In his capacity as president of the Bertrand Russell Society, philosopher Timothy Madigan (St. John Fisher College) has written to U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin to encourage them to work together to eliminate nuclear weapons, expressing support for Nuclear Age Peace Foundation‘s recent open letter to the leaders. 

That open letter was signed by a number of scholars and authors, including members of the Bertrand Russell Society such as Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky, according to a press release from the Society.

Professor Madigan also sent the leaders each a copy of Bertrand Russell’s History of the World in Epitome, a short book “which in only a couple of spare drawings and 21 words summarizes human folly throughout history and its ultimate doom in the event of a nuclear holocaust.”

From the press release:

Russell published the little book on his 90th birthday in 1962, only a few months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, a time when the world stood at the precipice of nuclear catastrophe, and, as we now know, a horror that was only barely averted. Russell, a renowned mathematician, philosopher, and Nobel Prize laureate, worked tirelessly to reduce the nuclear threat during the Cold War until his death in 1970 at age of 98. Russell and the great physicist, Albert Einstein, issued their famous Russell–Einstein Manifesto in 1955 to highlight the dangers posed by nuclear weapons, calling for world leaders to seek peaceful resolutions to international conflict.