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3:00 AM The Russell–Einstein Manifesto, 1955

On July 9, 1955, Bertrand Russell read aloud a warning signed by eleven scientists, ten of them Nobel laureates. Written at the height of the Cold War, the Russell–Einstein Manifesto called on humanity to choose between war and survival. It has not aged.<p class="ql-align-justify">On July 9, 1955, the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell read a document aloud to a room full of international reporters at Caxton Hall in London. It became known as the Russell–Einstein Manifesto. It was one of Albert Einstein’s last public acts: he had signed it in April 1955, just days before his death. Russell lived fifteen more years.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">The two men had known each other for decades. Russell — born in 1872, a Nobel laureate in literature, one of the twentieth century’s most restless intellectual consciences — had been a pacifist since the First World War, had gone to prison for it, and had never stopped. Einstein — born in 1879, the author of the theory of relativity, a refugee from Nazi Germany who had spent his final years at Princeton — carried a particular burden: it was his famous letter to President Roosevelt in 1939 that had helped set the Manhattan Project in motion. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was, in some indirect but real sense, connected to his name. The manifesto was, among other things, his answer to that.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">The immediate cause was the American thermonuclear test “Castle Bravo” at Bikini Atoll in March 1954. The explosion was two and a half times more powerful than calculated. Radioactive contamination spread across a vast stretch of ocean. The crew of a Japanese fishing vessel, the Daigo Fukuryu Maru, received lethal doses of radiation. The vessel’s radio operator, Aikichi Kuboyama, died six months later — the first victim of the hydrogen bomb who had not been at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It had become clear that the new weapon recognized no borders and chose no sides.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">The manifesto was signed by eleven scientists, ten of them Nobel laureates. Max Born, the German-British physicist who had helped build quantum mechanics and then watched his country descend into barbarism. Percy W. Bridgman, an American experimental physicist. Leopold Infeld, a Polish mathematician who had collaborated with Einstein in Princeton. Frédéric Joliot-Curie, a French physicist and son-in-law of Marie Curie, who had his own complicated history with both science and politics. Herman J. Muller, an American geneticist who understood radiation’s effects on living tissue better than almost anyone. Linus Pauling, who would win the Nobel Peace Prize eight years later for his own campaign against nuclear testing. Cecil F. Powell, a British physicist. Joseph Rotblat — the only physicist who had left the Manhattan Project on moral grounds before its completion, and who would devote the rest of his long life to the cause the manifesto embodied. Hideki Yukawa, the first Japanese Nobel laureate in physics. And Bertrand Russell himself.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">The document made no appeal to any ideology. It did not address governments, armies, or political parties. It addressed human beings as members of a biological species whose continued existence had been placed in doubt. The language was careful, almost clinical — which made it more, not less, alarming. The scientists did not say catastrophe was certain. They said it was possible, and that no one could be sure it would not happen, and that the men who knew most were the most pessimistic.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Its direct legacy was the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs — the first conference was held in 1957 in the small Canadian village of Pugwash, Nova Scotia, funded by the industrialist Cyrus Eaton. Scientists from the United States and the Soviet Union sat at the same table at the height of the Cold War. In 1995, Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for laying the groundwork for numerous arms control agreements, including the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Seventy years later, humanity’s nuclear arsenal has not disappeared. The manifesto has not aged.</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><em>© lesnoy 12 October 2026</em></p><p class="ql-align-justify"><em>***</em></p><h2 class="ql-align-justify"><strong>Statement: The Russell-Einstein Manifesto</strong></h2><h3 class="ql-align-justify">The Russell-Einstein Manifeston.</h3><p class="ql-align-justify">In the tragic situation which confronts humanity, we feel that scientists should assemble in conference to appraise the perils that have arisen as a result of the development of weapons of mass destruction, and to discuss a resolution in the spirit of the appended draft.</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent or creed, but as human beings, members of the species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt. The world is full of conflicts; and, overshadowing all minor conflicts, the titanic struggle between Communism and anti-Communism.  </p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">Almost everybody who is politically conscious has strong feelings about one or more of these issues; but we want you, if you can, to set aside such feelings and consider yourselves only as members of a biological species which has had a remarkable history, and whose disappearance none of us can desire.</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">We shall try to say no single word which should appeal to one group rather than to another. All, equally, are in peril, and, if the peril is understood, there is hope that they may collectively avert it.</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">The general public, and even many men in positions of authority, have not realized what would be involved in a war with nuclear bombs. The general public still thinks in terms of the obliteration of cities. It is understood that the new bombs are more powerful than the old, and that, while one A-bomb could obliterate Hiroshima, one H-bomb could obliterate the largest cities, such as London, New York and Moscow.</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">No doubt in an H-bomb war great cities would be obliterated. But this is one of the minor disasters that would have to be faced. If everybody in London, New York and Moscow were exterminated the world might, in the course of a few centuries, recover from the blow. But we now know, especially since the Bikini test, that nuclear bombs can gradually spread destruction over a very much wider area than had been supposed.</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">It is stated on very good authority that a bomb can now be manufactured which will be 2,500 times as powerful as that which destroyed Hiroshima. Such a bomb, if exploded near the ground or under water, sends radio-active particles into the upper air. They sink gradually and reach the surface of the earth in the form of a deadly dust or rain. It was this dust which infected the Japanese fishermen and their catch of fish.</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">No one knows how widely such lethal radio-active particles might be diffused, but the best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might quite possibly put an end to the human race. It is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death – sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration.</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">Many warnings have been uttered by eminent men of science and by authorities in military strategy. None of them will say that the worst results are certain. What they do say, is that these results are possible, and no one can be sure that they will not be realized. We have not yet found that the views of experts on this question depend in any degree upon their politics or prejudices. They depend only, so far as our researches have revealed, upon the extent of the particular expert’s knowledge. We have found that the men who know most are the most gloomy.</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful, and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race: or shall mankind renounce war?1 People will not face this alternative because it is so difficult to abolish war.</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">The abolition of war will demand distasteful limitations of national sovereignty.2 But what perhaps impedes understanding of the situation more than anything else is that the term “mankind” feels vague and abstract. People scarcely realize in imagination that the danger is to themselves and their children and their grandchildren, and not only to a dimly apprehended humanity. They can scarcely bring themselves to grasp that they, individually, and those whom they love are in imminent danger of perishing agonizingly. And so they hope that perhaps war may be allowed to continue provided modern weapons are prohibited.</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">This hope is illusory. Whatever agreements not to use H-bombs had been reached in time of peace, they would no longer be considered binding in time of war, and both sides would set to work to manufacture H-bombs as soon as war broke out, for, if one side manufactured the bombs and the other did not, the side that manufactured them would inevitably be victorious.</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">Although an agreement to renounce nuclear weapons as part of a general reduction of armaments3 would not afford an ultimate solution, it would serve certain important purposes. First: any agreement between East and West is to the good in so far as it tends to diminish tension. Second: the abolition of thermo-nuclear weapons, if each side believed that the other had carried it out sincerely, would lessen the fear of a sudden attack in the style of Pearl Harbour, which at present keeps both sides in a state of nervous apprehension. We should therefore welcome such an agreement, though only as a first step.</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">Most of us are not neutral in feeling, but, as human beings, we have to remember that, if the issues between East and West are to be decided in any manner that can give any possible satisfaction to anybody, whether Communist or anti-Communist, whether Asian or European or American, whether White or Black, then these issues must not be decided by war. We should wish this to be understood both in the East and in the West.</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? 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.</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">Resolution:</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">We invite this Congress, and through it the scientists of the world and the general public, to subscribe to the following resolution:</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">“In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them.”</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">Signatories:</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">Max Born</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Percy W. Bridgman</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Albert Einstein</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Leopold Infeld</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Frederic Joliot-Curie</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Herman J. Muller</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Linus Pauling</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Cecil F. Powell</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Joseph Rotblat</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Bertrand Russell</p><p class="ql-align-justify">Hideki Yukawa</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">Notes:1. Professor Joliot-Curie wishes to add the words: “as a means of settling differences between States.”2. Professor Joliot-Curie wishes to add that these limitations are to be agreed by all and in the interests of all.3. Professor Muller makes the reservation that this be taken to mean “a concomitant balanced reduction of all armaments.”</p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">9 July 1955 / Pugwash community <a href="https://pugwash.org/1955/07/09/statement-manifesto/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://pugwash.org/1955/07/09/statement-manifesto/</a></p><p><br></p><p>© lesnoy, LifeArmy.org</p><p>Original: <a href="https://lifearmy.org/articles/russell-einstein-manifesto-1955">https://lifearmy.org/articles/russell-einstein-manifesto-1955</a></p>

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