THE BEGINNING BEFORE THE BEGINNING

When reflecting on the life of SIPRI at 40, it should first be noted that the Institute did not emerge from a 'big bang' government decision on 1 July 1966, SIPRI's inauguration day. The creation of SIPRI, as it turned out, was rather the consequence of many years of low-profile debate-at universities and research institutes, in the Swedish Government and Parliament, in newspapers and among the public-about the relevance and desirability of peace and conflict research in Sweden. Setting up a capable peace research institute in neutral Sweden was also suggested abroad, for example, at the June 1962 meeting of the non-governmental Accra World Peace Assembly¹. The debate lasted for many years; and the moment of SIPRI's establishment did not mark the conclusion of the discussion, which, indeed, is still going on today. Rather, it reflected the coincidence between the efforts of those who were already striving for an institutionalized peace research capacity and a relevant upcoming historical jubilee- Sweden's 150 years of unbroken peace as of 14 August 1964.

Much of this process was described by Frank Blackaby² in SIPRI: Continuity and Change 1966- 1996, published on the occasion of SIPRI's 30th anniversary. This introduction is not an attempt to redraft that account, but rather a brief survey of why and how SIPRI came into being, reinforced by some new insights gained inter alia from documents and notes left by Dr Rolf Björnerstedt³ from documents in the Swedish Labour Movement Archives and Library⁴; and from interviews with relevant persons.

The new academic discipline of peace and conflict research was established gradually during the late 1950s. Several peace organizations and academic institutions discussed the possibility, and indeed the need, for more reliable and objective knowledge as a basis for policy makers trying to find non-military solutions to international conflicts. The cold war between East and West was going on at the time and a third world war fought with nuclear weapons was an ever-present possibility. In Sweden, the Minister of Defence began supporting 'security studies' at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (Utrikespolitiska institutet, UI) in the early 1960s, following the introduction of the term 'security policy' (säkerhetspolitik) into the Swedish language. At the time, two issues were at the top of the security agenda in Sweden. One was the policy of neutrality, originating as far back as 1834. The other was the decision whether or not to acquire nuclear weapons. Neutrality was uncontroversial and had in 1962 given Sweden a seat at the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament (CD)⁵. The nuclear weapon issue was highly controversial at large and posed a political dilemma as the Parliament and the public were severely split on the issue. It was also very relevant in relation to the negotiations in Geneva. The Swedish Government clearly hoped that an early success in the negotiations would ban nuclear weapons from the whole world, and thus from Sweden, too. Many politicians, inside as well as outside the cabinet, considered general and complete disarmament-which was high on the CD's agenda at the time-as a serious proposition.

Alva and Gunnar Myrdal pushed for the early establishment of a peace and conflict research centre in Sweden. They were the first and second chairmen of SIPRI's Governing Board, respectively

Sweden's chief disarmament negotiator, Ambassador Alva Myrdal (1902-86), who had to confront the issues in Geneva on a daily basis, started to urge the government to produce more analysis and scientific facts to support her own work and that of the other delegations in the group of non-aligned countries. In this she was vigorously supported by her husband, Professor Gunnar Myrdal (1898- 1987), an economist and social scientist of worldwide reputation. Both Alva and Gunnar pushed for the early establishment of an institute for peace and conflict research in Sweden.

As a former cabinet minister, Gunnar Myrdal had excellent contacts and personal relations with people in government at that time.⁶

Several members of the cabinet, including the Prime Minister, Tage Erlander, had begun to entertain a vision that peace research would eventually produce effective guidelines on how to secure lasting peace. Establishing an institute for peace and conflict research in Sweden thus became a logical conclusion.

As one illustration of this faith in research, it was believed that, when the next generation of ingeniously designed seismographs had been installed, agreement on a comprehensive nuclear test ban-then a top priority issue- would be just around the corner. Dr Ulf Ericsson of the Swedish Defence Research Institute (Försvarets forskningsanstalt, FOA)-who became a member of the SIPRI Seismic Study Group in 1968-published a paper in 1970 that investigated the limits of the political problem of seismic monitoring.⁷ In 1971 US Senator Ted Kennedy asked the Pentagon if the time was not ripe for agreeing to a test ban, considering recent scientific findings. The official reply of the US administration was that those findings were indeed interesting, but that further testing, especially so-called proof tests⁸, was important for US security and should continue. The United States thus could not agree to a comprehensive nuclear test ban. The earlier expectations of peace research had proved to be naive. But by that time, SIPRI had already celebrated its fi fth anniversary.

