![]() To which Russell, somewhat nonplussed, replies, “I can’t think that you would deny that there are hazards associated with the continued development of nuclear weapons.”ĪB: There was a lot of reticence about joining this international movement of scientists - it was one of the first tentative measures to try and get détente through the back door, involving contact between the scientists of East and West. ![]() He wrote to Russell, “I am somewhat troubled when I look at the proposed agenda … above all, I think with the terms of reference ‘the hazards arising from the continuous development of nuclear weapons’ prejudges where the greatest hazards lie.” They were, politically, quite close, supporting disarmament talks and negotiations, and world government as the ultimate solution for taming the “two scorpions in the bottle”- Oppenheimer’s analogy for superpower rivalry in a nuclear age. Due to that capacity, he believed that this would be a way to slowly get to agreement on some of the major issues of the day, like banning nuclear weapons tests.Īt this time, both Russell and Oppenheimer were thinking - as they had been for some years - about bolder steps, along the lines of world government - establishing an international body that would have far more authority than the United Nations and a monopoly on nuclear weapons and other weapons of war. Russell’s idea was not only that scientists were well equipped to understand the technical aspects of nuclear weapons, but also that a scientific outlook would enable them to consider these issues, despite political disagreements, in some kind of dispassionate way. One was inviting him to come to a conference in India in 1956, which didn’t end up happening and another for him to go to the first Pugwash Conference in Pugwash, Nova Scotia.ĪB: Pugwash was a movement that flowed out of what became known as the Russell-Einstein manifesto, which was a declaration by a group of very eminent scientists - most of the Nobel Prize-winners - that spoke of the dangers of nuclear weapons and called for the peaceful resolution of world conflicts. I understand that Russell reached out to Oppenheimer to join an international group of scientists whose goal was to mitigate the ongoing hazards of nuclear weapons – can you tell me about that? In this Q and A, Kenneth Blackwell, Russell’s original archivist, Andrew Bone, the Russell Centre’s senior research associate, and Nicholas Griffin, the Russell Centre’s Library Scholar in Residence, reflect on the contrasts between the two - and what renewed attention on this part of history can teach us today. The release of this summer’s biopic Oppenheimer has had the researchers at McMaster’s Bertrand Russell Research Centre thinking about the connections between Russell and Oppenheimer - and while their direct correspondence is, in fact, limited to a few letters, their intellectual connections and their individual lives provide some interesting insights into the years following the detonation of the first atomic bombs in 1945. Read about Bertrand Russell’s life and work on the Bertrand Russell Research Centre’s websiteĪ surprising correspondence, perhaps? What could the two possibly have in common? Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb” and director of the Manhattan Project, to Bertrand Russell, one of the 20 th century’s towering intellectuals and a prominent opponent of nuclear proliferation, on the occasion of Russell’s 90 th birthday in 1962. For those of my generation, our world would have been far emptier of these great qualities without your presence and your work.” “I remember how would pause with a smile before a sequence of theorems and say to us, ‘That was a point that Bertie always liked.”įor all the years of my life, I have thought of this phrase whenever some high example of intelligence, some humanity, or some rare courage and nobility has come our way.
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