The Strangest Dream

Film directed by Eric Bednarski Produced by the National Film Board of Canada

Joseph Rotblat: A Man of Conscience in the Nuclear Age

  • Martin Underwood
Sussex Academic Press: 2009. 144 pp. £17.95 9781845193232 | ISBN: 978-1-8451-9323-2

Professor Pugwash, The Man Who Fought Nukes: The Life of Sir Joseph Rotblat

  • Kit Hill
Ryelands: 2008. 80 pp. £8.99 9781906551049 | ISBN: 978-1-9065-5104-9

After years of backsliding on nuclear-weapons proliferation by the world's superpowers, President Barack Obama has stated that he intends to “make the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element” in nuclear policy. His recently appointed chief science adviser, physicist John Holdren, spent ten years as chairman of the executive committee for the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, the peripatetic annual meeting of scientists and statesmen to discuss ways to control nuclear weapons. It is named after the Canadian village of Pugwash, Nova Scotia, where its first conference was held under the sponsorship of a wealthy Canadian philanthropist, Cyrus Eaton.

Joseph Rotblat won a Nobel prize for his work on nuclear disarmament with the Pugwash organization. Credit: J. EGGITT/AFP/GETTY

The late Joseph Rotblat would have been heartened by these recent political developments. Rotblat was the youngest signatory of the 1955 Russell–Einstein Manifesto against nuclear weapons, which gave rise to the first Pugwash Conference at the height of the cold war in 1957. Rotblat dedicated more than half a century to the fight to abolish nuclear weapons. In 1995, he and the Pugwash organization shared the Nobel Peace Prize.

Two edited collections on Rotblat were published soon after his death in 2005 at the age of 96. As yet there is no substantial biography, although one is being prepared by the writer Andrew Brown. Now, Rotblat is the focus of The Strangest Dream — a Canadian documentary film (http://tinyurl.com/cnehl3) made to celebrate the centenary of his birth — which is intelligent, vivid and all the more powerful for its restraint; and the subject of two brief but interesting books — Martin Underwood's Joseph Rotblat and Kit Hill's Professor Pugwash, The Man Who Fought Nukes. Both authors are physicists who knew Rotblat personally. Hill is a long-standing collaborator in British Pugwash, as mentioned in the foreword by UK Astronomer Royal Martin Rees. Underwood worked as a postdoc with Rotblat on the linear accelerator at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London. Their books aim to introduce Rotblat's life and work to distinct readerships — with uneven results. Ironically, it is the director of the film, Eric Bednarski, who, despite having missed meeting his subject in the flesh, brings Rotblat alive.

Rotblat's first words on screen express his attitude to his science. Speaking in the precise, Polish-accented English he learned in wartime Britain in his thirties, he says: “If my work is going to be applied, I would like myself to decide how it will be applied.” Not for Rotblat the seductive idea that scientists have no responsibility for the uses to which their discoveries are put. Ethics were as important to him as experiments.

Only Joseph Rotblat had the courage to risk his career for his convictions.

Born in 1908 into a religious Jewish family in Warsaw, reduced to penury by the First World War, Rotblat was forced to become an electrician after leaving school. Eventually he entered academic physics through evening school, worked under a professor trained by Marie Curie and, in mid-1939, left Poland for the University of Liverpool, UK, to conduct nuclear-physics research under James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron. Atomic fission had just been discovered in Germany, and even before leaving Poland, Rotblat had privately visualized that fission could lead to an atomic bomb. Wrestling with his conscience — like Albert Einstein in 1939 — and leaving behind his Polish wife, who was eventually sent to a Nazi death camp, he decided that he must work on the bomb in case the Germans built one first and won the war. Chadwick, at first reticent to discuss such a sensitive subject with an 'alien', however friendly and able, finally got permission to bring Rotblat to join his team at the Atomic Research Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico — the Manhattan project.

Rotblat was the sole physicist to leave Los Alamos on grounds of conscience before the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan in August 1945. At a dinner party in 1944, he learned from the US army general in charge of the Manhattan project that the real target was Russia, and from Chadwick that Nazi Germany had abandoned its rival project. He resigned immediately and returned to the United Kingdom under a cloud of suspicion from US intelligence that he was a spy for the Soviet Union. A trunk of his papers mysteriously disappeared in transit from Los Alamos, presumably into the archives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Some other bomb-making physicists felt qualms in 1945 and even protested to the authorities, but only Rotblat had the “courage” to risk his career for his convictions, observes Pakistan Pugwash nuclear physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy in the film. “He was not the kind of man to be told what to think,” says Rotblat's Polish niece Halina Sand.

This is mainly why Pugwash was effective during the cold war. The first conference was attended by one lawyer and 21 scientists from the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, China, France, Poland, Australia, Japan, Austria and Canada. Despite pressure from governments, Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences refused to toe official lines. Instead, participants — whether Soviet scientists or statesmen such as former US defence secretary Robert McNamara — spoke as individuals. The meetings were private, but not secret, and held without the presence of the media. Formal speeches were generally eschewed; discussions took place around a table and informally, with the agreement that contributions would not be publicly attributed to individuals, so they could speak relatively freely. The result, notes Underwood, is that Pugwash was instrumental in achieving the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and, in 1972, both the Biological Weapons Convention and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. It also helped mediate between Moscow and Washington DC during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and established strong links with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who admired Rotblat, at the time of Gorbachev's arms negotiations with US President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

Underwood emphasizes politics more than science, and writes conventionally. Hill is more impressionistic and quirky, with the science explained at a very basic level in boxes. Both books contain errors; for example, Marie Curie's second Nobel prize was not for work on “artificial radioactivity” done with her daughter, as claimed by Hill. But it is nice to know from his book that Captain Pugwash, the British comic-strip pirate created in 1950 — whose fame initially made Rotblat suspect that Eaton's offer of sponsorship was a hoax — later sent the Pugwash Conferences a congratulatory scroll.

See Editorial, page 549.