Józef Rotblat was born on 4 November 1908 to a Polish-Jewish family inWarsaw,[4] then part of the Russian-ruled Kingdom of Poland, better known asCongress Poland.[5] He was one of seven children, two of whom died in infancy.[6] His father, Zygmunt Rotblat, built up and ran a nationwidehorse-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 ofWorld War I. Borders were closed and the family's horses were requisitioned, leading to the failure of the business and poverty for their family.[5] Despite having a religious background, by the age of ten, he doubted the existence of God,[7] and later became anagnostic.[8][9]
Rotblat's parents could not afford to send him to agymnasium, so Rotblat received his secondary education in acheder taught by a local rabbi. He then attended a technical school, where he studiedelectrical engineering, graduating with his diploma in 1923 in the newly establishedRepublic of Poland. After graduating, Rotblat worked as anelectrician in Warsaw, but had an ambition to become a physicist.[6] He sat the entrance examinations of theFree University of Poland in January 1929, and passed the physics one with ease, but was less successful in writing a paper about theCommission of National Education, a subject about which he knew nothing. He was then interviewed byLudwik Wertenstein [pl], the Dean of the Science Faculty. Wertenstein had studied in Paris underMarie Curie and at theCavendish Laboratory at theUniversity of Cambridge underErnest Rutherford. Wertenstein offered Rotblat a place.[10]
Rotblat earned a Master of Arts at the Free University in 1932. After, he entered theUniversity of Warsaw, and became a Doctor of Physics in 1938. He held the position of Research Fellow in the Radiological Laboratory of the Scientific Society of Warsaw, of which Wertenstein was the director, and became assistant Director of the Atomic Physics Institute of the Free University of Poland in 1938.[11]
During this period, Rotblat married a literature student, Tola Gryn, whom he had met at a student summer camp in 1930.[4][12]
Before the outbreak ofWorld War II, he conducted experiments that showed that in thefission process,neutrons were emitted.[13] 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 amicrosecond, and as a consequence would result in an explosion.[14][15]
In 1939, through Wertenstein's connections, Rotblat was invited to study in Paris and at theUniversity of Liverpool underJames 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.[16]
Before long, Chadwick gave Rotblat afellowship (theOliver Lodge Fellowship), doubling his income, and in that summer of 1939, the young Pole returned home, intending to bring Tola back with him.[17] 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.[18] Tola was trapped, and desperate efforts in the ensuing months to bring her out through Denmark (with the help ofNiels Bohr), Belgium, and finally Italy came to nothing, as each country in turn was closed off by the war.[19] He never saw her again; she was murdered inthe Holocaust at theBelzec concentration camp.[20] This affected him deeply for the rest of his life, and he never remarried.[21]
While still in Poland, Rotblat had realised thatnuclear fission might possibly be used to produce anatomic bomb. He first thought that he should "put the whole thing out of my mind",[22] 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 onTube Alloys, the British atomic bomb project.[22]
In February 1944, Rotblat joined theLos Alamos Laboratory as part of Chadwick'sBritish Mission to theManhattan Project.[22] Although he was upset by the morality of the project, he believed the allies needed to be able to threaten retaliation in case Germany developed the bomb.[23] The usual condition for people to work on the Manhattan Project was that they had to becomeUS citizens orBritish subjects. Rotblat declined, and the condition was waived.[24] At Los Alamos, he was befriended byStan Ulam, a fellow Polish-Jewish scientist, with whom he was able to converse in Polish. Rotblat worked inEgon Bretscher's group, investigating whether high-energygamma rays produced by nuclear fission would interfere with thenuclear chain reaction process, and then withRobert R. Wilson's cyclotron group.[25]
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 GeneralLeslie 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 aboutJ. 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."[26][27] Despite Groves' testimony, in response to a suggestion by Andrew Brown that Groves' remark may have been made to test Rotblat's loyalty,Barton Bernstein, who had questioned the accuracy of Rotblat's memory, commented in a letter to Brown: "It's an interesting, responsible interpretation, and cannot be dismissed, though I'm not prepared to embrace it."[28]
By the end of 1944, it was also apparent that Germany had abandoned the development of its own bomb in 1942. Rotblat then asked to leave the project on grounds of conscience and returned to Liverpool.[23]
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 inSanta Fe and leaving them a blank cheque to finance the formation of a communist cell.[22]
Rotblat was able to show that much of the information within the dossier had been fabricated.[22] In addition, FBI records show that in 1950, Rotblat's friend in Santa Fe was tracked down in California, and she flatly denied the story; the cheque had never been cashed and had been left to pay for items not available in the UK during the war. In 1985, Rotblat recounted how a box containing "all my documents" went missing on a train ride from Washington D.C. to New York as he was leaving the country,[27] but the presence of large numbers of Rotblat's personal papers from Los Alamos now archived at theChurchill Archives Centre "is totally at odds with Rotblat's account of events".[29][30]
Rotblat returned to Britain to become senior lecturer and acting director of research in nuclear physics at theUniversity of Liverpool.[11] He was naturalised as a British subject on 8 January 1946.[31] 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 asYiddish, smuggled the rest of the family out of theWarsaw 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 nearOtwock, in which Ewa and Halina lived with a Polish family. Displays of Polish anti-Semitism that she witnessed during theWarsaw 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.[32] They lived with him in London for some time before becoming established.[33] Halina would go on to graduate fromSomerville College, Oxford, andUniversity College London, and become an editor of theDictionary of National Biography.[34]