By the end of 1963 the general interest in peace research had grown considerably, but not enough to prompt immediate action. Simultaneously but not coordinated with the Myrdals' pressure for peace research, preparations for such research were also going on within the academic sphere, both at the universities and-very relevant for the later initiative to establish SIPRI-at FOA and UI in Stockholm. As a scholar at the former institute, Dr Rolf Björnerstedt was particularly active, as was Professor Karl Birnbaum, the director of the latter.

Dr Björnerstedt had early acquired an interest in nuclear physics and nuclear weapons. Already as a teenager in 1945, he happened to live on the same farm in central Sweden as Dr Lise Meitner, a famous German nuclear physicist who was one of three scientists who discovered the phenomenon of nuclear fission. She had escaped the war and moved to neutral Sweden. Rolf became a nuclear physicist himself. Upon graduation he joined FOA, but gradually became suspicious about the conventional wisdom in Sweden at the time-that Swedish defence should 'go nuclear'. It was therefore no surprise when in the early 1960s he became interested in peace research. Pro fessor Birnbaum, historian and political scientist, served as the director of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs in 1960-70. He took the lead, in cooperation with FOA, in the early security studies that the Ministry of Defence had initiated at his institute. For a short while, Birnbaum also considered the initiation of peace research in Sweden as an opportunity to expand his own institute.

Rolf Björnerstedt and Karl Birnbaum started to work out a preliminary outline for the research programme, organization and financing of a future peace research institute, although several others were working along similar lines at the time. Then, in May 1964, Rolf Björnerstedt had a brilliant idea. He saw from a news bulletin that the 150th anniversary of Sweden's unbroken peace was just three months ahead. Why not celebrate by establishing a peace research institute, rather than erecting a stone monument such as had already been raised at the centennial in 1914? The event had to be celebrated anyway, so why not in this way? The credit for seeing this connection is entirely his: and it meant that action could not wait. The Swedish Government was approached in two ways. Björnerstedt knocked on the door of the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, Karl Frithiofsson, and convinced him that the peace research proposal was the best idea for the purpose of celebrating the anniversary. Frithiofsson pushed the idea further into government circles. Karl Birnbaum happened to live in a western Stockholm suburb next door to a longtime aide to the Prime Minister. This neighbour, whom Birnbaum met frequently, was Olof

Nuclear physicist Rolf Björnerstedt originated the idea of celebrating 150 years of peace in Sweden by establishing a peace research institute. Below he receives the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education on behalf of SIPRI in 1982 from then UNESCO Director-General Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow

Palme, a member of the cabinet since the previous year and five years later to succeed Erlander as Social Democratic Party Chairman and Prime Minister. Olof Palme promised to present the idea to Erlander, who approved of the concept: it provided a dignified way of commemorating Sweden's 150 years of unbroken peace and at the same time would mean the realization of the project which Alva and Gunnar Myrdal had so ardently pursued.

The peace celebration was coming up and this imposed a 'deadline' on the political discussion about peace research in Sweden. Thus, on 16 August 1964⁹, at a joint Norwegian-Swedish ceremony at Eda, close to the stone monument from 1914, Tage Erlander announced that the formal process for establishing a peace research institute would be initiated. He did not specify any further details, however.

'The task of conducting a consistent policy of peace in Sweden makes it natural for us to acknowledge the problem of how international conflicts arise, how they can be avoided, and how they can be solved in a peaceful manner. This is currently a problem for all countries, for all the peoples of the world. . . .

. . . one could ask whether it would be possible for scientists to contribute to the resolution of international conflicts by increasing our knowledge of the underlying problems and of ways to reduce tension, to eliminate sources of conflict and to make effective use of the UN as a safeguard of peace. Not least, research efforts are needed to solve the problems arising in connection with the UN's peace operations and disarmament negotiations. The Swedish delegate to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Ambassador Alva Myrdal, has emphasized to me the great importance of creating greater possibilities for thorough, impartial elucidation of the questions arising in the field of disarmament. The same need for research and inquiry exists in the area of the United Nations' activ- ities, for example, in peacekeeping operations.

This question has been raised in several countries, and efforts to establish peace and conflict research have been made in several places. Also in our country, the first steps have been taken in this direction with the grant for security policy studies to the Institute of International Affairs.

The time has come for a serious examination of the question of our possibilities to make a more significant effort within this area. An international institute for peace and conflict research is a perspective which deserves thorough discussion. . . .

