Peace Source began as the working home of PAND, Peoples and Nations for Nuclear Disarmament, an open, volunteer-led effort to build support for a world without weapons of mass destruction. The pages preserved in this archive are the founder's own words, written during the site's most active period in 2007 and 2008.
Who We Are
The site was managed by Dr. Barrie Machin, an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. In his own words, he had "periodically engaged in peace and environment activism since 1961," and had "dedicated my lifework and 33 years of fieldwork and teaching to peace through cross-cultural understanding."
That phrase, peace through cross-cultural understanding, is the thread running through everything on Peace Source. The conviction was simple: the barriers that make nations reach for weapons are, at bottom, failures of understanding between peoples, and an anthropologist's training is as relevant to disarmament as any diplomat's.
Our Purpose
"Our business," the original About page stated plainly, "is to achieve world synergy and get WMD banned forever." PAND was never a conventional organisation with letterhead and dues. It was conceived as an open collaboration, an invitation to writers, filmmakers, scientists, and ordinary citizens to pool their talents toward one goal, and to do it quickly.
The urgency in the founder's writing is unmistakable. He argued that humanity had already proven it could abolish whole classes of weapons, chemical and biological arms had been banned by treaty, and that nuclear weapons could follow the same path if enough capable people chose to work together rather than wait.
A Collaboration, Not a Campaign
The vision described a kind of virtual headquarters: a "transnational system" where contributors from any country could take a floor, an office, a task, and coordinate directly. It reads today as an early, hand-built sketch of the networked activism that later platforms would make ordinary, a reminder that the tools change but the impulse to organise across borders does not.
These pages are kept here as a historical record. For the wider themes they touch, see our archive on nuclear disarmament and the link between environment and conflict.