Celebrate Our 30th!

This month marks the 30th anniversary of the founding of Science for Peace. Seventeen directors signed the incorporation papers and they comprised the entire membership of that day. The membership grew rapidly over the next 14 months and numbered 178 at the time of the Annual General meeting the next year. It is good to recollect the achievements of Science for Peace, which have been many. Throughout the 1980s, we had a close relationship with the Arms Control and Disarmament Division of the Department of External Affairs (now DFAIT) and, in the latter Trudeau years, with the Prime Minister’s office. In the first decade, board members included several presidents of the Royal Society of Canada, University Presidents and deans of faculties, Nobel Prize winners in Physics and in Chemistry, and, for one term, the President of the National Research Council.

Some early peace research was achieved by Walter Dorn, who brought in outside funding. A good idea of our early work in peace education can be seen in the obituary of Terry Gardner, in this issue of the Bulletin. More recently, our strong link with peace education has been mainly with Julia Morton-Marr and her organization IHTEC.

In our middle years, numerous Working Groups were active, and several came up with useful documents, of which the Toronto Resolution was widely circulated and read. Following an initiative of Anatol Rapoport’s, we published 13 books between 1986 and 2000. A project called the Superordinate Project, around 1990, gave rise to an important paper, “Nature’s Veto.”

Many briefs to Parliamentary Committees have been presented either in Ottawa or at Queens Park, and some written briefs and some oral. More recently the research on the corporatization of universities by Paul Hamel and John Valleau deserves attention.

Throughout these 30 years Science for Peace has put on many public events, and sponsored several conferences of experts resulting in published proceedings. In 2005, the Global Issues Project was initiated, fulfilling a goal of former SfP president Helmut Burkhardt that we should be looking at problems globally, to enable us to grasp the Big Picture, so often missed by narrow specialists.

It is a worthy background to build on.