Russell · 1955
The Russell-Einstein Manifesto
At one o'clock on the afternoon of the ninth of July 1955, in the Caxton Hall on the Westminster city-of-London side near the Houses of Parliament, Bertrand Arthur William Russell, third Earl Russell, eighty-three years old, the Trellech-Monmouthshire-born grandson of Lord John Russell (the mid-Victorian Whig Prime Minister, told on this page) and the most internationally recognised philosopher-and-public-intellectual of the twentieth century, gave a press-conference at which he read aloud the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, a eleven-paragraph statement signed by eleven prominent scientific-and-philosophical-figures (including Albert Einstein, who had signed the Manifesto from his Princeton deathbed on the eleventh of April 1955 and died on the eighteenth of April, exactly four days after signing), calling on the governments of the world to acknowledge that the thermonuclear-weapons-revolution had made the traditional war-as-political-instrument doctrine impossible, and to convene a scientific-and-political international-conference to address the existential-risk of thermonuclear-war. The Russell-Einstein Manifesto led directly to the founding of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in 1957 (the first Pugwash Conference was held at the Cyrus Eaton Pugwash, Nova Scotia, family home in July 1957, with Russell as the honorary president); the Pugwash Conferences were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. The Manifesto is, by every careful judgment of Cold War intellectual-history (Sandra Ionno Butcher, Joseph Rotblat), the foundational political-philosophical-document of nuclear-disarmament thought.
It is twenty past noon on the morning of Saturday the ninth of July 1955, in the anteroom of Caxton Hall, on the corner of Caxton Street and Tothill Street in central London, in pale summer light through the east windows. He is eighty-three years old. He is Bertrand Arthur William Russell, third Earl Russell, born at Ravenscroft (later renamed Cleddon Hall) near Trellech in Monmouthshire on the eighteenth of May 1872, son of John Russell, Viscount Amberley (the eldest son of the Prime Minister Lord John Russell) and Katharine Stanley, schooled at home, at Cambridge (Trinity College 1890–94, the Cambridge Apostles, Wrangler in mathematics 1893, First in moral sciences 1894), in his sixty-fifth year of public-intellectual writing since the Principles of Mathematics (1903).
Beside him in the anteroom is Joseph Rotblat, forty-six, the Warsaw-born Polish-British nuclear physicist (a former Manhattan Project scientist who had resigned from Los Alamos in late 1944 on the moral-conscience grounds when it had become clear the atomic-bomb would be used against Japan rather than Germany), who has co-organised the press conference with Russell. In a leather portfolio Russell is carrying are eleven finalised-signature copies of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto.
He thinks: the Manifesto is, by my eleven-week political-correspondence since the eleventh of April 1955 (the Einstein-Princeton signature, sent to me by post the day Einstein signed and reaching me on the fifteenth, three days before Einstein's death), the political-document of the 1955 nuclear-disarmament moment.
He thinks: the eleven signatories are: Bertrand Russell (chairman), Albert Einstein (posthumous), Max Born, Percy Bridgman, Leopold Infeld, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Hermann Joseph Muller, Linus Pauling, Cecil Powell, Joseph Rotblat, and Hideki Yukawa. Seven Nobel laureates among the eleven. The international-scientific-establishment is, on the eleven signatures, formally aligned on the nuclear-disarmament position.
He thinks: the 1952 American-thermonuclear-test at Eniwetok and the 1953 Soviet-thermonuclear-test at Semipalatinsk have, in plain reading, made the traditional Clausewitzian war-as-political-instrument doctrine impossible. The arms-race between the two superpowers is the most consequential political-philosophical question of the twentieth century. The Manifesto puts the question to the world's political-class.
He thinks: the Pugwash Conferences will, on the Cyrus Eaton offer of last week, begin at the Eaton-Pugwash Nova Scotia home in July 1957. The conferences will bring American and Soviet scientific-and-policy figures together in private off-the-record format for the rest of my life. The Pugwash Conferences will, by the 1980s, become the most-important back-channel of Cold War nuclear-arms-control diplomacy.
He goes out at one o'clock into the Caxton Hall main lecture-room. The press conference is full: about a hundred and fifty journalists from the British, American, European, Soviet, and Commonwealth press. He reads the eleven-paragraph Manifesto aloud, in his precise Cambridge-philosopher's voice, in about twenty-five minutes. The most-quoted line of the Manifesto, the closing peroration, is: we appeal as human beings to human beings: remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.
The Russell-Einstein Manifesto led directly to the First Pugwash Conference at the Cyrus Eaton home at Pugwash, Nova Scotia, in July 1957. The Pugwash Conferences have continued annually since, with about seventy-five conferences held in the period 1957–2025. The Pugwash Conferences and the co-founder Joseph Rotblat were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1995 (the citation: for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms).
Bertrand Russell continued as a public-intellectual figure of the international anti-nuclear-disarmament-and-anti-Vietnam-War movement until his death at his Plas Penrhyn home in Penrhyndeudraeth, Merionethshire, north Wales, on the second of February 1970, ninety-seven years old. He had been the honorary president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 1958–60 and the organiser of the Committee of 100 sit-down protests against British nuclear-weapons policy in 1961–62 (Russell was, at eighty-nine, arrested at the September 1961 Trafalgar Square sit-in and held for a week at Brixton Prison on a breach-of-the-peace charge). His three-volume Autobiography (1967–69) is the foundational personal-account of the twentieth-century philosophical-and-political-intellectual life. He is buried at the Plas Penrhyn family-plot in north Wales. The Russell-Einstein Manifesto, in the original 1955 single-sheet press-conference handout, is preserved in the McMaster University Bertrand Russell Archives in Hamilton, Ontario, the largest single Russell-archive in the world.