Einstein, Man Of Peace

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30212, 17 August 1963, Page 3

Einstein, Man Of Peace

Einstein on Peace. By Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden. Simon and Shuster. 703 pp.

The authors of this very considerable volume have done us a great service by producing what is, in effect, an anthology of Einstein’s own thoughts and statements on peace. Their own contributions are limited to a short introduction to each chapter and a few explanatory remarks: the rest of the book is Einstein speaking in letters, prepared speeches, and press interviews. The considerable research involved in this method has resulted in an important contribution to this subject and a most interesting and readable book. While it is pre-eminently in the field of science that Einstein is known, very close behind comes his life-long efforts for peace. He was not doctrinaire; he could not be confined to an ideology in either his politics or his pacifism. Yet every call for help in the cause of peace was considered, and often granted, however insignificant the organisation or person appealing to him Einstein was a socialist because he was convinced that only there lay man’s hope for equality, that a capitalist economy could not give security for all men, and that only in socialism could each man's freedom be determined. His hatred of war arose from the same emotions. It was based primarily on his regard for human beings as people for whom a higher vocation existed than being fed into a war. He was also convinced that war and its tensions militated against the intellectual freedom of the individual.

Nor was his pacifism an ivory tower philosophy. In 1914, in the middle of the jingoism of a Germany at war—and it seemed like successful war—Einstein and Nicolai produced their "Manifesto to Europeans,” a eall for unity among the nations. This kind of action went on all his life: organisations, committees, appeals—he was deeply committed to all of them. He was a follower of his own doctrine: “The serious pacifists who want to accomplish peace must have the courage to initiate and

carry on these aims. ... If they are too restrained, they become sheep—pacifist sheep.” Yet his love of liberty on occasions overrode his devotion to the cause of peace and put him into conflict with other pacifists. In the thirties, when the rise of Nazism threatened men’s security, dignity, and intellectual freedom, Einstein felt (with Bertrand Russell) that rearmament and war were inevitable. It was this, too, which made him leave Germany and settle in the United States. He went further. In a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939, he advocated the de- ; velopment of the atomic bomb —and even urged it when the United States was not interested. In all this, however, he is basically consistent. The Nazis were destroying the unity of nations and the freedom of the individual and had to be stopped It is one of the ironies of history that this great lover of peace not only by his own scientific discoveries unwittingly laid the foundations for the research that led to the atomic bomb, but also himself advocated the production of them.

From the dropping of the first bomb on Hiroshima to his death in 1955, however, Einstein became involved in practically every movement for peace. He worked and talked and wrote unceasingly, trying to get war banned between nations. He formed the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. He sent letter after letter, over a period of 10 years, warning the world of the destructive powers of the atomic weapons.

It is eight years since Einstein died. The weapons are (or were until last week) still being tested and stockpiled. War is still regarded as a possibility between the nations. None of us, as we face our future, is going to disagree with the last appeal he signed, just before his death: “In view of the fact that in any future war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realise, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purposes cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them consequently to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them”