Volumes of The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell

A Hypertextual Edition of Paper 58 in Volume 24


Contents

Headnote
Chronology
“The Atomic Bomb” (1945)
Annotation
Textual Notes
Bibliographical Index



Annotation

  • Atoms In The ABC of Atoms Russell writes in much the same detail and with the same figures about the minuteness of atoms (1923a), 9–10). He predicted of nuclear research that “It is probable that it will ultimately be used for making more deadly explosives and projectiles than any yet invented” (1923a, 11; quoted by Wood 1957, 152).

  • Rutherford Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937), New Zealand-born British physicist. He was Professor of Physics at McGill University 1898–1907, when he left for Manchester. He won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1908. In 1919 he became director of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.

  • more powerful process Lise Meitner and O.R. Frisch concluded that the results of experiments done by the German chemist, Otto Hahn, in December 1938 could only have been obtained as the result of nuclear fission. Frisch verified their assumption with experiments done in Copenhagen in January 1939 (Ham 2012, 101–2).

  • the Germans on the one side, and the British and Americans German research was led by Werner Heisenberg. The British and Americans at first worked separately, but during the Quebec Conference of August 1943 it was agreed they would work together. In 1951 Russell was to boast (his own word) of the British contribution and could not think of any Americans who had “contributed anything of any great importance at this stage” (Papers 26: 502).

  • foreseen for over forty years 1905 was the year of publication of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Wittner (1993, 4) discusses H.G. Wells’ The World Set Free (1914a), which depicts a war fought with nuclear weapons.

  • Bohr Niels Bohr (1885–1962), Danish physicist, worked with Rutherford at Manchester before returning to Denmark. After escaping the Nazis in late 1943, he spent the remainder of World War II in the United States working on the Manhattan Project. Bohr later favoured the internationalization of atomic weapons. Russell had gotten to know Bohr well on the former’s 1935 Scandinavian lecture tour. Indeed, Bohr tutored Russell at that time in quantum physics and indeterminism (Stevenson 2011, 115, 117).

  • Heisenberg Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901–1976), German physicist. With Max Born, he worked in quantum mechanics, proposing the uncertainty principle in the 1920s. He won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1932. Russell got to know him in Copenhagen in 1935 (Stevenson 2011, 121n.1) and made his acquaintance again at a meeting on 3 March 1948 at the Master’s Lodge, Christ’s College, Cambridge. They corresponded and cooperated over Pugwash in the 1950s.

  • Schrödinger Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961), Austrian physicist. He won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1933 and left Germany for Oxford the same year. He spent World War II in Dublin. Russell and Schrödinger later corresponded.

  • one small bomb Some British “Blockbuster” bombs, and especially the “Grand Slam”, weighed more than “Little Boy”, the uranium bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. This bomb weighed 9,700 pounds and was ten feet long with a diameter of 28 inches. Russell’s point concerns the size of the bomb relative to its target. What was new was the much greater explosive power (15–20 kilotons) of the “small bomb” and the slightly greater power of the plutonium bomb that levelled much of Nagasaki. This was a fission bomb. In November 1945, in a House of Lords speech (paper 66, 355), Russell forecast the development of the fusion bomb. Russell forecast the development of the fusion bomb. Russell was later to write on the U.S.S.R.’s fifty-megaton hydrogen bomb (1961d ), the most powerful ever exploded. For his still developing early views on thermonuclear weapons, see Papers 26: lxii–lxiv, 85.

  • every vestige of life throughout four square miles It was three days before photographic evidence was made public. Cf. the headline in The Times: “Hiroshima Inferno; 4 Square Miles Obliterated; Huge Death Roll” (1945r). Devastation outside the city centre was not total, and lingering deaths from the survivors’ radiation sickness were yet to come (Ham 2012, Chap. 21).

  • surrender or by extermination. Emperor Hirohito decided Japan should surrender on 10 August 1945, but the Japanese military did not agree to do so until 14 August. See Weinberg 1994, 890, and Weintraub 1995, Chap. 33. Other circumstances were influential: continued conventional bombing, comprehensive defeat overseas, prospect of Soviet occupation, and a major social crisis in the offing (Overy 2021, 371). For the last severe months of the war of atrocity with Japan, see Beevor 2012, 772–4.

  • a month ago This was a reasonable belief at the time. In early July 1945 the U.S.S.R. had as yet no Far Eastern military presence to speak of but was overwhelmingly strong in Eastern Europe, Austria and East Germany. The U.S. was rapidly defeating the Japanese forces, except on the home islands, Kyushu and Honshu, and was redirecting its troops from Europe to the planned invasion of Japan. Both the U.S.S.R. and U.S. had reached a peak of conventional weapons production. Thus in all factors considered together, the two might have seemed equal in “warlike strength” before the explosion of America’s plutonium test bomb on 16 July 1945. It was the geographical distribution of their respective strengths that was very unequal.

  • British Empire Since 1931 the empire's dominions and colonies had been known as the British Commonwealth of Nations (and from 1949 the Commonwealth of Nations). Russell began referring to it as “the British Commonwealth” in 1947, in which year India became a self-governing dominion.

  • make these bombs for themselves The U.S. Atomic Energy Act (1946; in effect 1 Jan. 1947) restricted the exchange of information on atomic energy, thus reducing Anglo-American cooperation, even though Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed on it. (See A356:18–19.) On 8 January 1947 Attlee and his cabinet secretly authorized the manufacture of a British atomic bomb. The first British atomic test was on 3 October 1952. The Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb on 29 August 1949. They had been working separately on a bomb and accelerated their programme after Potsdam.

  • control of the international authority One such authority that developed in the next two years was the Atomic Development Authority. See 70a (B&R B85), 73 (B&R C47.12), where Russell discusses the A.D.A. See also A121:14.

  • League of Nations Although the United Nations Organization did not come into existence until 24 October 1945, the founding San Francisco Conference had been over since 25 June and the Charter signed on the 26th. Russell, who was critical of the veto power on the Security Council, here dismisses the U.N.O.

  • ordered progress Russell often invoked this faith of his youth: “We believed in ordered progress by means of politics and free discussion” (Russell 1967, 1: 70). See, e.g., 379 above and Papers 13: 137.


Textual Notes

The links in the textual notes are to the passages in green type in Russell’s final text.

The copy-text is a photocopy plus a colour scan (RA3 Rec. Acq. 840) of the manuscript (“CT”) in the Emrys Hughes papers, National Library of Scotland. It is foliated 1, 2–8, seems to measure 211 x 268 mm., and is written in ink. An editorial hand rewrote, none too clearly, more than three dozen of Russell’s words in decipherment for the compositor. The same hand (or hands—sometimes with a blue pencil) added fifteen paragraph breaks and the instruction “Double Column ”, all of which are ignored here. “45” is the publication, “The Bomb and Civilization”, Forward, Glasgow, 39, no. 33 (18 Aug. 1945): 1, 3. It has six section heads, also ignored here as non-authorial; so is a pair of non-Russellian-drawn commas around the restrictive clause “which scientists have foreseen for over forty years”.


Bibliographical Index

Instead of page numbers, links are provided to the references to these citations.

* Bertrand Russell Research Centre * Faculty of Humanities * Bertrand Russell Archives * McMaster University

The text for this page was prepared at McMaster University.
Page maintained by Arlene Duncan/K.B. Last updated 21 March 2022.
Russell Keyword: alembics