Göttingen Manifesto

The Göttingen Manifesto was a declaration of 18 leading nuclear scientists of West Germany (among them the Nobel laureates Otto Hahn, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg and Max von Laue) against arming the West German army with tactical nuclear weapons in the 1950s, the early part of the Cold War, as the West German government under chancellor Adenauer had suggested.

Historical situation
In the Second World War some of the signing scientists had been members of the Uranverein, a nuclear research project of the Nazi regime. The war ended with the nuclear destruction of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the USA. After World War II the Cold War began. Germany was divided, and both German states were frontier states in the Cold War. After the Korean War (1950 - 1953), West Germany founded its own army, the Bundeswehr, in 1955. There were many protests against the remilitarisation of West Germany. A few months after the foundation of the West German army, the Eastern German state founded an army, too.

In 1953 the hydrogen bomb was invented. A short time later both superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union, had a so-called overkill potential. In the whole world and especially in the frontier states of the Cold War there was a great fear of nuclear war at that time. A few years later, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was felt the existence of mankind was under threat.

The Göttinger 18 wrote the following manifesto on April 12, 1957: