Committee of 100 (United Kingdom)

The Committee of 100 was a British anti-war group. It was set up in 1960 with a hundred public signatories by Bertrand Russell, Ralph Schoenman and Reverend Michael Scott and others. Its supporters used mass nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience to achieve their aims.

The idea of a mass civil disobedience campaign against nuclear weapons emerged early in 1960 in discussions between Ralph Schoenman (an activist in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)), and Hugh Brock, April Carter (both of the Direct Action Committee against nuclear war), Ralph Miliband, Alan Lovell and Stuart Hall. Schoenman approached Bertrand Russell, the president of CND, with the idea. Russell resigned from the presidency of CND in order to form the Committee of 100, which was launched at a meeting in London on 22 October 1960 with a hundred signatures. Russell was elected as president and Michael Randle of the Direct Action Committee was appointed secretary.

Russell explained his reasons for setting up the Committee of 100 in an article in the New Statesman in February 1961:

Many in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, including some of its founders, supported the Committee of 100's campaign of civil disobedience and in its first year it received more in donations than CND had received in its first year. Several of the early CND's activists, including some members of its executive committee, had been supporters of the Direct Action Committee and in 1958 CND had cautiously accepted direct action as a possible method of campaigning; but, largely under the influence of Canon John Collins, the CND chairman, the CND leadership opposed any sort of unlawful protest, and the Committee of 100 was created as a separate organisation partly for that reason and partly because of personal animosity between Collins and Russell. It has been suggested that this separation weakened the campaign against nuclear weapons.

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