Joseph Rotblat

Polish-born English physicist and peace activist

• Born: November 4, 1908
• Birthplace: Warsaw, Poland, Russian Empire (now in Poland)
• Died: August 31, 2005
• Place of death: London, England

Rotblat’s work in nuclear physics and on the Manhattan Project led to his postwar crusade to denuclearize the world and end all wars. As a medical researcher he pioneered radiation therapy for certain cancers, and in 1995 he won the Nobel Peace Prize, sharing the award with the peace organization Pugwash, which he helped to found.

Early Life

Born in Russian-controlled Poland, Joseph Rotblat (ROHT-blat) was the fifth of seven children in a prosperous Jewish family. His father, Zygmont Rotblat, had built up and headed a nationwide paper-transporting business, and Sonia, his mother, cared for their large and growing family at their homes in Warsaw and in the countryside. It was at their country home that the young Rotblat learned to ride the horses that his family bred. He later said that, from his earliest years, he had a passion for learning about the natural world, but in his heart this knowledge was always related to the welfare of people. He also experienced firsthand the ill effects of science and technology gone wrong during the slaughter of young men in World War I.

Rotblat’s father’s business failed during the war, and, in the postwar period, Rotblat’s world tragically changed from comfort and culture to hunger and despair. His father was forced to make illegal vodka in the family’s basement and sell it on the black market. For some time Rotblat had to abandon his formal education and work as an electrician laying street cables. In the evenings he educated himself by reading all that he could find in Polish, Russian, and English. His inherent intelligence and acquired knowledge enabled him to enroll at the Free University of Poland, where he pursued his passion for physics and from which he received his M.A. degree in 1932. During this time he met Tola Gryn, a fellow student who was majoring in Polish literature, and their relationship deepened and led to their marriage in 1937. Also in 1937, Rotblat was pursuing a doctorate in physics at Warsaw University.

While a graduate student, he did research at the Radiological Laboratory of the Scientific Society of Warsaw, where he worked with Ludwik Wertenstein, who had studied with the famous chemistMarie Curie. Rotblat’s doctoral thesis was on the inelastic scattering of neutrons from gold foil, for which he received his doctor of physics degree in 1938. Two Nobel-Prize-winning physicists, Frédéric Joliot in Paris and James Chadwick in England, offered him research fellowships. After accepting the Oliver Lodge Fellowship, he traveled, in March of 1939, to the University of Liverpool where Chadwick, who had won a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the neutron, was studying the energy of neutrons emitted from the fissioning of uranium nuclei. Rotblat’s grant was to work with a cyclotron that was nearing completion, and his intention was to master new techniques so that he could later set up a school of nuclear physics in Poland. However, world events soon changed his life and career in ways that he could not foresee.

Life’s Work

Before he had left Poland, Rotblat had learned of the discovery of nuclear fission in Germany, and during his early months in Liverpool he found that surplus neutrons were released by fissioning nuclei. Like other physicists of the time, he was aware that these excess neutrons could split other nuclei, leading to a chain reaction with the very rapid release of enormous amounts of energy. Furthermore, he realized that this could lead to a bomb of horrendous destructiveness, which raised troubling moral issues.

Rotblat also was troubled that his wife was still in Poland. In the summer of 1939 he went back to Poland so that he could bring her to England, but she was recuperating from a severe attack of appendicitis and had to postpone her trip. Rotblat had to return to England and left Poland by train two days before the Nazis invaded the country. Despite his desperate attempts to arrange her escape through Belgium, Denmark, or Italy, she remained trapped in a ghetto behind Poland’s closed borders. She was one of millions of Polish Jews who lost their lives during the Nazi occupation.

Because of his fear of the Nazis, and despite initial reservations, Rotblat agreed to investigate, with a team of young physicists, the feasibility of making an atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project , the U.S. program working to devise an atomic bomb, was in the early stages of development. Because he was not a British citizen, Rotblat was not allowed to travel to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the intensive bomb research was going on, until 1944. Earlier, in 1942, British prime ministerWinston Churchill and U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt had agreed that, because of the danger of a Nazi invasion of England, the bulk of atomic research would be conducted in the United States. Los Alamos became the center of research.

Rotblat continued to have mixed feelings about working on this terrifying weapon. On the one hand, he was grateful to be working with some of the greatest scientists in the world. On the other hand, the project was top secret and regulated by strict military controls, which he found distasteful. Initially, he calmed his anxieties through the conviction that the bomb would deter further use by the Nazis. However, in late 1944, intelligence reports made it clear that the Nazis were far from developing an atomic bomb of their own. He soon informed Chadwick, who also was working on the Manhattan Project, that he wished to resign from the project, but his request was delayed while authorities allayed their suspicions that he might be a spy. On Christmas Eve, 1944, he sailed for England, only to discover that a trunk with his personal effects had mysteriously disappeared.

