Committee of 100

The Committee of 100 was founded on the initiative of Ralph Schoenman and Bertrand Russell in October 1960. The Committee called for a mass movement of civil disobedience against British government policy on nuclear weapons. Its members saw a need for more radical methods than those used by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, especially following the defeat of the Labour Party in the 1959 general election. In this sense, the Committee of 100 was the successor of the Direct Action Committee, which disbanded in June 1961 after the Holy Loch demonstration. The Committee of 100 aimed to use non violent direct action on a mass scale, something the DAC had never managed to sustain. Bertrand Russell resigned as president of CND to take on the presidency of the Committee of 100 and Rev. Michael Scott became chairman.

Many leading DAC activists joined the Committee of 100, including Michael Randle, who returned from Ghana to become its first secretary, and April Carter, who sat with Randle on the working group. However the Committee of 100 did not share the DAC's Gandhian commitment to using non violent methods to achieve a non violent society. Its focus was limited to achieving British unilateral nuclear disarmament, as described in its manifesto by Russell and Scott, 'Act or perish'.

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