Joseph Rotblat

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Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat KCMG FRS (November 4, 1908 – August 31, 2005) was a Jewish Polish-British physicist. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 in conjunction with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, an organisation of scientists of which he was secretary general from its founding until 1973, for their efforts towards nuclear disarmament.

Rotblat was born Józef Rotblat in Łódź in central Poland, the fifth of seven children to a paper merchant. His father's business was ruined by World War I, but despite not receiving a formal education and working as a domestic electrician, he managed to win a free place in the physics department of the Free University of Poland and a position as a junior demonstrator. He received a MA in 1932 and became a Research Fellow of Radiological Laboratory of Scientific Society of Warsaw in 1933. He became Assistant Director of the Atomic Physics Institute at the Free University of Poland in 1937 and became a doctor of Physics at the University of Warsaw in 1938.

In early 1939, he went to work at the University of Liverpool to work with Sir James Chadwick, the discoverer of the neutron, becoming a lecturer in 1940. Because his stipend was small, he left his wife, Tola, in Poland. In the summer of 1939, shortly before Germany invaded Poland to begin World War II. He returned to Poland to bring his wife to England, but she was ill and could not travel. He returned alone and never saw her again. He never remarried.

Early in 1944 Rotblat went with Chadwick's group to work on the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bombs. He always had strong reservations about the use of science to develop such a devastating weapon. He was shocked in March 1944 when at a private dinner with Leslie Groves during which it was made clear that the atomic bomb was no longer being developed to deter Nazi Germany, but to subdue the Soviets. By the end of 1944 it was also apparent that Nazi Germany had abandoned the development its own bomb and Rotblat resigned in December. He was the only physicist to leave the Manhattan Project on the grounds of conscience, though others later refused to work on atomic bombs after the defeat of Japan. Before leaving Los Alamos he was accused of being a Soviet spy and he was barred from the United States for several years later. On departure from New York, his research notes and correspondence disappeared and he later discovered in his dossier in the United States a statement that he was suspected of wanting to join the Royal Air Force so that he could fly to Poland and defect to the Soviet Union.

After the war, Rotblat became interested in the medical and biological uses of radiation, and in 1949 became Professor of Physics at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, shortly before receiving his PhD from Liverpool in 1950. He also worked on several official bodies connected with nuclear physics, and arranged a major exhibition for schools on civil nuclear energy. In 1955, he demonstrated that the contamination caused by the fall out after the Castle Bravo test at Bikini Atoll nuclear test by the United States would have been far greater than that stated officially. Until then the official line had been that the growth in the strength of atomic bombs was not accompanied by an equivalent growth in radiation released. Japanese scientsts who had collected data from a fishing vessel, the Lucky Dragon which had inadvertently been exposed to fallout disagreed with this. Rotblat showed that there was a further fission phase at the end of the explosion that increased the amount of radioactivity by a thousand-fold. Rotblat's paper was taken up by the media, and contributed to the agitation that resulted in the ending of atmospheric tests by the Partial Test Ban Treaty.

Rotblat believed that scientists should always be concerend with the ethical consequences of their work. 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. With Bertrand Russell and others he organised the first one of these in 1957 and continued to work within their framework until his death. Despite the Iron Curtain and the Cold War, he advocated establishing links between scientists from the West and East. He thought 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. He nominated Mordechai Vanunu, who had disclosed the extent of Israel's nuclear weapons programme, for the Nobel Peace Prize every year from 1988 to 2004 when he was president of the Pugwash conferences. Central to his view of the world were the words of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto with which he concluded his acceptance speech for the Nobel prize: Above all, remember your humanity.

He was made a CBE in 1965 and knighted in 1998. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Society and a winner of the Albert Einstein Peace Prize in 1992. He was Editor-in-Chief of the journal 'Physics in Medicine and Biology' and president of several institutions and professional associations. He was also co-founder and member of governing board of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and a member of the Advisory Committee on Medical Research of the World Health Organization.

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