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letter to the london times, may 8, 1960 Bertrand Russell INTRODUCTION by Ray Perkins, Jr. The unpublished letter that follows (in Edith’s hand, dated 8 May 1960), from Russell to the London Times, is interesting in several respects. It is one of Russell’s earliest public proposals of what came to be known as ‘unilateralism’, i.e., the idea that Britain should unilaterally give up its nuclear weapons and its membership in NATO as a way to stimulate an agreement on nuclear abolition between the super powers. Unilateralism was an idea that Russell vigorously defended later that year (1960) against both Prime Minister Macmillan and the British Labour Party leader, Hugh Gaitskell (see Yours Faithfully, Bertrand Russell, pp. 227-29, 235-37). The timing of the letter is also significant, because it was written two months before Russell met Ralph Schoenman, the young American radical whom some Russell scholars see as filling the great old man’s head with radical mush. For example, Ray Monk, noticing that there were no signs of unilateralism in Russell’s 1959 Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare, concludes (post hoc, ergo propter hoc) that the idea which appeared in Russell’s writings the next year must have come from Schoenman, who entered Russell’s life in the summer of 1960 (see The Ghost of Madness, Cape, 2000, p. 406). Another reason that this letter is noteworthy is that Russell’s Swiftian wit is much in evidence as he responds to the all too common charge that his antinuclear ideas were riddled with hysteria and emotionalism. (Come on, if one can’t get emotional over nuclear war, then when and over what can one get emotional? For a more extended discussion of the place of emotion in nuclear politics, see Russell’s 1963 letter to the Times “Sense and Sensibility” in Yours Faithfully, p. 339.)
8 May, 1960 To the Editor of The Times: Sir—I find that a desire for one’s children to live out the normal span of human life is regarded as hysterical emotionalism. For the purposes of the present letter I shall, therefore, assume that I am devoid of human affection and consequently worthy to be listened to. Two policies are open to the Powers of NATO and the Warsaw Pact: one is to go on with present policies and thereby ensure, sooner or later, the extinction of the human race; the other is to seek enforceable agreements for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Both groups of Powers profess to adopt the second policy, but, in fact, whenever there is a prospect of agreement, one side or the other injects some new matter of disagreement as to which it is convinced that agreement is impossible. This shows that both groups of Powers are, in fact, in favour of the first policy, which gets the name of “realism”. Some people think that if one important nation were to abandon the alliance to which it belongs and decide neither to have nuclear weapons nor to seek the protection of other Powers which have them, this might induce, among the Powers of the side which is being deserted, a greater readiness to enter into genuine negotiations for disarmament. This is called hysterical emotionalism. As a person devoid of emotion, I am for the present expressing no preference among these policies. I merely ask myself what motive, other than emotion, can induce anybody to prefer anything to anything else. In making a choice, cold reason offers no help. Russell |