. FAS links with Soviet scientists paved the way for the famous NRDC seismic monitoring study. A series of U.S.-Soviet workshops co-sponsored by FAS and NRDC laid a technical basis for U.S.-Soviet agreements that could verify nuclear warhead elimination.
In Latin America, FAS organized an active program of contacts with scientists in Brazil and Argentina to organize a cooperative halt to nuclear bomb programs in those countries. And it organized talks between defense experts in Chile and Argentina, two countries that were near to war.
Beginning in 1989, FAS worked strenuously for three years and quite effectively, to prevent the Khmer Rouge from a return to power in Cambodia and to move U.S. policy away from an implicit alliance with the Khmer Rouge against the Phnom Penh Government. In particular, it revealed, in a New York Times op ed, secrets of U.S. involvement in that civil war. Later, it hosted the first visit to Washington of Prime Minister Hun Sen-a visit that contributed importantly to a subsequent Congressional approval of a large grant to the Cambodian peace process.
In 1990, FAS sought, by hosting the President of the Vietnamese Academy of Scientists, to start scien- tific exchanges with that country; this was the highest- ranking Vietnamese visitor to visit this country (with the exception of diplomats).
It also sent a representative to North Korea in efforts to defuse the North Korean effort to build an atomic bomb. FAS hosted, in 1994, a notable four- nation conference in Shanghai, of Americans, Chinese, Indians and Pakistanis, looking toward arms control in South Asia. A series of workshops with Russian scientists looking toward control of U.S.-Soviet atomic weapons was held during this period, often in co-sponsorship with the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
Beginning in the 1980's, FAS served as an incuba- tor for talent that would move on to other organiza- tions and even form them. In 1986, after working nine years at FAS on energy conservation, Deborah Bleviss formed the International Institute of Energy Conserva- tion, and serves today as its Executive Director. IIEC has branch offices in Asia and South America and works in conserving energy and recycling materials.
Similarly, after working seven years at FAS on nuclear weapons production and the spread of nuclear weapons to other countries, David Albright moved on to a career that founded his own Institute for Science and Intemational Security (ISIS). In particular, he had helped FAS slow and halt the Brazil-Argentine drive to nuclear weapon status.
Others who have moved on from FAS to continue work in related areas include: Thomas Longstreth (FAS: 1987-1988), now serving as Principle Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy & Requirements in the Department of Defense; Gordon Burck (FAS: 1987-1990), now a leading analyst on chemical weapons for EAI, a Washington consulting firm; and Christopher Paine (FAS: 1981- 1983) who is a senior manager of NRDC's nuclear non-proliferation program.
During this period, FAS won many endorsements of which some were:
"There is no other group that so truly represents the conscience of the American scientist as the FAS"- Jerome B. Wiesner, Science Advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. (This statement made in 1963 was reaffirmed by Wiesner in the 1970's and again before his death in 1994.)
"FAS is the best informed, hardest hitting science lobby in Washington...I can think of no other scientific organization that gets as much political punch per dol- lar as FAS"-Denis Hayes; Founder of Earth Day and Sun Day; former Director, Solar Energy Research In- stitute.
"Sakharov's release...was won only through ongoing pressure by the international scientific community (particularly the National Academy of Sciences in the United States and the Federation of American Scientists)"-Zhores Medvedev
"FAS has been extremely effective over the years because it is located in Washington, keeps on top of the issues and does its homework."-Matthew Meselson, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
"What Ralph Nader was to Detroit, the Federation has been to the Pentagon."-WlRED Magazine (Nov- ember 1995).
Some issues on the FAS Agenda 40 years ago:
1. New efforts toward international control of atomic and other weapons
2. Exchange of atomic information with friendly nations
3. Development of atomic power 4. Relaxation of government monopoly in domestic atomic operations
5. Improvement of visa and passport policies and practices
6. Uninhibited inquiry in our laboratories and universities
7. Modification of the Federal loyalty and security program
8. Organization and finance of US science and the role of the NSF
9. The future of the UN and the principle of international organization
-From FAS Newsletter January 12, 1953
First Row: Alison Ames, David Andersen, Jeremy J. Stone, Lora Lumpe
Second Row: Steven Aftergood, John Pike, Dorothy Preslar, Charles Vick
Third Row: Michael Panetta, Marcus Corbin, Paul Pineo
Not Pictured: FAS Comptroller Eleanor Jensen; Off-Site Project Directors Frank von Hippel, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, and Stephen S. Morse; and a half dozen Cusp Project Leaders.