In late April of 1958, reknown philisopher, musician, and Nobel Peace Prize holder Dr. Albert Schweitzer delivered an impassioned three-part plea to the world's media on the subject of nuclear tests, nuclear armaments, and the necessity of nonproliferation. At the time, they generated much attention, both in the media and the scientific communities. Later that year, they would, much rewritten, form the basis of one of Dr. Schweitzer's rarest books - Peace or Atomic War?. Yet today, almost fifty years later, it's nearly impossible to find anything more than a few choice quotes and excerpts of these letters themselves, which at the time did much, if indirectly, to shape public discourse - and opinion - of atomic weapons. There are probably copies in the late Doctor's collected papers, and the archives of the Nobel Institute in Norway, which distributed them. Yet, until now, no complete and full versions of these letters in their original form have ever been readily available to the public.
The story behind the preservation of one copy of these press releases is almost as fascinating as the papers themselves. Only through a stroke of fortune - and some politically-motivated mean-spiritedness - did a copy survive in a government archive, to eventually be unearthed, almost by accident, last year. Provided recently to us as fourth- or fifth-generation photocopies, we've scanned the letters, cleaned up the text, and made them available here as webpages and PDF files. Enjoy.
About these letters