As he describes it, one of Robert Nield’s early formative experiences was observing and analyzing the appalling damage visited on German cities and civilians by the Allied bombing campaign in the Second World War. His family background was Quaker and his own career path was perhaps influenced by his famous uncle, Philip Noel-Baker, a major figure in the peace movement between the wars and in British politics in the 1940s and '50s, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959.
After the War, Neild took a degree in economics and then worked in the Cabinet Office in Whitehall, in the U.K. Treasury, and as Deputy Director in the National Institute for Economic and Social Research in London, ending up as economic adviser to the Treasury under Harold Wilson’s 1964 Labour Government. Previous to this last appointment, he had worked in the U.N. Economic Commissions for Europe, where he made the acquaintance of the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal and his equally skilled and influential wife, Alva. In 1966 the Swedish Government was planning to celebrate 100 years of peace for Sweden by establishing a peace research institute in Stockholm, and Myrdal was looking for a Director for this new institute. He contacted Robert Neild, offered him the post, and thus Neild became the first Director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in 1967, a post he held for four years before handing it over to his British colleague, Frank Barnaby.
At the time, as he notes in his interview, Neild was interested in the arms race and the whole question of disarmament, both nuclear and conventional. However, as he says in another interview, “…there was incredibly little information available…” so that he felt that the best contribution that SIPRI could make was “…to provide a better flow of information about what was going on in the arms race…” This was the origin of the continuing series of SIPRI Yearbooks and the development of SIPRI as the trusted world source of accurate information about arms levels, arms expenditures and the arms trade--all of which can be dated back to Robert Neild’s strategy for the Institute, laid down during his Directorship.
Neild retired from SIPRI in 1971 to become a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, but he remained active in the peace and conflict field for the next forty years. After SIPRI, he worked with the Danish peace researcher, Anders Boserup around the issue of “non-offensive defence.” Both were influential in the “Gorbachev decade” leading up to glasnost, perestroika and detente between the Soviet Union and the West, making several informal visits to the Soviet Union to explain their ideas to receptive Russian experts.
Robert Neild remains at Trinity College as an emeritus professor and in 2016, at the age of 91, was writing letters to the Financial Times about ending the war in Syria.
JB/CRM