The government intends to set up an inquiry to survey the problems surrounding the establishment of such an institute. . . . I hope that Sweden will be able to make a contribution in this area that is in line with our long tradition of peace and with our growing awareness of the small nations' joint responsibility for the preservation of peace in the world of today.'
Excerpts from Prime Minister Tage Erlander's address in Eda on 16 August 1964

By this time, Rolf Björnerstedt and Karl Birnbaum had arrived at a preference for making the new institute purely international. Incidentally, Gunnar Myrdal held the same view. In order to obtain the support of a wider international science community for the proposed institute, in September Rolf Björnerstedt and Professor Hannes Alfvén¹⁰ participated in the Thirteenth Pugwash Conference-a very relevant forum for this particular purpose. Their presentation of the peace research institute as proposed by the Prime Minister was 'warmly applauded'¹¹. The Prime Minister had himself sent an official telegram of greetings and support to the conference. Pugwash's initial support was continued and enhanced through subsequent Pugwash Conferences until the then Secretary General of Pugwash, Professor Joseph Rotblat, was appointed a member of SIPRI's Governing Board in 1966¹².

In the same month of September 1964, Rolf Björnerstedt and Karl Birnbaum published outlines for a peace research programme in Op-Ed articles in Sweden's leading daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter, writing from a natural science and a political science angle, respectively. The debate on concrete issues had begun.

'The institute's first task will probably be an inventory of possible tasks. The multitude of national initiatives and more or less scientific works must be sorted and the different methods and results must be critically analysed and if possible evaluated. In principle, any work undertaken by a national institute has its counterpart at the international level. In practice, only a thoroughly screened selection of tasks will be agreed to be taken up in international studies. This does not mean, however, that the tasks would be either few or small.'
Rolf Björnerstedt, 'Internationell fredsforskning'[International peace research], Dagens Nyheter, 13 September 1964

'. . . even if the "discoveries" of peace research cannot as easily be translated into practical action at the international level as, for example, the research results of the natural sciences at the national level, increased knowledge about international conflicts is nonetheless an important prerequisite for more effective measures aiming at securing world peace. Can we really afford to leave any possibility untried in this domain? The international discussion about the UN's peacekeeping activities shows how much could be done in this area, through systematic, interdisciplinary cooperation carried out by international research teams, where the appointment of individuals is determined primarily by their capacity to contribute significantly to the illumination of a given problem, and not, for example, by formal quotas.'

Karl Birnbaum, 'Fredsforskning och internationella studier' [Peace research and international studies], Dagens Nyheter, 26 September 1964

In December 1964, the Swedish Government appointed a committee tasked with working out a concrete proposal for a peace research institute in Sweden. Ambassador Alva Myrdal was appointed chairperson of the committee. Both Professor Hannes Alfvén and Dr Karl Birnbaum were appointed members, as was Rolf Björnerstedt's boss, Dr Martin Fehrm, the Director-General of FOA. The committee (known as the 'Myrdal Committee') worked for more than a year and reported in early 1966.¹³

The first main problem confronting the committee was whether the institute should address primarily concrete and substantial issues relevant for assessing existing international conflicts and the arms race, or whether basic and theor- etical issues regarding the nature of aggression and violence should be the priority for research. The two approaches corresponded to two schools within the emerging peace research discipline. It soon became clear that the chairperson, or rather both the Myrdals, strongly preferred the first option.

SIPRI'S first Director, Robert Neild. He was a driving force behind SIPRI's early intellectual development and conceived the SIPRI Yearbook. He instructed Jan Prawitz to distribute copies of the first Yearbook to all members of the Conference on Disarmament and the UN General Assembly

They saw a need for more practically oriented knowledge for the promotion of peace in the relatively short run. Yet, as Gunnar Myrdal repeatedly insisted, the research undertaken by the institute should be independent and with only one precondition: the conviction that peace is a positive value. He was able to express this view with a great deal of authority, as the author of the famous book on objectivity in social science, first published in 1930 and now a classic and still relevant work¹⁴. Myrdal's view was criticized by the primary representative of the other school of peace research, the Norwegian Professor Johan Galtung, who was the Director of the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), founded in 1959. Galtung characterized the absence of war with the value-loaded term 'negative peace' and distinguished it from a 'positive peace' that would be arrived at by building peaceful conditions for positive interaction between individual human beings-whom he called 'social atoms'.

Needless to say, the Myrdal view prevailed. The Swedish Government adopted the resulting proposals from the committee and they were confirmed by the Parliament on 10 May 1966. SIPRI came into being on 1 July that year.

The success of the Myrdal formula became clear rather soon. When the first SIPRI Yearbook was published, in 1969¹⁵, the present author-a visiting scholar at the Institute at the time-was instructed by SIPRI's Director, Robert Neild, to distribute copies of the book to all the delegations at the Conference on Disarmament and the UN General Assembly.

