Early history

3. Early history

I. The interim period

In October Berner visited the United States, and also London, and conducted interviews with a large number of prominent academics who were concerned with the type of study which SIPRI might undertake. He carried with him notes on the projects already discussed by the Board: biological warfare; the ocean study; mass media and conflicts; and the arms trade. He added one further topic: the peaceful use of nuclear explosions. Berner was also exploring the idea of a ‘summer seminar’, in which some of these eminent men would come to Sweden for a few weeks and air their views on some topic of general interest.

To these various ideas, most of the academics said ‘Yes’; a few ‘No’. For instance, on the arms trade, Professor Oran Young at Princeton University said: ‘It would be very difficult to get a senior scholar to undertake the massive information gathering job which this project required’. This is certainly true: most senior scholars in these fields prefer abstract theorizing, do not like the laborious business of building up data banks, and have little time for any attempts at quantification. On the biological weapons project, Thomas Schelling thought that it might be an incitement for some governments in smaller countries to start thinking about procuring these weapons.

The academics took the opportunity to put forward their pet projects, which covered a huge range: Chinese foreign policy in
1949—66; the psychology of various conflict-solving procedures; diplomacy and cross-cultural relations; the sociology of language; the concept of a ‘viable state’ (e.g., should Nigeria be split up into a number of separate states?); regional integration; communication increase as a destabilizing factor in the world community; and so on.¹⁰

To some extent the same problem–of a multiplicity of views from a multiplicity of scholars–arose with the 1967 joint meeting of the Governing Board and the Scientific Council. The Scientific Council members were men (there were no women in the first list) of considerable eminence: for example, Henry Kissinger, Carl Kaysen and Alastair Buchan. Almost everyone who was asked to serve on the Council accepted. The rule then was that the Swedish Government appointed 16 members, and after that the Council itself should appoint 8 more. When the time came to make these additional appointments, the Board and the existing members of the Scientific Council put forward in all 22 names. No fewer than 15 of the 16 existing members of the Council took the trouble to fill in their ballot papers and vote on the 8 additional members of the Council. The members of the Scientific Council were at that time ready to take their duties seriously.¹¹

The problem, however, was much the same problem as that of the various consultations of the Myrdal Committee and Berner’s visit to London and the USA. The old Latin motto quot homines, tot sententiae (‘as many opinions as there are people’) applies. Peace research can cover an immense and disparate range of possible studies.

The minutes of the joint meeting of the Board and the Scientific Council provided plenty of examples:

Leo Mates¹² gave a statement on the international situation with particular regard to questions which might be susceptible to scientific analysis. Among the areas emphasized were the relations between the developed and the underdeveloped countries and the conflicts inherent in this situation of uneven economic and social standards, the problems of population growth, the gap between different countries in technological development, the problems which innovations in the technical field might have for the relations between states and finally the evolving role of international organizations in times of high or low tension between the superpowers. Problems to be emphasized might be the tension between rich and poor countries.

Johan Galtung proposed that suitable topics for SIPRI could be in the field of prediction of conflict in a longer-term perspective. He also referred to the problem of technical assistance and the effects which this might have on colonialism or neo-colonialism. A discussion ensued on the terms ‘colonialism’, ‘neo-colonialism’ and ‘decolonization’, in which various views were expressed on the desirability of studying these problems at SIPRI.

Carl Kaysen¹³ pointed to the possibility that the concept of national states might be obsolete for underdeveloped countries, because of increasing population density, and recommended study of such an area.

Henry Kissinger¹⁴ regarded the rigidity of bureaucratic thinking and the implications of this for policy as a highly important topic of research. The difference between policy on domestic issues and foreign policy decisions was in this regard of high relevance.

Robert Gardiner¹⁵ put forward the suggestion that SIPRI might study the problems of conflict and cooperation in the Horn of Africa where conceivably some international authority could be envisaged and also the burning issues in the southern part of Africa taking into account inter alia the role and situation of the small states Swaziland, Basutoland, and so on.

