"Detente or Destruction, 1955-57" continues publication of Routledge's multi-volume critical edition of Bertram Russell's shorter writings. Between September 1955 and November 1957 Russell published some 61 articles, reviews, statements, contributions to books and letters to editors, over 50 of which are contained in this volume. The texts, several of them hitherto unpublished, reveal the deepening of Russell's commitment to the anti-nuclear struggle, upon which he embarked in the previous volume of "Collected Papers" ("Man's Peril, 1954-55").
Continuing with the theme of nuclear peril, this volume contains discussion of nuclear weapons, world peace, prospects for disarmament and British-Soviet friendship against the backdrop of the Cold War. One of the key papers in this volume is Russell's message to the inaugural conference of the Pugwash movement, which Russell was instrumental in launching and which became an influential, independent forum of East-West scientific cooperation and counsel on issues such as an internationally agreed nuclear test-ban.
In addition to the issues of war and peace, Russell, now in his eighties, continued to take an interest in a wide variety of themes. He not only addresses older controversies over nationalism and empire, religious belief and American civil liberties; he also confronts head-on the new and pressing matters of armed intervention in Hungary and Suez, and of the manufacture and testing of the British hydrogen bomb. This volume includes 7 interviews ranging from East-West relations after the Geneva conference to a meeting with Russell.

The Collected Papers 28 signals reinvigoration of Russell the public campaigner. The title of the volume is taken from one of his most famous and eloquent short essays and probably the best known of his many broadcasts for the BBC. Man's Peril, 1954-55 not only captures the essence of Russell's thinking about nuclear weapons and the Cold War in the mid-1950s, its extraordinary impact served to jolt him into political protest once again. The activism of which we glimpse the initial stirrings in this volume continued in various guises more or less without interruption until his death. In the writings assembled in this volume, however, he is looking towards the non-aligned states and world scientific opinion as possible brokers of détente. (The volume includes Russell's famous public statement, the declaration of scientists known as 'The Russell-Einstein Manifesto'.) Although Russell was becoming increasingly immersed in work for peace, this was not to the exclusion of all other interests. For example, here we find also him reminiscing about his peace campaigning during the First World War, defending 'History as an Art', and attacking the obscurantism of obscenity legislation and the opponents of birth control.

In Collected Papers 21 Bertrand Russell grapples with the dilemma that confronted all opponents of militarism and war in the 1930s-namely, what was the most politically and morally appropriate response to international aggression.

How to Keep the Peace contains some of Russell's best-known essays, such as the famous Auto-obituary and his treatment of The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed. Like the sixteen previous volumes in Routledge's critical edition of Russell's shorter writings, however, Collected Papers 21 also includes a number of unpublished manuscripts from the Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University. Moreover, it recovers for Russell scholars and general readers alike a rich vein of material that has previously appeared in print only in obscure or long-defunct newspaper and periodical publications.