Word: pugwash
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...PUGWASH First Canadian fishing village in history to lend its name to a Nobel Peace Prize winner...
...Project--the only physicist to do so--believing that only the threat of losing World War II could justify creating so terrible a weapon. Then, in 1955, Rotblat joined Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell and six other scientists in signing a manifesto that led to the founding of the annual Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which have lobbied ever since to convince governments that, in Rotblat's own words, "the genie can be put back in the bottle...
...often such courageous behavior is not rewarded. Last week, however, it was--handsomely if somewhat belatedly. The Norwegian Nobel Committee gave its 1995 Peace Prize jointly to Rotblat, 86, and the Pugwash Conferences he still presides over. The conferences--named for the small Nova Scotia fishing village where they began--were praised by the committee for recognizing "the responsibility of scientists for their inventions" and for bringing together "scientists and decision makers to collaborate across political divides on constructive proposals for reducing the nuclear threat." It was the third Peace Prize to be given to scientists for nuclear-disarmament work...
...selection of Rotblat and Pugwash, while something of a surprise, comes at a particularly opportune time. It is 50 years since atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people. And the French and Chinese governments continue to defy international protests by conducting nuclear tests. "One of the reasons for the prize is a sort of protest against testing of nuclear weapons, and nuclear arms in general," acknowledged committee chairman Francis Sejersted...
...Pugwash Conferences were based on a 1955 manifesto that read, in part: "We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties...