“I saw science as being in harmony with humanity.” When nuclear physicist and peace activist Joseph
Rotblat accepted the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 88, he opened his
address with those words. Nothing in his
long career exemplifies his outlook more than his decision in 1944 to quit the
Manhattan Project at Los Alamos for reasons of conscience – the only physicist
to do so.
Rotblat was born in Warsaw in 1908 into a relatively
prosperous Jewish family. With the
beginning of World War I, however, things became difficult for them as they
began to endure poverty and hunger.
Rotblat found work as an electrician but dreamed of becoming a
physicist. He managed to enroll as a
student at the Free University of Poland, where he earned an MA degree in
physics in 1932, and earned a doctorate
in physics at the University of Warsaw in 1938.
He then held two positions: Research Fellow in the Radiological
Laboratory of the Scientific Society of Warsaw, and in 1937, assistant Director
of the Atomic Physics Institute of the Free University of Poland.
Early in 1939, Rotblat began to experiment with uranium. That year he learned of the fission of
uranium and devised an experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons to determine
whether neutrons were emitted in the process.
On finding that more neutrons were emitted than produce fission, Rotblat
realized that this could lead to a chain reaction in which the enormous amount of
energy released could cause a violent explosion – and conceivably be used to
make an atomic bomb.
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| Joseph Rotblat - abolishwar.org.uk |
In 1939, Rotblat accepted an invitation to go to Liverpool in
England to work in the laboratory of James Chadwick, who had discovered the
neutron. He had to leave behind his wife,
Tola Gryn, a literature student whom he had married in 1937 but who was ill and
unable to travel. Germany invaded Poland
two days after Rotblat left. By the time
Tola recovered, it was too late for her to leave, so she was trapped in the
horrors of World War II. Only in 1945 did
Rotblat learn that she had been killed by the Nazis.
Rotblat stayed in Liverpool for several years, working with Chadwick,
who was building a cyclotron, or particle accelerator, something Rotblat wanted
to build in Warsaw. Late in 1943 Chadwick
joined the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the
United States as part of a collaborative effort between the two countries to
develop an atomic bomb before Hitler and the Nazis did. Rotblat followed two weeks later, the delay caused
by his refusal to accept British citizenship.
At the time, Rotblat rationalized his decision to work on an atomic bomb
by regarding it as a deterrent, its only purpose being to ensure that no one
would ever use it, so destructive would its effects be. He later changed his mind about this, however,
and came to believe strongly that nuclear weapons should be abolished
altogether.
Rotblat stayed at Los Alamos for eleven months, working as an
experimental physicist. During that time
he became friendly with Niels Bohr, the Danish nuclear physicist well known for
developing a model of the atom. (Bohr,
who had been helping refugees from Nazism, had left Denmark in 1943 to avoid
arrest by the Nazis and had come via Sweden and England to join the Manhattan Project.) Rotblat had a radio receiver and listened to
news reports about the war, but he disliked the American stations because of their
many commercial interruptions. Bohr, who
felt the same, came to Rotblat’s room each morning at 8 o’clock to listen
instead to the news from the BBC. Bohr foresaw
an arms race and favored openness about nuclear matters with the Russians; his
views, hardly popular, were influential on Rotblat’s own.
Despite Rotblat’s appreciation of the
natural beauty around Los Alamos, as well as the company of many of the world’s
foremost scientists – including several Nobel laureates – and the highly
sophisticated scientific equipment available, Rotblat was not happy. He began to feel that his reason for being
there was becoming “more and more invalid.”
He later recalled,
“I could see that with all
the enormous expenditure, the enormous effort put in the United States, even so
it will take quite a long time [to build a bomb]. And it looked…very likely that the war in
Europe would be over before the project is most completed. This made me feel
that... my whole being there is quite unnecessary. And all my moral scruples
which I started with initially came back to me. And so I felt that, ‘What am I
doing here? What is the purpose of this work?’
“And this became worse….after
a casual remark which was made in my presence by the head of the Manhattan
Project, General Leslie Groves. “And he
said – this was I think in March, 1944 – he said, ‘Of course you realize...’
– he said this to Chadwick – ‘that the whole purpose of this project is
to subdue our main enemy, the Russians.’ In other words, it turned out …that
what we are working on is not to try to prevent the Germans from using the bomb
against us, but actually to help the Americans to build a weapon which they
then could use, if need be, against the Russians. And this was certainly not
something which I wanted to work on, particularly at the time when the Russians
were our allies....we relied upon them, [on] their enormous sacrifices to
prepare the ground for a victory on our side against the Germans.”
