WILLEM F. VAN EEKELEN

By coincidence, the birth of SIPRI happened at a turning point in my own diplomatic career, which took me away from Asian and African affairs and towards issues of security and European integration. Arriving at the Netherlands mission to NATO at Paris in 1966 I was assigned to the staff group of the newly established Nuclear Planning Group (NPG). That was the time of US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara's proposed solution for the non-US allies' participation in nuclear planning, after the hardware solution of the Multilateral Force had foundered on the undeniable fact that in the final analysis the decision on launching nuclear weapons would be taken in Washington. McNamara insisted on the personal involvement of defence ministers in nuclear issues. He even ordered a special table for the first NPG meeting, just big enough to seat only one person at each of the seven sides. The accompanying delegates-four for each minister- were seated beyond whispering distance.

The NPG was a remarkable success, even though Helmut Schmidt once called it 'the NATO Pleasure Group' in view of the attractive places selected for its meetings. It allowed for fairly informal in-depth discussions of current issues, such as the strategy of flexible response, forward defence and deterrence, and even managed to agree on provisional guidelines for the selective use of nuclear weapons, listing the factors involved in a decision. To all participants it was an intellectual exercise of the first order with possibly awesome implications.

All that was difficult stuff for the founders of SIPRI and others who attempted to use the emerging climate of détente to explore new approaches to security studies. Peace research was a new field that had been opened by people like John Galtung in Norway and Bert Röling, founder of the Polemological Institute in Groningen, the Netherlands, and a member of SIPRI's Governing Board. A few years after SIPRI's creation followed the Hessische Stiftung of Dieter Senghaas. These researchers had the merit of going deeper into the causes of war and exposed the dilemma of relying for our security on the threat of inflicting terrible damage. With a keen eye for publicity they seized on the acronym MAD for the mutual assured destruction on which both sides' nuclear strategy was based.

At NATO we were not enamoured of that early period of peace research because it turned ideological and threatened to undermine public support for the only way to counter the massive conventional superiority of the Soviet Union. We felt better off with Albert Wohlstetter's Delicate Balance of Terror and the Strategie des Gleichgewichts of Helmut Schmidt. These concepts did not solve every problem, but they provided the basis for a transatlantic bargain in which Europe improved its conventional strength, thus raising the nuclear threshold, in return for a link with the strategic weapons of the United States. The course of history did not prove them wrong.

In those days deterrence was seen as a matter of nuclear weapons, with Herman Kahn developing an intricate ladder of escalatory steps in his Thinking about the Unthinkable. Personally, the debate made me aware of the continuing importance of deterrence, even when there is no nuclear factor involved. Deterrence and denial remain important in any strategic calculation, and there is nothing inherently immoral in raising the cost of aggression. The early peace researchers could not avoid giving the impression of feeling superior to those pitiful men and women who tried to manage the cold war-and did so successfully by ensuring that not a shot was ever fired in a direct East-West confrontation. The assumption that the possession of such weapons would ultimately lead to their employment has so far not become reality.

Alyson J. K. Bailes, SIPRI's current Director, welcomes Mongolian Prime Minister Nambaryn Enkhbayar to SIPRI in 2003

Fortunately, the ending of the cold war has restored a large measure of consensus on arms control, disarmament and the new agenda of peace support operations. The great merit of SIPRI has been its ability to shift away from political or ideological issues and to focus on the facts that everybody has to take into consideration. Peace research has now developed in a constructive and less controversial manner in a world marked by ethnic and religious conflict and by the new threats of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and the problems of failed states and organized crime. Consensus has grown on the importance of these challenges, but also on their complexity.

The new agenda includes the legitimacy of the use of force against grave violations of human rights-and most recently, the 'responsibility to protect'; the balance between freedom and security; and the blurring of the demarcation between internal and external security.

SIPRI has earned a reputation for the objectivity of the facts and figures it carefully assembles, as well as for the thoughtful reports and analyses in its Yearbook and other publications. As a multinational research organization it has firmly established its place in the international security community. We owe this 'tool of transparency', as its energetic director Alyson J. K. Bailes calls it, to the initiative and continued support of the Swedish Government.