Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Summer 2004
Indeed, grantmaking to advance the cause of international peace and security continues through the current day. But in looking back at the Corporation’s work in this area over more than twenty years—and noting that the foundation has spent tens of millions of dollars supporting efforts dedicated to finding ways of averting a nuclear confrontation, reducing the spread of nuclear weapons and keeping the threat posed by these weapons at the forefront of public and policy attention—it is important to reflect on what has been accomplished and how the foundation decided to pursue the directions that were followed. What has been the Corporation’s strategy in developing and implementing its agenda? Has its grantmaking led to policy decisions? Have its grants contributed to lessening the chance of a nuclear exchange—intentional or accidental—between the United States and Russia? And what directions have two decades of work in this area led the foundation to pursue today? While the answers to these questions may not always seem definitive, it is clear that the Corporation’s work was undertaken with an eye to real-world challenges and a concern with developing thoughtful, effective responses using grantmaking tools that included support of research, commissions, public outreach, linkages between policy and expert communities and capacity-building efforts.
The Cold War and Nuclear Nonproliferation:
The Avoiding Nuclear War Program
In 1983, the United States, France, Great Britain, China and the Soviet Union were conducting regular tests of nuclear weapons; a radioactive Soviet satellite plummeted into the Indian Ocean; U.S. President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire” and introduced his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which came to be known as “Star Wars”; anti-nuke demonstrators linked arms in a 14-mile-long human chain in England; India entered the space age by launching its SLV-3 rocket; the Soviet Union admitted to shooting down a Korean airliner; the U.S. placed its first cruise missiles in Great Britain; and the U.S. and Soviet Union continued to aim thousands of nuclear weapons at each other.
The year seemed to epitomize the decade: international tensions were running high while international dialogue about how to address conflicts hardly rose above a murmur. Taking note of the escalating dangers of confrontation between nations stockpiling ever-increasing arsenals and publicly musing over the possible scenarios in which they might be used, the Corporation decided, initially, to focus a sizeable portion of its grantmaking activities on avoiding nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
“In the 1983–1984 timeframe, the prism we had to look through was the U.S.-Soviet relationship,” says Patricia Moore Nicholas, program associate in the Corporation’s International Peace and Security program. “The potential for tensions in that relationship were among the gravest threats to humanity at the time.”
The Corporation responded by developing its Avoiding Nuclear War program of the 1980s, which was designed to help fill the gaps in knowledge about the U.S.-Soviet relationship and nuclear policy. Under the program, the Corporation provided grants related to arms control, supported cooperative U.S.-Soviet linkages and strengthened U.S. institutions working in these areas. The thrust of these grants was to revitalize the study of international security and also to promote a corpus of scholarly and intellectual analysis on nuclear issues and on U.S.-Soviet relations.
In a related effort, the Corporation engaged in grantmaking directed at educating the public about the nuclear threat. For example, Corporation-supported work at the Public Agenda Foundation, Brown University’s Center for Foreign Policy Development, the League of Women Voters, the Foreign Policy Association and the Kettering Foundation’s Domestic Policy Association provided the public with analyses of the opinions and positions of experts on the uses of nuclear weapons and the nature of the U.S.-Soviet relationship. Providing funding for conferences organized by the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (under the direction of Aspen Institute senior fellow Dick Clark, former U.S. senator from Iowa and member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee) to bring together congressional policymakers and leading authorities on U.S.-Soviet relations was also an important strategy. For the Corporation, helping to build a bridge between the American public and American policymakers and the experts and scholars working on nuclear issues in a time of increasing tensions was—and continues to be—an ongoing consideration of its grantmaking.