Joseph Rotblat

Sir Joseph Rotblat (; 4 November 1908 – 31 August 2005) was a Polish and British physicist. During World War II he worked on Tube Alloys and the Manhattan Project, but left the Los Alamos Laboratory on grounds of conscience after it became clear to him in 1944 that Germany had ceased development of an atomic bomb.

His work on nuclear fallout was a major contribution toward the ratification of the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. A signatory of the 1955 Russell–Einstein Manifesto, he was secretary-general of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs from their founding until 1973 and shared, with the Pugwash Conferences, the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize "for efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international affairs and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms." His father, Zygmunt Rotblat, built up and ran a nationwide horse-drawn carriage business, owned land and bred horses. Józef's early years were spent in what was a prosperous household but circumstances changed at the outbreak of World War I. Borders were closed and the family's horses were requisitioned, leading to the failure of the business and poverty for their family. Despite having a religious background, by the age of ten, he doubted the existence of God, and later became an agnostic.

Rotblat's parents could not afford to send him to a gymnasium, so Rotblat received his secondary education in a cheder taught by a local rabbi. He then attended a technical school, where he studied electrical engineering, graduating with his diploma in 1923 in the newly established Republic of Poland. After graduating, Rotblat worked as an electrician in Warsaw, but had an ambition to become a physicist.

Before the outbreak of World War II, he conducted experiments that showed that in the fission process, neutrons were emitted. In early 1939, he envisaged that a large number of fissions could occur and if this happened within a sufficiently short time, then considerable amounts of energy could be released. He went on to calculate that this process could occur in less than a microsecond, and as a consequence would result in an explosion.

In 1939, through Wertenstein's connections, Rotblat was invited to study in Paris and at the University of Liverpool under James Chadwick, winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize for discovering the neutron. Chadwick was building a particle accelerator called a "cyclotron" to study fundamental nuclear reactions, and Rotblat wanted to build a similar machine in Warsaw, so he decided to join Chadwick in Liverpool. He travelled to England alone because he could not afford to support his wife there.

Before long, Chadwick gave Rotblat a fellowship (the Oliver Lodge Fellowship), doubling his income, and in that summer of 1939, the young Pole returned home, intending to bring Tola back with him. When the time came to leave Warsaw in late August, however, she was ill following an operation for appendicitis, and remained behind, expecting to follow within days; however, the outbreak of war brought calamity. Tola was trapped, and desperate efforts in the ensuing months to bring her out through Denmark (with the help of Niels Bohr), Belgium, and finally Italy came to nothing, as each country in turn was closed off by the war. He never saw her again; she was murdered in the Holocaust at the Belzec concentration camp. This affected him deeply for the rest of his life, and he never remarried.

Manhattan Project

While still in Poland, Rotblat had realised that nuclear fission might possibly be used to produce an atomic bomb. He first thought that he should "put the whole thing out of my mind", but he continued because he thought the only way to prevent Nazi Germany from using a nuclear bomb was if Britain had one to act as a deterrent. He worked with Chadwick on Tube Alloys, the British atomic bomb project. At Los Alamos, he was befriended by Stan Ulam, a fellow Polish-Jewish scientist, with whom he was able to converse in Polish. Rotblat worked in Egon Bretscher's group, investigating whether high-energy gamma rays produced by nuclear fission would interfere with the nuclear chain reaction process, and then with Robert R. Wilson's cyclotron group.

Rotblat continued to have strong reservations about the use of science to develop such a devastating weapon. In 1985, he related that, at a private dinner at the Chadwicks' house at Los Alamos in March 1944, he was shocked to hear the director of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., say words to the effect that the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets. Indeed, Groves testified under oath at the 1954 hearing about J. Robert Oppenheimer's security record that "there was never, from about two weeks from the time I took charge of this project, any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy and that the project was conducted on that basis."

Chadwick learned that the chief of security held a security dossier in which Rotblat was accused of intending to return to England so that he could be flown over Poland and parachute into Soviet territory to pass on the secrets of the atomic bomb. He was also accused of visiting someone in Santa Fe and leaving them a blank cheque to finance the formation of a communist cell. but the presence of large numbers of Rotblat's personal papers from Los Alamos now archived at the Churchill Archives Centre "is totally at odds with Rotblat's account of events".

Nuclear fallout

Rotblat returned to Britain to become senior lecturer and acting director of research in nuclear physics at the University of Liverpool. He was naturalised as a British subject on 8 January 1946. Most of his family had survived the war. With the help of a Polish man, his brother-in-law Mieczysław (Mietek) Pokorny had created false Polish Catholic identities for Rotblat's sister Ewa and niece Halina. Ewa, taking advantage of the fact that she was an ash blonde who, like Rotblat, spoke fluent Polish as well as Yiddish, smuggled the rest of the family out of the Warsaw Ghetto. Mietek, Rotblat's brother Mordecai (Michael) and Michael's wife Manya, Rotblat's mother Scheindel, and two Russian soldiers lived in a concealed bunker underneath a house near Otwock, in which Ewa and Halina lived with a Polish family. Displays of Polish anti-Semitism that she witnessed during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising embittered Ewa towards Poland, and she petitioned Rotblat to help the family emigrate to England. He therefore now accepted Chadwick's offer of British citizenship so he could help them escape from Poland. They lived with him in London for some time before becoming established. Halina would go on to graduate from Somerville College, Oxford, and University College London, and become an editor of the Dictionary of National Biography.

