Herbert York Interview (1988): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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In the last part of your career you moved to UC San Diego. You served as chancellor there. And now, in your new role, you are Director of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Tell us what that institution is trying to do.
I look at the mission of the Institute along the lines that it was presented to me by David Saxon, who was president of the university when we started, and Governor Jerry Brown, who was governor of the state, as being, primarily, to get the University of California more broadly and deeply involved academically with these large-scale issue of peace and security.
Of course, there have always been many people within the university who are interested in these issues, and some of them included them within their academic activities. Others carried on in a private way through political activism or otherwise. But what we're talking about is helping to expand, not necessarily create from scratch, but helping to extend those activities within the university in which professors and students include peace and security issues among their normal in university activities. And that means graduate students doing dissertations in any of a number of fields -- economics, political science, sociology, even physics -- in which the dissertation satisfies the normal requirements for a degree, but the backbone, the topic, relates in some way to the large-scale peace and security questions. We have a summer teaching seminar designed to improve the knowledge of the faculty members who teach in this area. We even interact with our Education Abroad Program, both in Asia and in Europe, to enrich the educational opportunities our students already have with some particular courses and seminars that relate, again, to these peace and security issues.
I don't take our mission to be to solve the peace and security problem. I take it to be to get the university more broadly engaged with this problem as part of its regular business, not as an add-on business. We're not looking for ways to bring in somebody to start working in this area. We're looking for ways to make it easily possible or to stimulate people who are already here to devote their time and energies to these questions within the disciplines, departments, and arrangements that are already here.
Is this a step toward contributing to public education in this area? Because if you look at the period that we're talking about, public opinion has become increasingly important. It's had its peaks and its valleys, but increasingly, it is very relevant to the debate that things cannot now be decided in the way they could in the past.
There have been ups and downs, as you say. And furthermore, there have been some shifts in the center of gravity, but I tend to see it more as periods when there's high polarization and periods of low polarization, rather than any fundamental shifts.
The early Reagan administration was a period in which there was enormous public interest on both sides of this issue. Reagan was elected by people who felt the prior administration was not paying enough attention to the threat posed by the Russians. When Reagan, then, began to talk in a way that was responsive to that part of the electorate, another part of the electorate said, "My God, where is he taking us?" And they became active. In my judgment, a lot of people who saw peace activism as representing a net movement in America were simply focusing on one end of a polarized society and forgetting that there was another large part of the American public that really felt quite opposite. In the later years of the Reagan administration, because he has turned back closer to the mainstream approach to arms control and so on, this polarization has melted to a certain degree.
In this last part of the most recent phase of your career, you've been involved a lot in East - West exchanges -- the Pugwash meetings and so on. How important are these?
They are of substantial importance, I think. The way they work is different at different times. When Pugwash was started, for example, it was only three or four years after Stalin died. Communications were almost nonexistent. There was no tourism, there were no international scientific meetings. International scientific meetings were just starting at the same time -- 1956 was the first Rochester Conference, I think, and '55 was the first International Atomic Energy Conference. Pugwash came along in '57. And so exchanges were very much inhibited, academic exchanges of all kinds. Those that dealt with political issues were more inhibited than others. And so the Pugwash movement was able to take a group of scientists and get them talking about combined scientific and political issues -- the arms race, in particular. And precisely because other channels were so rare and so clogged, it stood out. It provided a means for a communication that was effective. And there are number of cases of major ideas which were transmitted through that particular channel, all of them quite long ago. The easiest cases are all quite far back.
But even today, with the kind of exchange which is now [in place], and there are many more such instances, and some of them aren't even particularly organized -- I mean, you have a lot of people going back and forth. We're expecting a Russian visitor at our Institute shortly; we've had one just a few weeks ago. The communication channels are much broader and richer than they were. But these informal channels remain important. The informal and unofficial channels can in no way substitute for the government-to-government channels. But they can speed the flow of ideas and they can stimulate thinking at all levels, including the highest levels.
When one looks at the totality of your career, as one can in your book, there's a very great richness there. And one of things that is striking is that, on the one hand, you've been a participant at various important decision points in the system, whether at the [Livermore] Lab or in Washington or back at the university. And at the same time, you've been a historian of all of these matters. So, you've been both the well-situated participant and the trained observer. Any special insights from all of this richness that you want to leave us with?
I'm not really a trained observer. I've had a lot of help from some very nice and friendly people within the university. Or else, because my academic training really is very different from social sciences and ...
But you've had the time and the support to look at these things, too.
Yes. Yes, both in terms of individuals and in terms of the institution. I just feel very fortunate and glad about it. I'm glad it worked out that way. It's certainly been interesting for me to have the opportunity to go from inside to outside on more than one occasion.
Any insight that you can pass on about the complexity of the process that we haven't sort of talked about yet? That the people who are protesting, say, on the outside don't see the constraints on the people on the inside?
There certainly are large differences in the way they approach questions, in what their fundamental beliefs are and so forth. And those differences can never be totally bridged. It simply is different to have a responsibility for something, to have the monkey placed on your back to decide what's got to be done right now, almost always without sufficient information. That creates a set of mental attitudes and a way of thinking and approaching problems that's different from what you can have when you can sit back and say, "Well, I don't know enough. I'll get some more information" -- and then take a year to do it. The two are different and you can't really bridge them. But I know a lot of people in both of those circumstances, and I try, myself, to appreciate the point of view that goes, not only with the beliefs, but also with the situations, and to try to bridge that gap.
Professor York, thank you very much for taking this time to talk with us about these issues. I'm sure that everybody will want to go out and read your book, Making Weapons, Talking Peace -- a Physicist's Odyssey from Hiroshima to Geneva. Thank you very much and thank you for joining us for this Conversation on International Affairs.
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