This is the record of the 10th Pugwash Symposium, an outgrowth of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. These conferences and the more specialized symposia are marked by a free and open exchange, in which world scientists and scholars share their facts and their thoughts. This enables them to give objective expression to their concerns about the effects of science and technology on mankind, positive and negative, potential and actual, and especially about the role of science and scientists in evolving sane arms policies. While unofficial, these meetings have often heralded several years in advance what were to become official national policies and international agreements.
This symposium brought together participants from the United States, the Soviet Union, England, France, West Germany, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Israel, and India. The discussion that resulted include both “hard” technical analyses of specific weapons systems and assessments of long-range tendencies of a necessarily general and exploratory nature.
The explosive growth of modern technology and the proliferation of armaments have been accelerating – and parallel – developments. Although there is a lag between new discoveries and their application in hardware, this lag is rather shorter in the case of weapons than for more peaceful products – hence the need to monitor as closely as possible and without delay the military application of new techniques. Thus a goal of the participants in this symposium was to trace the paths by which known and foreseeable technologies could be transferred, both into weapons and into arms control devices.
