GO Jones
Friday September 2, 2005
The Guardian
Sir Joseph Rotblat, who has died aged 96, was a nuclear physicist and a tireless worker for peace. When he and his creation, the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs were jointly awarded the 1995 Nobel peace prize, some newspapers identified him only as a "little known" physicist. But scientists in many disciplines, and officialdom in many countries, knew him well.
Born in Warsaw, Poland, Rotblat remained there until the age of 30, during which time he had been working in nuclear physics. What saved his life was that he had arranged to spend a year as Oliver Lodge fellow at Liverpool University with the Nobel prize for physics recipient Professor James Chadwick - the man who proved the existence of neutrons. This meant that Rotblat, after a short return visit, left Poland two days before Hitler invaded his country, otherwise one of the most extraordinary scientific careers of the 20th century would have been lost.
In the year 1939 came the discovery of nuclear fission in uranium and Rotblat himself subsequently worked on fission, briefly in Warsaw and later in Liverpool, where certain basic experiments were carried out into the feasibility of an atomic bomb. Inevitably, with the entry of the United States into the second world war in 1941, and the subsequent move to develop the A-bomb, he soon found himself at the centre of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Like a minority of the scientists involved, he was concerned then about the morality of working on a weapon of mass destruction, but convinced himself that the apparent danger of a German bomb justified it. However, unlike those other scientists, as soon as this danger had clearly disappeared he left the project and returned to Liverpool University to resume his post as a lecturer, and then senior lecturer, in the physics department and director of research into nuclear physics.
In 1950 he became professor of physics at London University's St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College. He remained in the post until 1976 - then becoming emeritus professor. During those years his professional career was devoted to the application of nuclear physics to medicine.
But Rotblat's real life's work was summed up by Bertrand Russell in his autobiography: "He can have few rivals in the courage and integrity and complete self-abnegation with which he has given up his own career (in which, however, he still remains eminent) to devote himself to combating the nuclear peril as well as other, allied evils."
Rotblat first took the lead in setting up, in 1946, the British Atomic Scientists Association (Basa), following meetings between Liverpool and Oxford physicists who had worked on the Manhattan Project or its British precursor, code-named Tube Alloys.
Although Basa was much smaller than its counterpart, the Federation of American Scientists, it was able to stimulate public debate through its journal, through public statements and its atom train travelling exhibition. It had adopted a non-political stance and its list of vice-presidents - all fellows of the Royal Society - included many of Britain's most eminent scientists as well as government advisers, and covering almost the whole political spectrum, from critics of British defence policy like Patrick Blackett to Winston Churchill's personal scientific adviser, Lord Cherwell.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be insufficiently non-political for some of the vice-presidents, following a public statement in 1957 about the danger of strontium-90 in fallout from nuclear weapon tests. Basa was wound down and finally dissolved in 1959. Many of Britain's leading physicists, including Harrie Massey, Nevill Mott, Rudolph Peierls and GP Thomson, had taken active roles in it. But Rotblat was its driving force and conscience.
By this time Rotblat had become active in other directions. He had helped Russell and took the chair at the launch of the famous Einstein-Russell Manifesto in 1955, signed by Albert Einstein two days before his death, and by nine other world-famous scientists, mostly Nobel prizewinners. At the time of his death, Rotblat was the last surviving signatory. He was a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, launched in 1958, and was briefly on its executive committee.
Rotblat's main contribution, nevertheless, was still to come. It was through the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, financed by a Canadian-American industrialist, Cyrus Eaton, which was first held in 1957 at Pugwash, a small fishing village in Nova Scotia.
Conferences followed approximately once a year, organised by Rotblat and his friend Professor Patricia Lindop of St Bartholomew's. The lists of up to 100 participants, from as many as 40 countries, but mostly from Great Britain, the US and the Soviet Union were a Who's Who of international science; the list of locations is a map of the world.
Most significant was the understanding that participants attended as individuals, not as representatives of governments, though observers from such organisations as the UN or the UN's educational scientific and cultural organisation Unesco were welcome. Scientists from both sides of the iron curtain could talk freely and informally but could, of course, report back to their governments. A Unesco/Pugwash symposium: Scientists, The Arms Race And Disarmament (1982), mentions several instances where Pugwash discussions had clearly contributed to subsequent international agreements.
Rotblat was secretary-general of Pugwash from 1957 until 1973, chairman of British Pugwash from 1978 to 1988 and from 1988 to 1997 president of Pugwash worldwide. Its annals, many edited by him with various collaborators, have provided continuing and wide-ranging analyses into current problems of disarmament and world security.
While working at Los Alamos, Rotblat had been shocked to hear General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, remark quite casually that the real purpose, of course, was to subdue the Soviet Union. When he decided to leave the project, a determined but highly incompetent attempt had been made to "fit him up" as a Russian spy.
It is a tribute to his universally recognised integrity, and to his skill in treading delicately though forcefully (he was very much aware of the cost of respectability as well as of its advantages) that among his many honours from east - including several from his native Poland - and west was the CBE, awarded in 1965. No measure of his real contribution, the honour at least signalled that his help to the British establishment by then outweighed his nuisance value.
