Editor's Pick

ON 9 JULY 1955, at a press conference in London’s Caxton Hall, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell releases a manifesto signed by 11 scientists and public intellectuals—including Albert Einstein, who had died three months earlier—warning about the catastrophic consequences of nuclear war. The Russell–Einstein manifesto, as it came to be called, urged governments around the world to recognise that nuclear weapons “threaten the continued existence of mankind” and to “find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them.”

Russell and Einstein had made public statements against the use of nuclear weapons in the aftermath of the Second World War, which ended with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On 23 December 1954, a few months after the United States successfully detonated a thermonuclear warhead, Russell delivered a lecture on the BBC, titled “The Hydrogen Bomb and the Peril to Mankind.” After consulting with Einstein, he circulated a text, based on his BBC broadcast, among scientists from both sides of the Cold War divide. Russell also met the Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who offered to host the international conference proposed in the manifesto.

The Delhi conference, scheduled for December 1956, was cancelled after the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Uprising destabilised international politics. Instead, Russell accepted an offer from Cyrus Eaton, an Ohio-based investment banker, to hold the conference in Eaton’s hometown of Pugwash, Canada. The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, founded in July 1957, worked towards disarmament and peaceful resolutions of international conflicts. The organisation helped formulate the Non-Proliferation Treaty and other agreements limiting the use of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and also facilitated backchannel talks to end the Vietnam War. In 1995, Pugwash and its first secretary general, Joseph Rotblat—a physicist who had left the Manhattan Project on moral grounds—were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.