Rotblat felt betrayed by the use of atomic weapons against Japan, and gave a series of public lectures in which he called for a three-year moratorium on all atomic research. a teaching hospital associated with the University of London. He remained there for the rest of his career, becoming a professor emeritus in 1976. He received his PhD from Liverpool in 1950, having written his thesis on the "Determination of a number of neutrons emitted from a source". He also worked on several official bodies connected with nuclear physics, and arranged the Atom Train, a major travelling exhibition for schools on civil nuclear energy. He became one of the most prominent critics of the nuclear arms race, was the youngest signatory of the Russell–Einstein Manifesto in 1955, and chaired the press conference that launched it. After the positive coverage of the manifesto, Cyrus Eaton offered to fund the influential Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, an international organisation that brought together scholars and public figures to work toward reducing the danger of armed conflict and to seek solutions to global security threats, particularly those related to nuclear warfare. With Bertrand Russell and others, Rotblat organised the first of these in 1957 and continued to work within their framework until his death. In 1958, Rotblat joined the executive committee of the newly launched Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Despite the Iron Curtain and the Cold War, he advocated establishing links between scientists from the West and East. For this reason, the Pugwash conferences were viewed with suspicion. Initially the British government thought them little more than "Communist front gatherings".

However, he persuaded John Cockcroft, a member of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, to suggest who might be invited to the 1958 conference. He successfully resisted a subsequent attempt to take over the conferences,

He was one of the signatories of the agreement to convene a convention for drafting a world constitution. As a result, for the first time in human history, a World Constituent Assembly convened to draft and adopt a Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

Later life

Rotblat retired from St Bartholomew's in 1976. In 1975 and 1976, he was Montague Visiting Professor of International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. He believed that scientists have an individual moral responsibility and, just as the Hippocratic Oath provides a code of conduct for physicians, he thought that scientists should have their own code of moral conduct, a Hippocratic Oath for scientists. and above all, with respect to the potential pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons. Central to his view of the world were the words of the Russell–Einstein Manifesto with which he concluded his acceptance lecture for the Nobel Prize in 1995: "Above all, remember your humanity". He also served as editor-in-chief of the journal Physics in Medicine and Biology from 1960 to 1972.

Rotblat suffered a stroke in 2004, and his health declined. He died of septicaemia at the Royal Free Hospital in Camden, London, on 31 August 2005. He won the Albert Einstein Peace Prize in 1992, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1995. He was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George in the 1998 Birthday Honours for services to international understanding. His certificate of election to the Royal Society read

Rotblat shared, with the Pugwash Conferences, the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for efforts toward nuclear disarmament. His citation read: "for efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international affairs and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms." Towards the end of his life, he was also elected honorary member of the International Association of Physics Students, and the Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation of India awarded him the Jamnalal Bajaj Award in 1999.

He was an honorary editorial board member for ‘Journal of Environment Peace’ published from the library of University of Toronto, now from Noble International University, edited by Professor Bob Ganguly and Professor Roger Hansell.

A plaque commemorating Joseph Rotblat, unveiled in 2017 in the presence of Polish Ambassador Arkady Rzegocki, can be found outside the offices of British Pugwash, on the corner of Bury Place and Great Russell Street in London.

Notes

References

External links

The Papers of Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat held at the Churchill Archives Centre
1989 Audio Interview with Joseph Rotblat by Martin Sherwin Voices of the Manhattan Project.
Dr. Rotblat: Or How I Learned to Start Worrying & Fear the Bomb via Culture.pl
Annotated Bibliography for Józef Rotblat from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues.
The Strangest Dream, a National Film Board of Canada film that tells Rotblat's life story.
Interview about the Manhattan Project for the WGBH-TV series War and Peace in the Nuclear Age.
Series 1 video interviews (recorded in 2002) with Sir Józef Rotblat by the Vega Science Trust.
Series 2 video interview (recorded in 2005) with Sir Józef Rotblat by the Vega Science Trust.
Op-Ed: The 50-Year Shadow by Józef Rotblat, The New York Times, 17 May 2005.
Józef Rotblat – Nobel Lecture
Man of Peace Dies: Scientist Who Turned Back on A-bomb Project The Guardian 2 September 2005.
Interview with Józef Rotblat recorded in 2005 a few months before he died.
Józef Rotblat: A site dedicated to his life, work, and archive, assembled by Dr Martin Underwood.
Listen to a life story oral history interview with Sir Joseph Rotblat, recorded for National Life Stories at the British Library.
Dr. Rotblat: Or How I Learned to Start Worrying & Fear the Bomb