Racial problems were considered to be of great importance and Gunnar Myrdal pointed out that a preliminary study could be undertaken by SIPRI on the racial issues underlying the tension between states and between continents.

On the specific projects which SIPRI proposed, there were those in favour and those against. On the biological warfare study proposal, Solly Zuckerman¹⁶ and Henry Kissinger were doubtful; Grigori Tunkin, a leading Soviet international lawyer, was strongly in favour. On the arms trade project, Carl Kaysen was strongly in favour; both the Soviet Council members, Tunkin and B. S. Krylov¹⁷, were opposed. It is not easy to detect much influence from the Scientific Council’s deliberations on the actual research programmes which SIPRI pursued.

There is no written record of Governing Board discussions of candidates for the post of director. The appointment was, as it is today, made by the Swedish Government, no doubt after hearing the Governing Board’s views. Robert Neild is an economist–that is, he came from a quantitative social science. There is little doubt that he was the choice of Gunnar and Alva Myrdal. Robert Neild had worked with Gunnar Myrdal at the UN Economic Commission for Europe (ECE) in the early postwar years, when it seemed possible that the ECE might be an effective agent in establishing economic cooperation between the two parts of Europe. He came from a post in the British Treasury which required him to give practical advice on immediate policy problems. He was fully in tune with Gunnar Myrdal’s preference for ‘hard-boiled research’; in a memorandum to Professor Myrdal, he emphasized his desire to pursue practical problems. He would probably not have been well known to other members of the Governing Board. He had attended just two of the Pugwash annual conferences, in 1962 and 1964.

At the May 1967 Governing Board meeting, two ‘hard-boiled’ projects were added to the list. ‘The Board discussed a possible project on seismic detection and instructed the Director to explore what is being done on the diplomatic level in this respect and to prepare a proposal for decision by the Board in this area’. Finally, as the last item which the Board considered on that day, ‘the Director introduced the idea that the institute should produce a yearly report on developments in the arms race, arms trade and disarmament. The Board approved this project’. The Yearbook is dealt with–together with the arguments for and against SIPRI’s specialism–in the next chapter.

Some of the other projects that were on the agenda in May 1967 did not fit into the longer-term plans. A single study was commissioned on communication satellites, by Ingemar Dörfer, a Swedish scientist, published as the first in the Institute’s Stockholm Papers series. The conclusion of this study is well summarized in the Introduction:

Another project which produced one small booklet was on the peaceful applications of nuclear explosives. It was prepared by Dr Marvin Kalkstein, an American scientist working at SIPRI during the academic summer vacation, and published in the Stockholm Papers series. At that time the US Atomic Energy Commission was showing a great deal of enthusiasm for the use of nuclear explosives in earth-moving and underground engineering, mainly for the exploitation of underground resources such as gas, oil and mineral ores.

The study questions whether any use of nuclear explosions for earth-moving could be compatible with the Partial Test Ban Treaty. This treaty bans any explosion ‘if such explosion causes radioactive debris to be present outside the territorial limits of the State under whose jurisdiction or control such explosion is conducted’. The treaty does not specify any permissible level for radioactivity outside the boundary. The use of nuclear explosives for earth-moving must release radioactive debris into the atmosphere. Kalkstein comments:

SIPRI did not pursue this issue further. Nothing much came of the experiments in the peaceful use of nuclear explosives. In the current CD negotiations for a comprehensive test ban (CTB), neither the USA nor Russia wants any exception made for peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs); the only state which still favours the idea of PNEs is China.

The ocean study was completed by 1968. Robert Neild’s Preface gives the context:

Since it appeared that the framing of international policies was already getting under way, it was decided that SIPRI should study the problem, adopting an approach that would yield quick results. Professor William T. Burke, then of the Ohio State University, was therefore commissioned to prepare in a matter of months a report on contemporary legal problems of ocean development, including a full description of the technological and policy background to the problems. Seven scholars from different countries were invited to submit their comments on Professor Burke’s paper in writing and then to attend a symposium held in Stockholm in June 1968. The new deputy director, Mr Jan Mårtenson, acted as rapporteur to the conference.

