Message to First Pugwash Conference [1957]

THIS MESSAGE OF greeting to the participants in the first Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs is a keynote paper in the present volume. Excerpts were run by The New York Times (10 July 1957, p. 6) and The Montreal Gazette (10 July 1957) two days after the text of Russell’s tape recorded message was released to the press. Over twenty years elapsed, however, before its unabridged publication as part of a Pugwash retrospective in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “Pugwash Beginnings”, 34, no. 4 (April 1978): 36-7 (B&R C57.20). The twenty-two scientists to whom Russell had initially addressed Paper 61 had been invited to the summer retreat in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, of Cyrus S.Eaton, the Canadian-born American industrialist and financier. The “preliminary arrangements” (345:3), proceedings (from 7-10 July) and follow-up to the conference are all discussed at length in the Introduction. The meeting was the culmination of two years’ patient organizational work by Russell, the two collaborators credited at the end of the message (“Professors Powell and Rotblat”), and the University College London physicist Eric Burhop. Their travails are briefly recounted (343:14-29) before Russell sketched the perplexing problems confronting the politically diverse group of scientists which he had helped assemble. Yet, he also gave voice to a cautious hope that such East-West cooperation “will prove the seed from which, gradually, a sense of common human problems will come to replace the present futile competition, from which nothing but catastrophe can result” (344:30-2).