Bertrand Russell speech in Manchester

Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, co-authored the Principia Mathematica, "rightly regarded as one of the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century."

Russell was a "British philosopher, logician, and social reformer, founding figure in the analytic movement in Anglo-American philosophy, and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Russell’s contributions to logic, epistemology, and the philosophy of mathematics established him as one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century."

"Not long before his eighty-sixth birthday in 1958, when most old people are content to sit in comfortable chairs and perhaps take quiet walks, Bertrand Russell launched a movement that would eventually send thousands of marchers into the streets of Britain. Russell had been deeply concerned by the invention and use of the atomic bomb from the very beginning; on 18 August 1945 he wrote: “it is impossible to imagine a more dramatic and horrifying combination of scientific triumph with political and moral failure than has been shown to the world in the destruction of Hiroshima.” One avenue he was to pursue in his fight against nuclear weapons was the creation of the Pugwash Conferences.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was to prove a more populist anti-nuclear strategy. The catalyst for the formation of the CND was an article by J.B. Priestley in the New Statesman advocating British unilateral nuclear disarmament in response to nuclear tests being carried out in the Pacific by Britain – the article touched a nerve with the public and the influential journal’s editor, Kingsley Martin, proposed the idea that a new organization should be created. After a few meetings, it was agreed that Russell would be the president with Canon John Collins as its chairman. The official launch, on 17 February 1958, was made to overflow crowds that filled Central Hall Westminster. Although seen originally as a pressure group, the CND grew quickly into a mass movement. It received wide press coverage and Russell was both lampooned by newspapers cartoonists and honoured with the cover of Newsweek magazine. He spoke in Manchester on 1 May 1959."