In 1992, jointly with Hans Bethe (obituary, March 18 2005), he was awarded the much coveted Einstein peace prize, and in 1995, unusually late in career for a distinguished scientist, he was elected to the Royal Society. But perhaps the accolade that meant most to him was the sometime Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's statement that Pugwash papers and conferences had helped to guide the foreign policy that had led to the thaw in the cold war.
Rotblat wrote or edited more than two dozen books and scores of papers, culminating in the 1995 Nobel lecture - a powerful and moving exposition of the continuing danger to the world of the existence of nuclear weapons. In it he appealed to the nuclear powers to abandon cold-war thinking, to his fellow scientists to remember their responsibility to humanity, quoting the last passage of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto: "We appeal, as human beings to human beings. Remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open for a new paradise; if you cannot there lies before you the risk of universal death."
Rotblat continued to work into his 90s with apparently undiminished energy, lecturing in dozens of cities in Britain and abroad - including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Since his Nobel prize, he was aware that he was now "somebody" - his own expression - and spoke out on wider issues. In 1996, he appealed personally to President Weizman of Israel to show clemency to Mordechai Vanunu, the former technician who had "leaked" to the Sunday Times about Israel's secret stockpile of nuclear weapons and was then still in prison - in solitary confinement - after 10 years.
Following the disclosures about cloning experiments, he argued that an international ethics committee must be set up to monitor developments. He said: "I feel, however unpleasant it may be for scientists, that science may have to be controlled. We have got to tackle it because I think the whole future of mankind is in jeopardy."
Anthony Tucker adds: In accounts of Joseph Rotblat's important work for the wartime Tube Alloys Project (the British nuclear weapons programme) at Liverpool University, of his time at Los Alamos, his reasons for leaving the project and turning to the much harder battle for peace and disarmament, Rotblat consciously excluded all references to his life before the war. He called such references "extraneous personal elements", almost as if his life had begun when he left Poland in 1939.
Yet his life and attitudes had, by that time, been profoundly affected by isolation, family disruption and social deprivation. After the turn of the century, his father built up and ran a nationwide and prosperous horse-drawn transport business based in Warsaw. The family owned land and bred horses out in the countryside and, with two brothers and a sister, Joseph's formative years were initially in a context of culture, comfort and social esteem.
When he was five, things changed dramatically for the worse. The first world war turned Europe into a charnel house triggering, among other things, a wave of antisemitism that swept away his family's business and position. Rotblat grew up as an increasingly deprived, often hungry and sometimes physically abused child in the breadlines of a starving nation. Experiencing first-hand the near-insane intolerance and injustice generated as a political condition of war, these years forged Rotblat's unswerving ideals of world peace and of the use of science for the benefit of man and the planet.
In spite of great difficulties, the family remained together in Warsaw and, by 1918, Joseph was reading everything he could find, in English as well as Polish and Russian. His parents, recognising his outstanding intelligence, wanted him to become a rabbi. But Joseph, with a natural gift for mathematics and a flair for experiment, was determined to become a scientist.
During the early interwar years, he scratched a living as a teenage domestic electrician in Warsaw and, through sheer brilliance - for he was without formal education -won a very rare free place in the physics department of the University of Warsaw. At the same time he was granted a position as junior demonstrator, which carried a pittance rather than a salary. In spite of - or perhaps because of his experience of poverty - he never looked back academically, becoming a research fellow at the university in 1933 and assistant director of the atomic physics institute at the Free University of Warsaw from 1937 to September 1939.
During this period he married but, when he left Poland for Liverpool University on the eve of the outbreak of the second world war, his wife was ill.
They planned that she should follow him to England as soon as she was able. In the event she was killed, or died in the appalling conditions of the Warsaw ghetto during the first months of the Nazi occupation, a fact known to British intelligence in 1941 but not passed on to Rotblat until 1945.
Indeed, when he left Los Alamos in 1944, Rotblat had planned to return to Poland immediately after the war in the hope of finding his wife. Instead, in recognition of the important role Rotblat had played in nuclear weapons research, the British government agreed to try to find any other survivors of his family.
Rotblat thought that his parents would be dead. But his mother, sister and two brothers, who had escaped from the Warsaw ghetto to go into hiding or join the anti-Nazi guerrillas in Russia, were found to be alive. By negotiation and by devious routes, all were brought to England in the postwar years, cementing Rotblat's loyalty and, through their experiences, reinforcing his unceasing and single-minded pursuit of an ideal world in which the primary goal is peace.
In his 90th year Rotblat might be said to have finally entered the public consciousness by appearing on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs.
In 1998, he surprised some of his friends by accepting a knighthood at the level (Knight Commander) usually associated with establishment figures such as lords lieutenant or permanent secretaries. But all will have appreciated the words of the citation: "for services to international understanding".
- Anthony Tucker died in 1998. His contribution has been revised and updated.
- Joseph Rotblat, nuclear physicist and peace campaigner, born November 4 1908; died August 31 2005
Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
