Einstein’s vision for peace
By Lawrence S. Wittner https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/03/31/einsteins-vision-for-peace/
Aghast at the use of nuclear weapons, he threw himself into efforts to prevent worldwide nuclear annihilation
Although the popular new Netflix film, Einstein and the Bomb, purports to tell the story of the great physicist’s relationship to nuclear weapons, it ignores his vital role in rallying the world against nuclear catastrophe.
Aghast at the use of nuclear weapons in August 1945 to obliterate the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein threw himself into efforts to prevent worldwide nuclear annihilation. In September, responding to a letter from Robert Hutchins, Chancellor of the University of Chicago, about nuclear weapons, Einstein contended that, “as long as nations demand unrestricted sovereignty, we shall undoubtedly be faced with still bigger wars, fought with bigger and technologically more advanced weapons.” Thus, “the most important task of intellectuals is to make this clear to the general public and to emphasize over and over again the need to establish a well-organized world government.”
Four days later, he made the same point to an interviewer, insisting that “the only salvation for civilization and the human race lies in the creation of a world government, with security of nations founded upon law.”
Determined to prevent nuclear war, Einstein repeatedly hammered away at the need to replace international anarchy with a federation of nations operating under international law. In October 1945, together with other prominent Americans (among them Senator J. William Fulbright, Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, and novelist Thomas Mann), Einstein called for a “Federal Constitution of the World.”
That November, he returned to this theme in an interview published in the Atlantic Monthly. “The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem,” he said. “It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one. . . . As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.” And war, sooner or later, would become nuclear war.
Given Einstein’s fame and his well-publicized efforts to avert a nuclear holocaust, in May 1946 he became chair of the newly-formed Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, a fundraising and policymaking arm for the atomic scientists’ movement. In the Committee’s first fund appeal, Einstein warned that “the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”
Even so, despite the fact that Einstein, like most members of the early atomic scientists’ movement, saw world government as the best recipe for survival in the nuclear age, there seemed good reason to consider shorter-range objectives. After all, the Cold War was emerging and nations were beginning to formulate nuclear policies. An early Atomic Scientists of Chicago statement, prepared by Eugene Rabinowitch, editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, underscored practical considerations.
“Since world government is unlikely to be achieved within the short time available before the atomic armaments race will lead to an acute danger of armed conflict,” it noted, “the establishment of international controls must be considered as a problem of immediate urgency.” Consequently, the movement increasingly worked in support of specific nuclear arms control and disarmament measures.
In the context of the heightening Cold War, however, taking even limited steps forward proved impossible. The Russian government sharply rejected the Baruch Plan for international control of atomic energy and, instead, developed its own atomic arsenal. In turn, U.S. President Harry Truman, in February 1950, announced his decision to develop a hydrogen bomb―a weapon a thousand times as powerful as its predecessor.
Naturally, the atomic scientists were deeply disturbed by this lurch toward disaster. Appearing on television, Einstein called once more for the creation of a “supra-national” government as the only “way out of the impasse.” Until then, he declared, “annihilation beckons.”
Despite the dashing of his hopes for postwar action to end the nuclear menace, Einstein lent his support over the following years to peace, nuclear disarmament, and world government projects.
The most important of these ventures occurred in 1955, when Bertrand Russell, like Einstein, a proponent of world federation, conceived the idea of issuing a public statement by a small group of the world’s most eminent scientists about the existential peril nuclear weapons brought to modern war. Asked by Russell for his support, Einstein was delighted to sign the statement and did so in one of his last actions before his death that April.
In July, Russell presented the statement to a large meeting in London, packed with representatives of the mass communications media. In the shadow of the Bomb, it read, “we have to learn to think in a new way. . . . Shall we . . . choose death because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”
This Russell-Einstein Manifesto, as it became known, helped trigger a remarkable worldwide uprising against nuclear weapons in the late 1950s and early 1960s, culminating in the world’s first significant nuclear arms control measures. Furthermore, in later years, it inspired legions of activists and world leaders. Among them was the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev, whose “new thinking,” modeled on the Manifesto, brought a dramatic end to the Cold War and fostered substantial nuclear disarmament.
The Manifesto thus provided an appropriate conclusion to Einstein’s unremitting campaign to save the world from nuclear destruction.
Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).
New York Times: Nuclear Risks Have Not Gone Away
The overriding question is how to reduce the risk of nuclear war, a topic that will no doubt be addressed as the Times series continues to be rolled out
William Hartung, https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhartung/2024/03/06/new-york-times-nuclear-risks-have-not-gone-away/?sh=1a2848863efe
For most Americans, nuclear weapons are a relic of the Cold War, out of sight and out of mind. But a surge of attention over the past year may put these world-ending weapons on the public agenda again, in a way that has not been seen since the rise of the disarmament movement of the 1980s.
First came the announcement that the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – which expresses the view of a panel of experts of how close we are to ending life as we know it through a nuclear conflagration or the accelerating impacts of climate change – was maintained at an uncomfortably close 90 seconds to midnight.
Then came the release a few months later of Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer, which told the story of the man pundits of his time called “the father of the atomic bomb.” The film followed the arc of Oppenheimer’s life and career, including his support for the dropping of the bombs on HIroshima and Nagasaki because he thought that once their sheer destructive power was understood, the human race would abandon war as a way of resolving disputes. He was tragically wrong, but the success of Oppenheimer and its prominent place in Hollywood’s awards season offers an opportunity to reflect anew on the history and consequences of the bomb, including issues that were largely ignored in the film, like the plight of the people exposed to lethal radiation from bomb tests in the U.S. and the Pacific, the devastating health problems of uranium miners, and, most terribly of all, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with a death toll estimated by independent experts of over 140,000 people.
In the wake of these reminders of the nuclear danger, The New York Times NYT +1.2% has come out with a timely and urgently important series called At the Brink, which looks at current day nuclear risks based on nearly a year of reporting and research. It is a much needed corrective to our false sense of security regarding the continued presence and costly “modernization” of the world’s nuclear arsenals.
The opening essay of the series, written by longtime national security journalist and current New York Times opinion writer W.J. Hennigan, notes up front that “In the fall of 2022, a U.S. intelligence assessment put the odds at 50-50 that Russia would launch a nuclear strike to halt Ukrainian forces if they breached its defense of Crimea.” He later notes that the risk of nuclear escalation in Ukraine is now relatively low, but that the overall state of the world has created the greatest risk of the use of nuclear weapons since the height of the Cold War. Hennigan also gives a graphic presentation of the devastating impact of even a relatively small nuclear weapon – the exact kind of sobering depiction that was omitted from Oppenheimer.
The Times piece reminds us of the vast scope of the Cold War nuclear arms race, as well as the current one among the U.S., Russia, and China – a competition that is all the more dangerous because the last U.S.-Russia nuclear arms control treaty, New START, is hanging by a thread, set to expire in February 2026.
The overriding question is how to reduce the risk of nuclear war, a topic that will no doubt be addressed as the Times series continues to be rolled out. The only way to be truly safe from nuclear weapons is to eliminate them altogether, as called for in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in January 2021 and has been ratified by 70 nations. Conspicuously missing from that list are the world’s nuclear weapons states, which still hold onto the illusion that a nuclear balance of terror can be sustained indefinitely. As wars proliferate from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan and beyond, the added risk posed by nuclear weapons underscores the need to move beyond outmoded rationales for continuing to build and deploy these devastating weapons. As the issue of nuclear weapons returns to public consciousness after years of denial, there is an opportunity to have a serious debate about whether and how to eliminate them before they eliminate us. We can’t afford to miss that chance.
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 