Among the various national and transnational groupings working against nuclear war, the Pugwash movement stands out. Even today, it evokes the July 1955 manifesto that was drafted by Bertrand Russell and co-signed by Albert Einstein just before his death. The movement took its name from the location of its first meeting, in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia in summer 1957. So far, 59 “Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs” and numerous workshops have been held in various regions of the world. From the beginning, the movement aimed to bring together eminent scientists, scholars, politicians, diplomats and government advisers across the hostile frontiers of the Cold War. The “Pugwashites” wanted to go beyond the exchange of diplomatic notes or military force, instead using the shared language of science to evaluate the risks of nuclear armament, develop solutions to regional conflicts and exert influence on national governments with the goal of promoting world peace. The themes addressed by the Pugwash conferences have diversified to reflect the changing problems facing international politics – climate change; crises of energy, food and natural resources. Since the movement was founded its membership structure has also changed, as have the scientific disciplines and professions of its members, its objectives, methods and modes of cooperation, and its role within the debates of global politics.

To date, the history of the Pugwash movement has been told largely through chronological accounts, memoirs and partial studies of national Pugwash groups. Writing a comprehensive history of the movement is perhaps not possible at the present time. On the one hand, the informal structure of the Pugwash movement means it is known only to a relatively small audience, and has attracted little attention from historians even since the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the movement and its secretary general, Joseph Rotblat, in 1995. On the other, although the Pugwash movement has an international presence, it is embedded in very different scientific, social and political configurations in different countries and regions. As a result, it seems neither possible nor desirable to write a single, unified narrative of the movement's peace-policy successes and global political significance. Instead, what we need are multi-faceted histories written from a range of distinct national and regional perspectives. Only in this way will historians be able to fully understand the distinctive character of the Pugwash movement in the long term, its survival through time and across such profound political changes and its contributions to international dialogue. From its inception, Pugwash oscillated between an elitist claim to universal scientific expertise, links with transnational movements for peace and against nuclear weapons, and integration into the local political establishments. It therefore offers an outstanding opportunity to consider national and international connections between science and politics, which became increasingly complex during the second half of the twentieth century. Analysing these interrelations from a transnational perspective necessitates a large, cooperative network of historians, able to take a range of different thematic and regional approaches.