This paper focuses on the construction of a transnational community of scientific critics of biological weapons research in the late 1950s and 1960s. First initiated in 1957, the Pugwash Conferences were a transnational venue for scientists to discuss and criticize the Cold War arms race, which emerged as an increasingly important element of informal Cold War diplomacy as the 1960s progressed. Though the organization which coordinated the conferences was dominated by Anglo-American and Soviet physicists principally concerned with the nuclear arms race, these leaders actively sought to construct transnational networks of critical experts on other weapons of mass destruction, especially biological weapons. Beginning in the late 1950s, Pugwash leaders successful enlisted biologists, epidemiologists, and physicians like Martin Kaplan and Matthew Meselson to construct this community of expertise, which in turn served as an influential liminal space for critics of biological weapons research and contributed to the unilateral American renunciation of the biological weapons in 1969, and the negotiation of the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972. The significance of Pugwash in Cold War diplomacy has been documented by Matthew Evangelista, but his focus on a few case studies of activism leaves a scholarly lacuna in Pugwash’s influential opposition to biological weapons. Drawing on the papers of Pugwash leaders and activists, my paper fills this lacuna, focusing on the twin questions of how a physicists’ organization so effectively constructed a community of biologists, and how this community constructed an authoritative body of critical knowledge in the face of pervasive military secrecy.
