Politics, Commitment and the Responsibilities of the Scientist

Abstract

The one political cause in the post-war world which attracted unambiguous support from writers outside what used to be the Soviet Union was that of nuclear disarmament. The opposition to nuclear weapons was most eloquently expressed by Bertrand Russell in a talk on the BBC on 23 December 1954, under the title Man’s Peril: As geological time is reckoned, man has so far existed only for a very short period — 1,000,000 years at the most. What he has achieved, especially during the last 6,000 years, is something utterly new in the history of the cosmos, at least as far as we are acquainted with it. For countless ages the sun rose and set, the moon waxed and waned, the stars shone in the night, but it was only with the coming of man that these things were understood. In the great world of astronomy and the little world of the atom, man has unveiled secrets which might have been thought undiscoverable. In art and literature and religion, some men have shown a sublimity of feeling which makes the species worth preserving. Is all this going to end in trivial horror because so few are able to think of man rather than of this or that group of men? Is our race so destitute of wisdom, so incapable of impartial love, so blind even to the simplest dictates of blind preservation, that the last proof of our silly cleverness is to be the extermination of all life on our planet? — for it will be not only men who will perish, but also the animals, whom none can accuse of Communism or anti-Communism.¹

Bertrand Russell and Solzhenitsyn: nuclear disarmament and the world of the Gulag.