The 1995 Nobel Peace Prize — Pugwash and Joseph Rotblat
This display brings the story of Thinkers’ Lodge forward almost forty years from the first conference. Across the bottom are the words “Toward Peace,” while the center identifies Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs as recipients of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize.
The large photograph at the top shows’ participants at the original 1957 Pugwash Conference. The smaller photographs trace the movement that grew from that gathering of scientists continuing to meet, Rotblat participating in later discussions, and eventually the presentation of the Nobel Prize.
The Nobel Committee awarded the 1995 Peace Prize jointly to Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences “for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms.” The timing was significant: it came fifty years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nearly forty years after the scientists first met here in Pugwash.
Rotblat received half of the prize personally, while the Pugwash Conferences received the other half. By then, what had begun with 22 scientists meeting in this small Nova Scotia village had developed into an international organization conducting meetings around the world and providing opportunities for scientists and policy specialists from opposing nations to communicate outside normal diplomatic channels.
One detail on this display is especially important. At the lower left is an image of the Nobel Peace Prize medal. The award was not simply recognition of a single meeting in 1957. It recognized decades of continuing work that grew from the conversations begun here.
This display therefore provides a wonderful conclusion to one part of the Thinkers’ Lodge story. In 1957, no one sitting around that table could know what their experiment in international dialogue would become. Thirty-eight years later, the name of this little Nova Scotia village was announced in Oslo as part of the Nobel Peace Prize.
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