The effect was immediate. Until then many ambassadors, particularly in the nonaligned group, were poorly supported in their work. They frequently had to wait many hours to get in contact by telephone with their ministries at home and, when they reached their ministries, the instructions they received were not always to the point. Rather, the regular basis for their daily work was the proposals made by the major powers and whatever they could glean from the morning newspapers on the spot.

From 1969, they also had the highly respected SIPRI Yearbook: and beyond the slightest doubt, for many that meant a quantum jump in performance quality.

SIPRI's 30th anniversary publication noted that, when the union of Norway and Sweden was brought to an end peacefully in 1905, a demilitarized zone was created on both sides of the border¹⁶. This zone has an indirect connection to in the sense that a former staff member-Dr Ingemar Dörfer, the author of SIPRI's second publication¹⁷-owns a summer house in the westernmost part of Sweden. The kitchen of this house was divided in two by the eastern limit of the zone established in 1905, so that half of Dr Dörfer's kitchen was demilitarized. When he served as an aide to Sweden's Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1991-94, he managed to get the zone treaty cancelled. It had then for too long been an anachronism. It will take longer before we can say the same of all the time-worn sources of strife in the world that SIPRI still monitors today.

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Jan Prawitz is a Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. He was formerly inter alia Scientific Advisor to the Swedish Disarmament Delegation and Special Assistant for Disarmament to Sweden's Defence Minister. He was a SIPRI researcher from 1968 to 1969

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1 Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives, file HP48 V 66.

2 Frank Blackaby (1921–2000) served as a senior SIPRI researcher from the beginning and as the Institute’s Director in 1981–86.

3 Dr Rolf Björnerstedt (1926–2005) was closely involved in the ‘beginning before the beginning’ process. He served as SIPRI’s Deputy Director in 1966–68 and as Chairman of its Governing Board in 1979–85.

4 The author is especially indebted to Mr Stellan Andersson of the Labour Movement Archives and Library for generous assistance in scanning relevant files and documents. Mr Andersson specializes inter alia in Alva and Gunnar Myrdal and Olof Palme files and has published a monograph on Sweden’s arms control policies in 1961–63 (Den första grinden, Santerus, 2004, in Swedish).

5 In 1960 this body was called the Ten-Nation Committee on Disarmament, in 1962–68 the Eighteen Nation Committee on Disarmament (ENDC), and in 1969–78 the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament (CCD). It became the CD in 1979.

6 Gunnar Myrdal was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974, and Alva Myrdal was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982.

7 The Seismic Study Group produced an early SIPRI volume: Davies, D. (ed.), SIPRI, Seismic Methods for Monitoring Underground Explosions, Stockholm Papers Number 2 (Almquist & Wiksell: Stockholm, 1969). Ericsson’s studies were published as ‘Event identification for test ban control’, Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, vol. 60, no. 5 (Oct. 1970), pp. 1521–48, and were tabled as Swedish interventions at the Geneva negotiations in documents of the Eighteen Nation Committee on Disarmament, ENDC/119, 19 July 1967, and the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament, CCD/329, 29 June 1971. FOA is today called FOI (Totalförsvarets forskningsinstitut, the Swedish Defence Research Agency).

8 Most nuclear weapon tests have been part of research and development programmes, but randomly selected weapons from current arsenals were occasionally ‘proof tested’ in order to verify the status of the arsenals.

9 The anniversary day was 14 Aug. but the ceremony was postponed for 2 days because the appointments calendar of the prime minister was full.

10 Hannes Alfvén (1908–95) was professor of physics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970. He also served as the President of Pugwash in 1970–75.

11 Proceedings of the Thirteenth Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, ‘Disarmament and Peaceful Collaboration among Nations’, Karlovy Vary, Czech oslovakia, 13–19 Sep. 1964, p. 13.

12 In 1995 the Pugwash Conferences and the President of Pugwash, Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat (1908–2005), jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize.

13 The report was published in Statens offentliga utredningar (SOU) 1966:5.

14 The book was first published in Swedish (Vetenskap och politik i nationalekonomin, Norstedts: Stockholm, 1930). Several editions followed in various languages; an English version is The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory, Routledge & Paul: London, 1953).

15 SIPRI Yearbook of World Armaments and Disarmament 1968/69 (Almqvist & Wiksell: Stockholm, 1969). This Yearbook was published in collaboration with Humanities Press, Inc., New York and Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., London.

16 See the chapter by Frank Blackaby in the volume SIPRI: Continuity and Change 1966–1996, p. 5.

17 Dörfer, I., SIPRI, Communication Satellites, Stockholm Papers Number 1 (Almqvist & Wiksell: Stockholm, 1969).


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