Still concerned that, however unlikely, Germany might somehow
find a shortcut to building a nuclear bomb, Rotblat remained at Los Alamos for
some months. But in November 1944
another event caused him to finally quit the bomb project. Chadwick, who by then was working in Washington
DC, visited Los Alamos occasionally. He
told Rotblat that he knew, through intelligence channels, that the Germans had
given up working on a bomb. Rotblat then
asked to leave. Chadwick was not
pleased, but he agreed, swearing Rotblat to secrecy about the news from
Germany. The ostensible reason for
Rotblat’s departure was personal – he wanted to return to England to try to
find his wife. He left under a cloud of
suspicion, as some thought he must be a Russian spy; a case was built up against
him that was later shown to have been fabricated. During his train journey from Washington DC to
New York, a box containing some of his important papers mysteriously
disappeared and was never found.
Rotblat returned to England, where he became a lecturer and directed
research in nuclear physics at the University of Liverpool. When in August 1945 he learned that the US
had bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he felt horrified and betrayed: “I thought, of course, that the Americans would insist that the
project continues to find out whether the bomb works or not, they may test it,
and this will be the end. And when I
find out it was used against a city with this terrible devastation, I was of
course shocked. And all my worst fears –
which were told to me by Niels Bohr – came really to [be] vivid to me. That
this is now a new world: a world full of danger.”
Rotblat wanted no part of it. He vowed to devote his future work in science
entirely to peaceful purposes. He
campaigned for a three-year moratorium on atomic research. Always seeking ways to educate the public
about nuclear energy, in 1947 he developed a traveling exhibit for schools
called the Atom Train. After abandoning his
career in nuclear physics research, he grew interested in the medical and
biological uses of radiation and took up a position as physicist at St. Bartholomew’s
Hospital in London. He also studied the
effects of radiation on living beings, in particular that of strontium 90 in
the fallout from a nuclear blast. His
work helped raised awareness of the dangers of nuclear fallout, leading to the
Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.
In 1955 the English philosopher and peace
activist Bertrand Russell, also greatly concerned about the nuclear threat,
drafted a proposal urging prominent scientists on both sides of the Iron
Curtain to work together toward eliminating that threat. Russell sent a draft to Albert Einstein, who
– in one of the last acts of his life – signed it. On meeting Russell at a BBC sponsored
discussion about Castle Bravo, the US’s test of a thermonuclear bomb on Bikini
Atoll in the Pacific in 1954, Rotblat
learned of Russell’s proposal and added his signature to what became known as
the Russell-Einstein Manifesto warning of the dangers of a nuclear arms race.
The year 1957 saw the beginning of Rotblat’s
best known legacy: he organized the
first of many Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Financed by Canadian railroad magnate Cyrus
Eaton, the first meeting took place in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, the village of
Eaton’s birth. Scientists and others
from many countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain were invited to
participate as individuals, not representatives of their governments, in discussions
of the nuclear peril. The conferences were held almost every year in various
parts of the world. Rotblat became
Secretary General in 1973 and President in 1988, and edited many volumes of the
conferences’ proceedings.
Rotblat retired from St. Bartholomew’s in
1975. All along and into his later years, he campaigned passionately for the
elimination of nuclear weapons, traveling and lecturing widely and becoming a
founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958. More broadly, he envisioned and worked toward
an end to all war; he believed that “during war time … all our thought,
ingrained moral principles which you have, seemed to be thrown overboard and
you...we are in quite a different mentality.”
Rotblat always insisted that scientists have a social
responsibility. He advocated a
Hippocratic Oath for scientists under which they would pledge, at the beginning
of their careers, to work in science only for humanitarian causes.
The author of many books and articles, Rotblat
received many honors: he was awarded the
Albert Einstein Peace Prize in 1992 (jointly with physicist Hans Bethe),
elected to the Royal Society of London in 1995, and knighted in 1998. Rotblat died on August 31, 2005.
In 1995 Rotblat was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize, jointly with the Pugwash Conferences.
He concluded his acceptance speech with these words:
“The quest for a war-free world has a
basic purpose: survival. But if in the process we learn how to achieve it by
love rather than by fear, by kindness rather than by compulsion; if in the
process we learn to combine the essential with the enjoyable, the expedient
with the benevolent, the practical with the beautiful, this will be an extra
incentive to embark on this great task. Above all, remember your humanity.”
Sources:
“Joseph
Rotblat,” Wikipedia, the Free
Encyclopedia
Andrew
Brown, Keeper of the Nuclear Conscience:
The Life and Work of Joseph Rotblat, 2012
Reiner Braun, Robert Hinde, David Krieger, Harold Kroto, and
Sally Milne, eds., Joseph Rotblat:
Visionary for Peace, 2007
Dr.
Joseph Rotblat, “Leaving the Bomb Project,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, August 1985 http://www.reformation.org/joseph-rothblat.html;
also reprinted in Braun et al
Vega Science Trust interviews with Joseph Rotblat, 2002
WGBH Open Vault Interview with Joseph Rotblat, 1986
Several articles about Joseph Rotblat are gathered at
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