Atomic War or World Peace Order? Karl Jaspers, Denis de Rougemont, Bertrand Russell

Abstract

The detonations of atomic bombs over two major Japanese cities and the development of nuclear weapons stirred many responses from intellectuals. Immediate responses were those of shock and fear, constituting a distinct feeling of dystopianism in what earlier research has described as a utopian moment. This article assesses how Karl Jaspers, Denis de Rougemont and Bertrand Russell responded to the bomb, from the years 1945–1958, drawing upon the devices of transnational and conceptual history. They regarded the Second World War and the nuclear armament as results of nation state sovereignty and pleaded for international law and delineations of national sovereignty. The responses underwent three different phases, while they continued to share the common threats of communism and Soviet totalitarianism. In looking at Jaspers, De Rougemont and Russell, we are able to see an internationalism that argued from the standpoint of a liberal order which was increasingly fuelled by anti-communism. In several respects, their responses to the atomic bomb represented a major strand of Western European internationalist thinking during the post-war period.