Here again, SIPRI decided not to stay with this subject. The issue of deep-sea mineral mining stayed dormant: commodity prices did not rise enough to make such mining economic. Once the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea had been established, it would have required too large a proportion of SIPRI’s resources to follow the issues in detail.

Finally, there was the thorny question of ‘international conflicts and mass media’. SIPRI organized a workshop in June 1967, with 12 participants. There seems to be no record of their deliberations. One small project did emerge. It was to compare different newspapers’ treatment of the discussions at the ENDC in Geneva. The study was prepared by Professor Loyal Gould, director of International Journalism at the Ohio State University, and published as a Stockholm Paper in 1970. The statistical analysis was made by Randall Forsberg. A full transcript of what was said at the ENDC was available after a delay of some weeks. Not surprisingly, journalists–if they attended the meetings at all–did not wait for the transcripts; various delegates handed out copies of what they had said immediately after the meeting.

A good deal of the study concentrated on the ENDC’s inadequate press arrangements. The main conclusions of the analysis of the press coverage were this: that the press coverage of the points at issue between delegates was thin, and that newspapers in any given country tended to concentrate on the contributions of that country’s delegate. This experiment in studying press coverage did not encourage SIPRI to go further in this type of study.

By early 1968, therefore, the main areas of continuing work covered the biological weapons project (soon to be expanded to cover chemical weapons as well; see chapter 5); the seismic studies, on detection of underground nuclear tests; the arms trade; and the annual SIPRI Yearbook. Under the dominant influence of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal and Robert Neild, a decision had been taken about the type of institute that SIPRI would be and the sort of work it would do. It would be a problem-oriented institute, centrally concerned to establish as far as possible the facts about ‘the world war industry and the attempts to constrain it’. Its ‘stereotype reader’ would not be an academic theorist. It would be a UN delegate from a country which did not have expensive think-tanks such as the Rand Corporation or the Brookings Institution; or it would be the defence correspondent of a serious newspaper trying to keep abreast of new military developments and of arms control negotiations. The pattern had been set. 

9) Berner was from the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs; he is now Swedish ambassador to Germany, in Bonn. Björnerstedt came to SIPRI from the Swedish National Defence Research Establish-ment (FOA); he later occupied important UN positions and in 1979–85 was Chairman of the SIPRI Governing Board.

10) Berner enlivens his account of these interviews by recording the comments which the academics made about each other. The word ‘brilliant’ was lavishly used, but often with qualifications; ‘R combined a brilliant mind with an utter lack of political sense, and in some of his writing his frustra-tions took the upper hand’. ‘Y is somewhat of a genius but rather erratic.’ A few got unalloyed praise: ‘K is an extremely brilliant, uni-versal man, who is furthermore extremely nice’. A few were damned: ‘Z had not produced anything original during several years but was only going on in relatively tedious tracks’. ‘L is not a great thinker, but could be useful’.

11) It should be noted that under the SIPRI Statutes of 1994 the Scientific Council was replaced by an Advisory Committee; see the list of members, appointed in 1996, in Annexe C.

12) Mates was a former diplomat and then Director of the Belgrade Institute of International Politics and Economics.

13) Kaysen was an economist and then a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

14) Kissinger was then a professor at Harvard University. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973.

15) Gardiner was Head of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and served as acting chairman of the 1967 joint meeting of the Scientific Council and Governing Board.

16) Lord Zuckerman was Chief Scientific Adviser to the British Government.

17) Tunkin and Krylov were international lawyers and members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

18) Björnerstedt and Berner then left SIPRI, and Jan Mårtenson, from the Swedish Foreign Office, became Deputy Director.