Yes, Russell definitely did that and was evasive about it afterward. In the late 1940s this insanity was widespread: an entire movement of politically influential players dedicated itself to nuking the Soviet Union before it achieved the bomb and (so the argument went) inevitably used it on us. Von Neumann was another prominent advocate ("If you say bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say do it at five o'clock I say why not one o'clock?") Many hawkish military leaders (e.g. Curtis Lemay) pushed strongly for it, though others (such as Eisenhower, IIRC) had the wisdom to be appalled by the idea. Thankfully Truman refused. [1]
I got all this from William Poundstone's book on the Prisoner's Dilemma. It's been years since I read it, so corrections on details are welcome.
That is the climate that was satirized in Dr Strangelove.
It was sordid on Russell's part to agitate for nuclear strikes, but everyone makes mistakes and everyone is subject to social climate. What is arguably worse is that once the insanity had passed, he refused to own up to it fair and square and just say "we were mad, and thank goodness it didn't happen". Perhaps that is what a world reputation as a moral authority does to the ego. I remember doing a double-take when I first read about this and wondering why it is so little known. If Barry Bonds deserves an asterisk beside his name in the record books then surely so does Bertie.
[1] Contemporary analogs left as an exercise to the reader.
Looking at http://www.economist.com/node/699582/print?Story_ID=699582 it seems to be open to some doubt whether Russell was actually advocating a nuclear first strike. (It seems clear that he was prepared to countenance one in some circumstances. That's not obviously completely unreasonable.)
After that he went on found the Pugwash conferences, be the first president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, etc., so he can hardly be painted as a nuclear warmonger generally. As you say, "everyone makes mistakes and everyone is subject to social climate".
Could you be more explicit about how he "refused to own up to it"? I mean, did he deny saying the actual words he's documented as having said, or did he disagree with someone else's interpretation of them, or what?
I'm afraid I don't remember the sources I read (other than Poundstone's book) and don't have time to dig into it just now, though given what I posted I suppose I should. FWIW, my memory is that he was asked about it more than once in the 1960s, denied that he'd said what he'd said, and then responded evasively when presented with evidence of it. On the other hand, my memory is that he'd advocated for a nuclear strike in print; and given the debate you linked to, that seems unlikely.
Edit: My conscience wouldn't sit still until I did dig around a bit. The question is more controversial than Poundstone's book made it seem, so I definitely shouldn't have said "definitely". When will I learn :) On the other hand, there's a lot more material than that Economist article made it seem (the editor of Russell's letters who was defending Russell in that piece really comes across as disingenuous for not mentioning this), and some of it is pretty unpleasant.
The consensus seems to be that Russell advocated threatening the USSR with nuclear strikes to force them to change their policies. Whether he advocated pre-emptive war itself is controversial. He made many comments about this in the 40s and 50s. From a BBC interview in 1959:
BBC: "Is it true or untrue that in recent years you advocated that a preventive war might be made against communism, against Soviet Russia?”
Russell: “It’s entirely true, and I don’t repent of it.”
Other comments were ambiguous (he thought it necessary to "bully the Russians" with the threat of bombing them but hoped it would not lead to war, etc.) Later, he claimed that he had simply "entirely forgotten" that he had ever advocated this. At least two serious biographers, Ronald Clark and Ray Monk, do not find this credible. Here's Clark:
[Russell's] explanation that he had simply forgotten what he had said [...] would be more acceptable if applied to one speech rather than to a long series of articles and statements [...] It might be possible to argue that his disavowal of advocating preventive war was based on the most academic interpretation of the term: that advocating the threat of war unless a potential enemy submitted, even though being prepared to have your bluff called, was not advocacy of a preventive war. But even this questionable escape-route is blocked by Russell’s own statement to [the BBC] and [by] his earlier suggestion that “a casus belli would not be difficult to find".
My conclusion is that what I wrote wasn't far off, but it was unfair to lump Russell in with von Neumann, Lemay, and the rest of the Dr. Strangelove set who were advocating for nuclear war outright.
Well, maybe. It's a bit hard to tell from that one-liner whether you're being serious or glib, but the question of how the great man or woman treats the people closest to him or her is a tricky one. I agree that it's relevant, but it hasn't traditionally been considered to be. And we never have access to the full story. Everyone knows from their own personal life how utterly different things can look up close than they do from afar.
It wouldn't be a surprise if Russell were the classic intellectual type with strong affections for humanity in the abstract and the people around him not so much. Champions of causes are often this way. There are incredibly striking and tragic cases of this, such as what happened between Gandhi and his oldest son. But one should especially hesitate to condemn in matters of the heart.
Meh. The world has suffered enough from "the classic intellectual type with strong affections for humanity in the abstract and the people around him not so much". I'd much rather listen to someone who's attached to others and behaves decently towards them.
(I've got a particular bias against Gandhi for what that so-called "moral paragon" famously said about the Holocaust.)
For others who are curious about the Gandhi reference, here's what I dug up:
"“Hitler,” Gandhi solemnly affirmed, “killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. I believe in hara-kiri. I do not believe in its militaristic connotations, but it is a heroic method.”
“You think,” I said, “that the Jews should have committed collective suicide?”
“Yes,” Gandhi agreed,” that would have been heroism. It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to the evils of Hitler’s violence, especially in 1938, before the war. As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.”"
Yes, basically, that. It kind of indicates that he believed Jewish lives are worth so little that we should have pointlessly thrown away millions of them for publicity.
Edit: It's questionable whether this was something specific he had against Jews or not. Frankly, I'm not even sure whether an anti-Semite or an anti-humanist is morally superior.
No, he wasn't saying that "we should have pointlessly thrown away" any of them. He was saying that the Jews should have sacrificed themselves to make a point, in something like the same way as many of Gandhi's followers put themselves in danger to make a point, and Gandhi himself went on (life-threatening) hunger strike to make a point. And he was saying that the end result would likely have been the loss of fewer Jewish lives.
There is a big difference between "It would be a noble and also an effective thing for group X to sacrifice themselves" and "Other people should sacrifice group X", and it seems very clear that Gandhi was saying the first of those and not the second, and that he was advocating that they should do the same kind of thing as he did himself.
Now, for the avoidance of doubt, I think (1) he was wrong about this and (2) there's still something a bit indecent about saying "those people should have sacrificed themselves". But I don't see anything anti-Semitic, or anti-humanistic, in this, nor do I think he was saying that Jewish lives were worth little in absolute terms or relative to others. He was saying that in the face of a powerful oppressor self-sacrifice is both an effective tool and a noble thing to do.
Ah. The dispute here is that I (along with most Jews nowadays) simply do not believe that self-sacrifice is effective or noble. The Holocaust was, in fact, our single biggest lesson ever in precisely that. From our perspective, self-sacrifice is anti-humanistic, it's a simple murder: you kill yourself, save nobody else, and win nothing for it but the sympathy of future generations -- hopefully.
I mean, for that matter, compare how many Holocaust victims did fight back versus those who didn't. Since the vast majority didn't fight back, what could they have done to make their deaths into an effective "martyrdom"?
Thank you for this lucid explanation. Gandhi's way of thinking and acting remains extremely counterintuitive (to us), so it's important to remember both that he practiced what he preached and that it actually worked. If one forgets either of those things, many of his statements become obvious monstrosities. But the fault is with our definition of "obvious".
