From The Hindu Archives, January 14, 1976: Pugwash meet opens: call for abolition of nuclear weapons

Madras, Jan. 13: A short speech by the Pugwash President Nobel Laureate, Prof. Dorothy Hodgkin, in which she expressed the interest of the scientific community in the abolition of nuclear weapons, and indeed of all other weapons, and in the re-building of society on equitable lines, heralded the opening of the week-long deliberations of the 25th Pugwash Conference at the spacious Ball Room in Taj Coromandel here.

She said India had a very special place in the history of the Pugwash Movement in as much as the late Prime Minister Nehru organised a Committee of Scientists to explain nuclear energy which preceded the actual Russell-Einstein Manifesto from which the dating of the Movement was usually made.

Prof. Dorothy Hodgkin recalled how the late Dr. Radhakrishnan, when he was India’s envoy in Moscow and also a Professor of Philosophy of Eastern Religions at Oxford, had urged her to visit the Soviet Union for contacts with her scientist counterparts in that country for a thaw in the cold war which was then at its peak. She actually made the visit three years later.