MARY KALDOR

I joined SIPRI in the autumn of 1967. In a way it was the golden age of SIPRI. Robert Neild was the Director and Gunnar Myrdal was the Chairman of the Governing Board. We were all very young, full of energy and expectations about what we could achieve. It was the beginning of the Yearbook and of several projects, like the arms trade and the chemical and biological weapons projects, that continue to this day. I remember Frank Blackaby, then the editor of the SIPRI Yearbook and later Director of SIPRI, saying that what we were trying to do was to write about armaments and disarmament for someone like the Egyptian delegate to the Geneva disarmament talks. What I do think we succeeded in doing was laying down an intellectual framework and background information for the intense debates that took place later, in the 1980s.

I was at SIPRI during the Viet Nam War, and Sweden seemed a haven of progressive thinking. There were many Viet Nam deserters and conscientious objectors. I remember going to the bank to take out money on the day when President Johnson announced a halt to the bombing of Viet Nam and the bank clerk said to me: 'Isn't this good news?' I thought: in what other country would the bank clerk be so interested in war and peace and assume that his customer would feel the same way? It was the time of the avant-garde film I Am Curious, Yellow and the BBC organized a programme about Sweden chaired by the veteran British broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge. He wanted to know why Sweden had a high suicide rate and why Swedes were depressed. And he was amazed when all the young Swedes said that they were depressed about the Viet Nam War and the height of prison walls.

I had just left university and, in retrospect, I was incredibly lucky. Nowadays it would be unthinkable for someone straight from an undergraduate degree to undertake a major research project. My job at SIPRI was to construct arms trade statistics. I spent months browsing technical magazines and specialist newsletters, talking to the Swedish military and the Swedish Defence Research Agency, until we came up with a method of tracing arms flows and valuing them-the method that is essentially still used today, even though we did not have computers in those days but used index cards and the knitting needle system for sorting the cards. The arms trade methodology is still one of the things I am most proud of in my career.

Mary Kaldor in make-up with Eva Grenbäck for a SIPRI staff pantomime: 'The hero was a guerrilla leader fighting the dictatorship from the hills, played by a woman, Randy Forsberg, who later became a leader of the US nuclear freeze campaign'

During my time at SIPRI, we organized a pantomime each Christmas time. I think we organized three and I still have a photo of Karin Lissåkers (later the US Director of the IMF and now George Soros' adviser on globalization) and me as the ugly sisters in 'Cinderella'. One year our pantomime was about a Third World country ruled by a military dictator, General Hawk (played by Robert Neild). The hero was a guerrilla leader, Ho Che Mao, fighting the dictatorship from the hills, played, in British tradition, by a woman, Randy Forsberg, who later became a leader of the US nuclear freeze campaign. Ho Che Mao was in love with the general's daughter, Holly Hawk, and had a poor widowed mother, Widow SIPRI, who eked out a living cutting up newspapers for SIPRI's press cuttings library. Widow SIPRI was the pantomime dame, played again as in the British tradition by a man, Frank Blackaby. There were four wicked arms dealers-US, Russian, French and British. I asked our Swedish Deputy Director if he would play the Russian dealer and he said: 'I don't think I have much of a sense of humour. Does it matter?' 'Oh no', I replied, 'It's perfect for the part'. Jozef Goldblat, our Polish arms control expert, adored being the French arms dealer and went around kissing everyone's hand and trying to charm Holly Hawk. Prvoslav Davinic, later the Minister of Defence of Serbia and Montenegro, dressed up in whites and a boater to play the British arms dealer, while Theodore Nemec, SIPRI's long-standing Czech staff member, donned a cigar to play the American part. Finally, the good fairy was a Swedish aid consultant, whom we called SIDA SIDAsson (SIDA being the acronym for the Swedish aid agency), who spent all her time trying to persuade General Hawk and Ho Che Mao to talk. Of course it all ended happily. Ho Che Mao got his girl and General Hawk married Widow SIPRI and relinquished power.

Many of my lasting friendships date from that time, including my lifelong partner, Julian Perry Robinson, and my friend Karin Lissåkers, who was then Gunnar Myrdal's research assistant. One of the great intellectual dynamos of SIPRI that I would like to commemorate was Anders Boserup, who is no longer alive and whom I still miss. He shared a flat in Gamla Stan with me and Julian and he filled SIPRI with exciting confrontations and arguments. We were privileged to work with the Myrdals, who were larger than life people. Gunnar would say that 'facts talk', and Alva's analysis of the cold war had a big influence on my way of thinking.

All in all, I am really grateful to SIPRI, not only for giving me a wonderful start in my professional life, but also for the sustained contribution the Institute has made to public knowledge about security, disarmament and peace.

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Mary Kaldor is Professor of Global Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She was a researcher at SIPRI from 1967 to 1970

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