Britain and the H-bomb [1957]

THIS LETTER TO the New Statesman was written at the request of its editor, Kingsley Martin, who wanted Russell to comment on the galley proofs of a forthcoming plea for Britain’s unilateral renunciation of nuclear weapons by the English author and social critic J.B.Priestley (1957). Russell’s sympathetic response appeared one week after Priestley’s famous article, alongside letters from a number of other readers: 54 (9 Nov. 1957): 617 (B&R C57.28). Indeed, the huge weight of mostly supportive editorial correspondence generated by Priestley’s moral, financial and political case for unilateralism acted as a stimulus to the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. On 10 December Martin hosted a meeting to determine the feasibility of a new national campaign of opposition to Britain’s nuclear defence policy. Priestley and Russell were both present at this gathering of what Canon John Collins called the “midwives of CND” (quoted in Taylor 1988, 20). Overtures were then made to the leaders of the National Council for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons Tests, which was already contemplating a change of focus from testing to disarmament. Russell attended a meeting of sponsors of the new campaign at Collins’s home on 16 January 1958, when the NCANWT agreed to be absorbed by CND.