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.[22] Rotblat was determined that his research should have only peaceful ends, and so became interested in the medical and biological uses of radiation. In 1949, he became Professor of Physics atSt Bartholomew's Hospital ("Barts"), London,[35][36] a teaching hospital associated with the University of London. He remained there for the rest of his career, becoming aprofessor emeritus in 1976.[37] He received his PhD from Liverpool in 1950, having written his thesis on the "Determination of a number of neutrons emitted from a source".[38] He also worked on several official bodies connected with nuclear physics, and arranged theAtom Train, a major travelling exhibition for schools on civil nuclear energy.[27]
At St Bartholomew's, Rotblat worked on the effects of radiation on living organisms, especially on ageing and fertility. This led him to an interest innuclear fallout, especiallystrontium-90 and the safe limits of ionising radiation. In 1955, he demonstrated that the contamination caused by thefallout after theCastle Bravonuclear test atBikini Atoll by the United States had 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 radioactivity released. Japanese scientists who had collected data from a fishing vessel, theLucky Dragon, which had inadvertently been exposed to fallout, disagreed with this. Rotblat was able to deduce that the bomb had three stages and showed that the fission phase at the end of the explosion increased the amount of radioactivity by forty times. His paper was taken up by the media and contributed to the public debate that resulted in the ending of atmospheric tests by thePartial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.[39]
Rotblat believed that scientists should always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work.[40] He became one of the most prominent critics of thenuclear arms race, was the youngest signatory of theRussell–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 influentialPugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, aninternational organisation that brought together scholars and public figures to work toward reducing the danger ofarmed conflict and to seek solutions toglobal security threats, particularly those related tonuclear warfare. WithBertrand 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 launchedCampaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Despite theIron Curtain and theCold 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".[41]
However, he persuadedJohn Cockcroft, a member of theUnited 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,[41] causing aForeign Office official to write that "the difficulty is to get Prof. Rotblat to pay any attention to what we think ... He is no doubt jealous of his independence and scientific integrity", and that securing "a new organizer for the British delegation seems to be the first need, but I do not know if there is any hope of this."[41] By the early 1960s theMinistry of Defence thought that the Pugwash Conferences were "now a very respectable organization", and theForeign Office stated that it had "official blessing" and that any breakthrough may well originate at such gatherings.[41] The Pugwash Conferences are credited with laying the ground work for thePartial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, theNonproliferation Treaty of 1968, theAnti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, theBiological Weapons Convention of 1972 and theChemical Weapons Convention of 1993.[4] In parallel with the Pugwash Conferences, he joined withAlbert Einstein,Robert Oppenheimer,Bertrand Russell and other concerned scientists to found theWorld Academy of Art and Science, which was proposed by them in the mid-1950s and formally constituted in 1960.[42]
Rotblat campaigned ceaselessly against nuclear weapons. In an interview shortly before the 2004 US presidential election, he expressed his belief that the Russell–Einstein Manifesto still had "great relevance today, after 50 years, particularly in connection with the election of a president in the United States",[49] and above all, with respect to the potential pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons.[50] 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:[51] "Above all, remember your humanity".[52] He also served as editor-in-chief of the journalPhysics in Medicine and Biology from 1960 to 1972.[11] He was the president of several institutions and professional associations and also a co-founder and member of the governing board of theStockholm International Peace Research Institute, as well as a member of the Advisory Committee on Medical Research of theWorld Health Organization.[11] Rotblat was a programme advisor to theBAFTA award-winning nuclear docudramaThreads, produced in 1984.[53]
He made important contributions to nuclear physics, both before and after working during the war on atomic energy problems at Liverpool and at Los Alamos. This included observations on the angular distribution of protons from the (d,p) reaction, which led to an important tool for determining the spin and parity of nuclear levels. He worked on the medical applications of nuclear physics, and later on the biological effects of radiation. His outstanding distinction is in his work for the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs. He was one of the founders of these conferences, and for the past 37 years has been untiring in his support and enthusiasms [sic] for the conferences, which have enabled scientists from all over the world and with opposing ideologies to talk objectively about the issues dividing them. His untiring devotion to this cause and his inspiration have been vital for the development and continuing existence of the conferences.[57]
Rotblat shared, with thePugwash Conferences, the 1995Nobel Peace Prize for efforts toward nuclear disarmament.[58] 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."[3] Towards the end of his life, he was also elected honorary member of theInternational Association of Physics Students,[59] and theJamnalal Bajaj Foundation of India awarded him theJamnalal Bajaj Award in 1999.[60]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.[61]
^"Joseph Rotblat".Great Lives. Series 26. Episode 6. 13 January 2012. BBC Radio 4.Archived from the original on 25 December 2018. Retrieved18 January 2014.
^Rotblat & Ikeda 2007, p. 94. "I have to admit, however, that there are really many things that I do not know. I am not a particularly religious person, and this is the reason for my agnosticism. To be an agnostic simply means that I do not know and will keep seeking the answer for eternity. This is my response to questions about religion."
Rotblat, Joseph; Ikeda, Daisaku (2007).A Quest for Global Peace: Rotblat and Ikeda on War, Ethics and the Nuclear Threat. London: I.B.Tauris.ISBN978-1-84511-278-3.OCLC123195789.
