ESRC Research Seminars
New Approaches to WMD Proliferation
30 June – 1 July 2005
The formal title of the seminar series is ‘New Approaches to WMD Proliferation’ its
unofficial title has always been the ‘next generation project’ both in terms of the
personnel involved and in its approach to the subject of proliferation.
The origins of the project can be traced to a bar. In this case a bar in Geneva after a
Pugwash meeting on biological weapons in 1999 where we were considering the fact
that there was an identifiable gap in the ages of the people attending the meeting: a
small group of people were under 30; and even smaller group between 30 and 50;
and a large group were over 50. The second observation was that many of the
discussions involved personal recollections, observations, or knowledge which either
was not written down or was known by very few people.
It was then that we realised that much of the knowledge and wisdom concerning
actual arms control was implicit and rested in the minds of people: it was not to be
found in books or articles. At this point we realised we potentially faced a large
problem: the disappearance of tacit and implicit knowledge held in the minds and
archives of a generation of scholars who had been involved in these topics for a very
long time.
If that information and experience was not to be lost then we would have to devise a
way of teasing such information out and passing it on to the next generation. This,
we viewed, was particularly acute in the UK where universities tend to pension off
their staff between 60 and 65 and the community of scholars involved in WMD arms
control was diminishing.
After initial discussions in 2002, the current programme of six seminars was put
together in late 2003 and early 2004. We persuaded Julian Perry Robinson to head
up the application and corralled Brian Balmer from University College London, Wyn
Bowen from King’s College London, John Simpson from Southampton, and Tracy
Sartin from Lancaster to form a core group in order to cover nuclear, chemical, and
biological weapons.
The seminar series will be organized by this core group.
Its objectives include
bringing together newer researchers from institutions working on WMD in order to:
•
address the generational gap within UK higher education expertise in this
area by encouraging and supporting the active participation of postgraduate
students and newer researchers;
•
explore the conceptual issues surrounding the shift in the anti-WMD
paradigm, particularly with regard to the design of future approaches;
•
increase
interaction
between
scholars
studying
chemical,
biological,
radiological and nuclear weapons by fostering collaboration and crossfertilization;
•
develop an inter and multi disciplinary approach to a complex set of problems
through interaction with lawyers, scientists, technologists and political
scientists;
•
improve engagement with research users in government, non-governmental
organizations, industry and the media; and,
•
act as a networking forum in which a broad agenda for future study will be
formulated and which will encourage the development of spin-off research
proposals and wide dissemination of research
To achieve this over the next 24 months we hope the seminars will:
•
foster a community of younger scholars and students by supporting their
attendance at the seminars and encourage their active participation;
•
provide a forum in which issues related to all weapons of mass destruction
can be discussed through a series of themed seminars;
•
bring research users into contact with the younger research community;
•
create a database of academic researchers and students working on WMD
issues in UK higher education institutions;
•
produce a number of papers containing summaries of seminar discussions;
•
create a dedicated website for the seminar series to serve as a key resource;
•
post texts of papers and presentations on the website; and
•
establish an e-mail listserv as a communication, dissemination and networkbuilding tool.
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Our vision was that the seminar series should serve to bring together researchers
working on all categories of weapons of mass destruction and to actively engage with
research users and mix existing researchers and to encourage new research
groupings. The aim was not to create another small closed group of researchers.
Rather, our goal is to promote collaborative research and particularly to facilitate a
network of younger researchers and students.
Academia can tend towards insularity.
Of course, we all want to claim we are
experts in our fields, but most people, and most institutions, either have expertise in
one aspect of WMD or the other: rarely is real expertise in nuclear, chemical, and
biological weapons issues found in one place in the UK.
The experts and
communities are distinct and mix only occasionally.
The next generation project was intended also to go beyond the political sciences.
Without being too simplistic, early arms control tended to involve scientists who had
transferred over to policy-making.
They understood the science and technology
behind the weapons they were attempting to control. Now, very few people involved
in this field have transferred from science to policy making: most of the next
generation are political or social scientists, historians, or from non-scientific
disciplines. Where are the chemists, physicists, and biologists?
Furthermore, academic projects have a tendency to bring together like-minded
people to consider a problem: like-minded in terms of political outlook and likeminded in terms of academic disciplines.
Yet, an actual policy-making group in
government or a delegation at negotiations contains not only a range of different
views on what should be done (and how) but a range of expertise: scientific and
technological expertise; international law experts; trade and commerce expertise to
consider the impact of controls on civil industry; foreign policy and security experts;
regional and country-specific experts; intelligence staff, and diplomats, as well as
those with historical or institutional memory of how a situation arose and the efforts
undertaken in the past to address it.
Has anyone in UK academia put together such a group in recent memory to consider
a particular problem in WMD? Probably not; yet there are clear lessons from the
past which should not be forgotten. Consider, for example, the sense of déjà vu
nuclear experts must be having about the ideas for limiting and controlling the
nuclear fuel cycle as a means to stem further proliferation. There is a need to bring
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together different types of expertise to make policy as well as understand what is
happening in the world today.
These seminars are intended simply as a means to begin addressing all these issues
in the UK, especially in UK academia. We are not proposing to offer solutions to the
current range of problems in the area of WMD proliferation. We are not aiming to
produce as an outcome a single product in the form of a book (although we certainly
intend to publish). We are simply aiming to bring together those new to the subject
and planning to stay in it for a while – hence the PhD students – those who have
been in this field for under a decade in specific areas in order to widen their breadth
of knowledge and experience, those with a lifetime of experience and knowledge,
and those from industry, academia, government, and advocacy or NGO
organisations.
If everyone who attends this opening seminar can offer the names of a few other
people actually working in this area in the UK – in whatever capacity – then we can
begin to develop a broader base of expertise which may be able to learn from the
past and offer feasible solutions or new ways of understanding the current WMD
environment.
Caitríona McLeish
Daniel Feakes
Jez Littlewood
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