At Liverpool University he became the acting director of nuclear physics research, but he was devastated when he learned of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945. With the war’s end he found out about the death of his wife and the survival of his mother and other relatives, most of whom eventually came to England. He was now a British citizen, and he became the conscience and the driving force behind the British Atomic Scientists Association (BASA), which promoted nuclear weapons control and disarmament. One of the BASA’s projects was the Atomic Train, a touring exhibition designed to educate the public about nuclear power and its dangers.

In the late 1940’s, Rotblat abandoned his research on nuclear physics to concentrate on medicine. He joined the staff of the University of London’s Medical College of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, where he pioneered radiation therapy for certain cancers. His Liverpool and London researches resulted in two more doctoral degrees (1950 and 1953), and he used his expertise in nuclear physics and medicine to alert the public to the harm caused by fallout from the testing of nuclear weapons. In 1955 he was the youngest of eleven scientists to sign a manifesto against nuclear weapons that was issued by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein. This manifesto became the basis for the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, named for the location of its first meetings, in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, in 1957. Rotblat helped found this organization and served as its secretary-general for sixteen years.

Through their meetings and publications, the Pugwash Conferences played an important role in bringing together scientists and public figures from capitalist and socialist countries to discuss fundamental issues on arms control and peace-building. These discussions contributed to such international agreements as the Partial Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (1963), the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (1968), and the Antiballistic Missile Treaty (1972). Throughout the 1960’s and into the 1970’s, Rotblat continued his dual career as medical researcher and peace activist by serving as editor in chief of Physics in Medicine and Biology and by cofounding the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, Rotblat became Pugwash’s president and remained at the forefront of efforts to foster cooperation among nations. These efforts led to many awards, including his being named a Commander of the British Empire in 1965, his honorary membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1972), and his receiving the Bertrand Russell Society Award (1983), the Polish Order of Merit (1987), and the Albert Einstein Peace Prize (1992). His greatest recognition came when, together with Pugwash, he received the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize. Rotblat donated his half of the million-dollar award to various Pugwash-related goals. He was knighted in 1998 and continued to attend peace conferences until 2004, when he was slowed by a stroke. He died in his sleep at his home in London at the age of ninety-six.

Significance

Though he began his career as a nuclear physicist, Rotblat became best known as a peace crusader and critic of nuclear weapons. Like Einstein, he came to regret his role in developing atomic bombs. Between 1945 and 2005, his intellectual work articles, books, and participation in various peace organizations, especially Pugwash helped him progress toward reaching the two chief goals of his life: the short-term goal of the abolition of nuclear weapons and the long-term goal of the abolition of war. Many consider Rotblat to have been a towering figure indeed a hero in the quest for world peace.

Bibliography

Braun, Reiner, et al., eds. Joseph Rotblat: Visionary for Peace. New York: Wiley, 2007. The five editors of this book enlisted eminent scholars and important politicians to survey the life and contributions of Rotblat. Their articles include biographical surveys, personal reminiscences, and appraisals of his achievements. An appendix features documents and articles related to Rotblat’s peace work.

Gaddis, John Lewis, et al., eds. Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy Since 1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Discusses the global politics of nuclear proliferation following World War II. Includes the chapter “Longing for International Control, Banking on American Superiority: Harry S. Truman’s Approach to Nuclear Weapons.” Bibliographical references, index.

Rotblat, Joseph. Scientists in the Quest for Peace: A History of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972. Rotblat wrote many books on medical physics and the control of nuclear weapons, and this book is one of the most important. Despite its focus on the first fifteen years of Pugwash, it remains a good introduction to the particulars of this organization and to the author’s general views on the social responsibility of scientists. Index.

Szasz, Ferenc Morton. British Scientists and the Manhattan Project. New York: Macmillan, 1992. The author recounts the stories of the British scientists who traveled to Los Alamos to help create the atomic bomb. He extends his account into the postwar years, when several of these scientists, including Rotblat, had a profound influence on the nuclear programs and policies of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. Bibliographical references and index.

Wittner, Lawrence. Resisting the Bomb, 1954-1970. Vol. 2 in The Struggle Against the Bomb. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997. This massive work (641 pages) comes between volume 1, which deals with the history of the disarmament movement up to 1953, and volume 3, which tells the story of those who tried to move the world toward nuclear disarmament from 1971 to 2003. Wittner interviewed Rotblat for his books, and his Pugwash activities are substantially analyzed in volume 2. Index.