Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Spring 2005
Strategic Visions
Prompted by a dangerous gap between the mounting
superpower rivalry and the negligible understanding of Soviet behavior
among the American public and their leaders, Carnegie Corporation spearheaded
support after World War II for inter-disciplinary research on the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe. This led to the founding of the Russian Research
Center at Harvard University in 1948 that attracted talented scholars
to the field. The research and study supported by these and other grants
provided by the foundation world effectively created a reservoir of knowledge
for senior policymakers to draw on at the dawning of the Cold War.
Avoiding Nuclear War
After concentrating primarily on domestic causes throughout the
mid-1960s and 1970s, Carnegie Corporation once again took the lead to
move the Soviet Union to the forefront of foundation grantmaking. In 1983,
under the stewardship of new president David A. Hamburg, the Corporation
launched a major campaign to marshal independent research and policy analysis
aimed at encouraging both superpowers to step back from renewed confrontation
and to delineate sober-minded prospects for improving bilateral relations.
This Avoiding Nuclear War (ANW) program was premised on investigating
creative ways for extricating both countries from an intensifying security
dilemma, where mutual fear, mistrust, misperceptions and commitments to
containment elevated each side’s anxiety and propensity to resort
to even more threatening policies with potentially grave consequences
for humanity. The ANW program aspired to generate a “deeply innovative
combination of new ideas, understanding and education” about nuclear
crisis management, crisis prevention and confidence building. Because
assumptions about Soviet foreign and military ambitions seemed to be key
factors driving U.S. policy and “due to startling revelations about
the profound misunderstanding of American policymaking within senior Soviet
leadership and intelligence circles,” Hamburg at the outset envisioned
Soviet-related projects as integral to the ANW program. Accordingly, from
1983-1990, the Corporation devoted roughly half of the program’s
$50 million portfolio to strengthening and cultivating “the strongest
possible” scholarly and policy analytical expertise for examining
Soviet decision making and security policy, improving communication among
Soviet and American policymaking and policyadvising communities and elevating
public awareness and understanding of the fateful bilateral relationship.
Guided by this strategy, the lion’s share of Soviet-related grants
during the period fell into four basic categories. The first consisted
of multi-year, multi-million-dollar institutional grants to Columbia University,
Stanford University, the University of California, RAND and MIT to revitalize
first-rate graduate training and scholarly research on Soviet foreign
and security policies. This was complemented by support to Duke University
and the Social Science Research Council for training on Soviet domestic
politics that, together with the institutional grants, aimed at attracting
a new generation of scholars to advise the American public and policymakers.
Second, the ANW program invested in leading policy-analytic research organizations,
such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, as well as top-flight academic research centers
(such as at Harvard and Georgetown universities as well as the Brookings
Institution) to generate immediate and long-term assessments of Gorbachev’s
“glasnost” and “new thinking” and their implications
for crisis management and prevention. As new opportunities arose to engage
Soviet scientists and analysts with direct access to the Kremlin, Hamburg
and the program staff championed formation of joint study groups, consisting
of policy experts and scientists from both sides of the U.S.-Soviet divide.
This featured collaborative projects between Harvard University and the
Soviet Foreign Ministry that explored alternative negotiating strategies,
as well as joint technical studies on verification and compliance of arms
control agreements and the health consequences of nuclear war between
respective institutes of both countries’ Academy of Sciences.
The ANW program also accented support for linkages and exposure to the
Soviet Union for disparate audiences. Successive grants to the Aspen Institute
brought together U.S. Congressmen and Soviet specialists. Through a combination
of bi-annual retreats and regular breakfast meetings, the project served
the dual purposes of engaging legislators with little knowledge of the
Soviet Union directly with policy scholars (and on occasion, their Soviet
counterparts) in a bipartisan format, while enlightening experts and Soviet
officials on the concerns of U.S. congressional leaders. Finally, the
Corporation supported various public awareness projects, such as collaboration
between the Public Agenda Foundation and Brown University on alternative
directions for U.S.-Russia relations, as well as several educational documentaries,
including two television series, that traced the evolution of Soviet society
under Gorbachev (Gorbachev’s Russia) and ebbs and flows in the bilateral
relationship (Global Rivals).