Russell - Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare

Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare was first published in 1959, in an effort to prevent the catastrophe which would result from a large scale H-bomb war. Nuclear technology had already evolved more and deadlier weapons, and these had created a new and more precarious balance of power. Public concern was growing. Russells views changed in the years following Hiroshima, and were to change again, as the arms race became institutional and ever more costly. Military planning soared away into the realms of fantasy, but the reality was that mankind had developed hitherto unimagined destructive capacities.

Inevitably, Russells writing about the bomb was dominated by the fact of the Cold War. Fear of Communism had already ranged the United States and its European allies into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. An Eastern Alliance, the Warsaw Treaty Organisation, had emerged shortly afterwards. Fear of Communism did not only stimulate military co-ordination: for a time, it also promoted economic co-operation, and the ascendancy throughout the West of what is now thought of as the Keynesian world order. These were to be the years of a social welfare consensus in Western Europe, and of the emerging Common Market. Public planning and governmental intervention prospered in the West European economy as never before. Undoubtedly leaders such as Jean Monnet drew support from the business communities with which they were working, on the supposition that their policies would help to fortify the institutions of liberal democracy in the West. Were not Stalins tanks massed along the newly defined Eastern border? And were not the Communist Parties in Italy and France able to count their votes in many millions?

But if the phobias of the time guaranteed a long period of full employment and relative prosperity, they also launched frenetic military competition. Ultimately the welfare consensus began to wear off: but the military confrontation proved more enduring.

Those who had worked on the development of the bomb in the United States had not expected that it should be tried out on cities without prior warning. They had presumed that a public test of its powers might be made at sea, or in some unpopulated area. In fact, the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki seems to have had little to do with military exigencies in the war with Japan, which was already drawing to a close. The presumption of many, politicians and scholars alike, is that the first nuclear bombardment took place in answer to the felt need of the American leadership, to send a chilling message to the Soviet Union.

In a very short time, Stalin showed that he had understood, and the Russians detonated their own bomb four years after the Hiroshima explosion. The Soviet hydrogen bomb followed inexorably, just as had the American fusion device. The nuclear race was on. Soon after there opened the race to perfect intercontinental and other rockets, which might deliver the new weapons.

This contest was precisely encapsulated in the metaphor which Russell presented to describe it:

Since the nuclear stalemate became apparent, the Governments of East and West have adopted the policy which Mr. Dulles calls brinkmanship. This is a policy adapted from a sport which, I am told, is practised by some youthful degenerates. This sport is called Chicken!. It is played by choosing a long straight road with a white line down the middle and starting two very fast cars towards each other from opposite ends. Each car is expected to keep the wheels of one side on the white line. As they approach each other, mutual destruction becomes more and more imminent. If one of them swerves from the white line before the other, the other, as he passes, shouts Chicken!, and the one who has swerved becomes an object of contempt. As played by irresponsible boys, this game is considered decadent and immoral, though only the lives of the players are risked. But when the game is played by eminent statesmen, who risk not only their own lives but those of many hundreds of millions of human beings, it is thought on both sides that the statesmen on one side are displaying a high degree of wisdom and courage, and only the statesmen on the other side are reprehensible. This, of course, is absurd. Both are to blame for playing such an incredibly dangerous game. The game may be played without misfortune a few times, but sooner or later it will come to be felt that loss of face is more dreadful than nuclear annihilation. The moment will come when neither side can face the derisive cry of Chicken! from the other side. When that moment is come, the statesmen of both sides will plunge the world into destruction.