The Russell-Einstein Manifesto

A new weapon does not, of itself, change the conduct of states. States are old institutions, slow to learn, and the men who run them are inclined to fit each novelty into the cabinet of instruments they already understand. War, in particular, has been kept on its shelf for so long that even the appearance of a weapon which makes war meaningless does not immediately remove it. Someone, at some moment, must say aloud that the shelf itself is gone. The saying is not a discovery; the physicists have done the discovering. It is the translation of physics into the older language of conscience, spoken at the right hour and under a name the chancelleries cannot ignore. For this office, history occasionally borrows a private man at the end of a long life.

THE LONG INHERITANCE

He is Bertrand Arthur William Russell, third Earl Russell, born at Ravenscroft above the Wye on the eighteenth of May 1872, grandson of the Lord John Russell who carried the Reform Bill of 1832 and twice served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The Whig house at Pembroke Lodge raised him after both his parents were dead before he was four; Queen Victoria, his grandmother's friend, was a presence in the household memory. Trinity College took him in 1890. He came down a Wrangler in mathematics and a First in moral sciences, and he has been writing in public since the Principles of Mathematics of 1903 and the Principia Mathematica he produced with Whitehead between 1910 and 1913. He has been to Brixton twice, the first time in 1918 for opposing the Great War, the second time, at eighty-nine, for sitting down in Trafalgar Square against his own country's bomb. By the summer of 1955 he has outlived two world wars, his three eldest friends in philosophy, and the European order into which he was born. The thing now pressing on him is not philosophy. It is the calendar.

THE LETTER FROM PRINCETON

In February he wrote to Einstein in Princeton, setting out the case that the scientists who understand the new weapon must speak, jointly, before the governments fix the language of the arms race for good. Einstein, dying, replied on the eleventh of April with his signature and a short covering note. I am gladly willing to sign your excellent statement, the old man at Princeton wrote. Four days later Einstein collapsed; he died on the eighteenth. The signature reached Russell at Plas Penrhyn on the fifteenth, with three of those days still ahead. He has since thought, more than once, that the document is therefore in the most exact sense a posthumous instrument; that of all the public papers Einstein ever put his name to, this was the last, and that the last was the one which named the weapon for what it is. The remaining ten signatures he has gathered by correspondence over eleven weeks: Max Born, Percy Bridgman, Leopold Infeld, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Hermann Joseph Muller, Linus Pauling, Cecil Powell, Joseph Rotblat, Hideki Yukawa, and his own. Seven Nobel laureates. A Pole who walked away from Los Alamos in 1944 when he understood the bomb would not, after all, be needed against Hitler. A Japanese physicist whose countrymen have already been on the receiving end of the device. The signatures are not, in their ordinary working lives, of one political mind. On this paper they are.

THE ANTEROOM AT CAXTON HALL

Saturday the ninth of July 1955, twenty minutes past noon, the anteroom of Caxton Hall on the corner of Caxton Street and Tothill Street, a quarter of a mile west of the Abbey. Pale summer light through the east windows. He is eighty-three. Beside him is Rotblat, forty-six, Warsaw-born, who has organised the press for him because Russell no longer organises anything except sentences. In a leather portfolio there are eleven copies of an eleven-paragraph statement, finalised, signed, dated. Through the door he can hear the journalists arriving, the chairs scraping, the murmur of a room which does not yet know what it is here to be told. He has read the text so many times in the last week that the cadences sit in his mouth like a lesson learnt in boyhood. He is aware that the chancelleries, on the morning after, will read it as the intervention of a private peer in his eighty-fourth year, and that this is the precise weight of authority he intends to spend. He has spent authority before. He is, by now, almost entirely composed of spent authority.

THE SECOND BEFORE THE DOOR

There is a particular kind of stillness available to a man of eighty-three who has decided, in clear weather and without enthusiasm, what he is about to do. He looks at the portfolio. The bomb tested at Eniwetok in November 1952 produced a fireball three miles across; the Soviet device at Semipalatinsk the following August closed the gap; both are, by the careful judgment of the men whose names are inside this leather, of an order of magnitude that retires the Clausewitzian definition of war from active service. He has written, in the draft now in his hand, that here is a problem which cannot be solved by the methods of the past, and he believes this to be a sentence of fact and not of opinion. There is a sentence further down, which he composed first and around which the rest of the document was built, where he asks the reader to set aside the categories of nationality and ideology and stand, for the length of one paragraph, as a member of the biological species which now possesses the means to extinguish itself. He has, in his own mind, no expectation that statesmen will read it twice. He has the entirely different expectation that scientists will, and that scientists, being a smaller and more answerable body than statesmen, can be moved. Cyrus Eaton's letter of last week, offering his family house at Pugwash in Nova Scotia for a private conference of scientists from both sides of the iron curtain, is in the same portfolio, behind the manifesto. He has not mentioned Pugwash to the press. The press are here for the document; the conferences will be the work of the years he has left. He nods to Rotblat. Rotblat opens the door.

THE READING

One o'clock. The main lecture-room of Caxton Hall is full: about a hundred and fifty correspondents from the British, American, European, Soviet and Commonwealth press. He reads the eleven paragraphs aloud in his precise Cambridge voice, without hurry, in something close to twenty-five minutes. He names the signatories. He names the weapon. He names the situation. He reaches the closing paragraph and slows: 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. He puts the paper down. The room asks its questions, which are the questions of a press room in July 1955 and which he answers with the patience of a man who has been answering questions in public since the reign of Edward the Seventh. By evening the text is on the wires to Washington, Moscow, Tokyo, Delhi. By Monday morning it is on the leader pages.

PUGWASH

The first conference convened at Cyrus Eaton's family house on the Northumberland Strait in Nova Scotia, in July 1957. Twenty-two scientists came: seven Americans, three Soviets, the rest from Britain, Canada, France, Japan, Poland, Austria, China and Australia. Russell, by then eighty-five, was honorary president; Rotblat ran the meeting. The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs have met, in some seventy-five sessions, every year since. They were the channel through which the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 was first informally drafted, and the channel through which, in the worst years of the 1980s, working physicists from Los Alamos and Arzamas-16 sat in the same room when their governments could not. In October 1995 the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave the Peace Prize jointly to Joseph Rotblat and to the Pugwash Conferences, for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms. Russell had been dead twenty-five years. He had founded a working institution out of a press conference and a Canadian industrialist's spare house, which is the kind of architecture that outlives its architect.

THE LAST WELSH HOUSE

He went home to Plas Penrhyn above the estuary at Penrhyndeudraeth in Merionethshire, where the Glaslyn comes down off Snowdon. He served as honorary president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from 1958 to 1960, broke with it as too cautious, founded the Committee of 100, and at eighty-nine was sentenced to a week in Brixton for a sit-down in Trafalgar Square. He wrote against the American war in Vietnam through the sixties. He finished the third volume of his Autobiography in 1969. He died at Plas Penrhyn on the second of February 1970, ninety-seven years old, and was cremated without ceremony at his own instruction; his ashes were scattered over the Welsh hills. The original single-sheet press-conference handout from the ninth of July 1955, the document the journalists at Caxton Hall took away in their pockets, sits today in the Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, the largest holding of his papers in the world. It is two pages of typescript, eleven paragraphs, eleven signatures, one of them by a man four days from death. It is the moment a private peer at the end of his life translated a problem of physics into a sentence of conscience, and it is still, on the foolscap, faintly legible in the original ink.