Berlin 2015 – scientific programme

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GP: Fachverband Geschichte der Physik

GP 4: Friedensengagement

GP 4.4: Talk

Tuesday, March 17, 2015, 11:30–12:00, HL 001

In the Name of International Cooperation: Peaceful Atoms, Pacifist Physicists, and Partisans of Peace in Early Cold War (c. 1950-1960) — •Stefano Salvia — PhD and Research Assistant in History of Science, University of Pisa - Galileo Museum, Florence

In my previous paper, From Russia with Love. The Pontecorvo Affaire (75. DPG-Frühjahrestagung, Dresden 2011), I briefly referred to Bruno Pontecorvo’s affiliation to the international(ist) network called “Partisans for Peace" (founded in 1949, later World Peace Council): an organization of pacifist scientists, intellectuals, and artists (like Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Pablo Picasso) which was very similar to the Pugwash movement, but part of the Comintern (later Cominform). As already noticed by Albert Einstein, the Partisans for Peace were *pacifist* in a very particular sense: they strongly criticized Western nuclear policies, but they justified the Soviet atomic programme as inevitable response to them. At the same time, physicists who joined the 1955 Russel-Einstein Manifesto (like Joseph Rotblat and Norbert Wiener) or the 1957 Göttinger Erklärung (like Otto Hahn and Max Born) were suspicious about the 1955 “Atoms for Peace" programme, sponsored by the US to balance the Soviet influence in Europe as in non-alligned countries. I will discuss these different (and partially overlapping) scientific cooperation networks built in the name of “peace" during the hottest years of the Cold War, when peace itself had become an ideological weapon in the hands of a militarized science.