Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 2 | A Letter from the President

It was Yogi Berra who said, “We’re lost but we’re making good time.” Alas, he could have been describing humanity’s roundabout trip to world peace. Today, despite making some good progress toward peace, we again face a world with escalating violence and threats of war. In these times that strain hope, I find solace in four anniversaries in the struggle for peace and thought I would share them with you.

Ninety years ago, in 1913, during a lull between wars, Andrew Carnegie opened the Palace of Peace at The Hague, which today houses the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the UN’s International Court of Justice, the Hague Academy of International Law and one of the most prestigious international law libraries in the world. At the opening, he spoke about his ardent belief that war could be vanquished by the transformative power of knowledge, learning and understanding. He believed that war is wasteful and avoidable, that diplomacy and international organizations can resolve disputes peacefully and, when necessary, help national members to act collectively in prosecuting cases involving injustice. In his speech that day he said, “The greatest advances have appeared to burst upon us suddenly although the ground has been well prepared. So it will probably be with the change from barbarous war to civilized peace.”

Twenty years ago, in 1983, Carnegie Corporation joined our sister institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in trying to keep Andrew Carnegie’s vision for peace alive. The Corporation expanded and formalized its anti-war program, calling it Avoiding Nuclear War. At that time, the nuclear arms race was heading toward outer space with President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The Corporation had some success with its program, according to a 1988 assessment by David Hamburg, the Corporation’s president at that time. He reported: “Almost all the serious discussion in the Congress and the national press on SDI relied upon the major studies we had supported and to some degree initiated. It is widely believed that these studies changed the terms of the national debate, relying more on fact and less on fancy.” The Corporation’s program, now named International Peace and Security, continues to support research and initiatives that try to identify the ticking bombs of conflict and war and seek rational ways to defuse them.

Ten years ago, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Congress enacted the Cooperative Threat Reduction Act of 1993, which included recommendations from a Corporation task force. This was not surprising, since its members included the law’s primary co-sponsors, senators Sam Nunn and Richard G. Lugar. The act significantly strengthened an earlier law, the Soviet Nuclear Threat Act of 1991, which was also co-sponsored by Lugar and Nunn, who now serves as a Corporation trustee. The 1993 law authorized financial and technical assistance to help former Soviet republics dismantle weapons of mass destruction, prevent their proliferation and relocate warheads from some republics to Russia. Since 1993, this international cooperation has resulted in the removal of nuclear weapons from three republics, the deactivation of more than 6,000 nuclear warheads and the destruction of hundreds of intercontinental missiles, mobile launchers and bombers. Now, after U.S. expenditure of about $5 billion in total on this project, perhaps 40 percent of all Russian material has been “secured,” according to Senator Nunn. This work continues today, though Congress has never fully funded the project, which safeguards the world’s most insecure arsenal of weapons of mass destruction—a situation, some argue, that poses a far greater and more alarming long-term risk than does Iraq or North Korea and their arsenals.

Two years ago, in January 2001, Ted Turner and Senator Nunn founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit, international organization with a mission to strengthen global security by reducing the risk of use and proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. The initiative states that it seeks to raise public awareness, serve as a catalyst for new thinking and take direct action to reduce these threats.

These four anniversaries remind us of progress as well as the need for much more. The anniversaries also remind us that old crises do not go away, even as new ones appear and preoccupy government policy and public attention. It is nonprofit organizations like the Corporation, the Nuclear Threat Initiative and others that provide a wider perspective, concerned not only with the crisis du jour but also with endemic problems, including the security of existing weapons of mass destruction, simmering conflicts over scarce resources and deeply rooted efforts to mobilize religion in service of ethnic and nationalist interests.

This January, in a step that builds on Andrew Carnegie’s legacy, Carnegie Corporation and the Nuclear Threat Initiative sponsored a London conference, entitled “Protecting Against the Spread of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Weapons: An Action Agenda for Global Partnership.” The conference brought together a consortium of 15 European, North American and Asian research institutions that, for the past year, had been examining ways to accelerate the work of securing and dismantling weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union—and preventing them from falling into the hands of hostile states and terrorists.

Yesterday’s unresolved international problems, as we well know, have a way of developing into tomorrow’s international crises. As Wallace Stevens once observed, “All history is modern history.”

Vartan Gregorian
President