Editor’s Preface

Committee of 100

During the Summer of 1960, philosopher and activist Bertrand Russell was persuaded to trade in his presidency of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament for the leadership of the Committee of 100, a newly planned movement for large scale nonviolent direct action against the manufacture and use of nuclear weapons. Together with Michael Scott, Ralph Schoenman, Michael Randle, April Carter and 95 other public signatories, 88-year-old Russell launched the Committee at a meeting in London on 22 October 1960. Its objective was to stop the “folly of nuclear armament” through mass civil disobedience. 

Right from the beginning the Committee of 100 strongly emphasized the nonviolent nature of the demonstrations, and anybody who wished to participate had to adhere to a long list of behavioral guidelines designed to safeguard the nonviolent integrity of the movement. Nevertheless, demonstrators expected and were expected to be arrested and charged. At the second sit-down demonstration in April 1961 in London, over 800 people were arrested. In September, a week before the next mass demonstration, all hundred committee members were summoned to court without charge for incitement to commit breaches of the peace. They were forced to sign a promise of good behavior for twelve months. 32 of them refused, including Russell, who opted to go to jail instead. The following demonstration, the largest organized by the Committee, brought between 12,000 and 15,000 demonstrators to the centre of London. Over 1,300 of them were arrested.

By now the authorities were beginning to take the Committee much more seriously, which resulted in the arrest of six of the younger and lesser known Committee members. They were charged with conspiracy and incitement to breach the Official Secrets Act. Five of them were imprisoned for 18 months. This heavy handed crack down by the authorities caused many signatories to resign from the Committee, and with the ebbing away of the Cuba Crisis, mass support for the activities of the Committee and the concept of unilateral nuclear disarmament started to dwindle. In 1963 Russell resigned. After that the Committee turned more radical and increasingly became a fringe movement. In October 1968, the Committee of 100 was wound up.

Despite its relative success the Committee would become a template for later activist organizations, especially in terms of its anarchist inspired organization. Early 1962 the Committee decided to decentralize its organization. To facilitate nationwide communication it dissolved into many autonomous regional committees and area working groups (any region attracting a 100 signatories could start its own Committee of 100 and plan its own actions, hence the Twickenham Committee of 100, the Croydon Committee of 100 and the Bromley and Beckenham Committee of 100, to name just a few) under the umbrella of the National Committee of 100. Next to the regional committees there were many autonomous working groups who carried out an array of specialized tasks, including the Legal Action Group, Schools for Non-Violence, the Welfare Group and the 100 Book Club.