Joseph Rotblat brief biography by Cathy Eaton (April 2018) and Sandra Butcher
Joseph Rotblat, Nobel Peace Prize, and the Impact of the Pugwash Conferences
From the first Pugwash Conference on Science and Human Affairs held at Thinkers Lodge in 1957, until his death at age 96 on September 2, 2005, Joseph Rotblat played a pivotal role in the struggle to eliminate nuclear weapons. At the second Pugwash Conference in Lac Beauport, Montreal, Rotblat quoted from the 1957 Pugwash Statement. “It cannot be disputed that a full-scale war would be an utter catastrophe. In the combatant countries, hundreds of millions of people would be killed outright, by the blast and heat, and by the ionizing radiation produced at the instant of explosion. If so-called “dirty” bombs were used, large areas would be made uninhabitable for extended periods of time, and additional hundreds of millions of people would probably die from delayed effects of local fall-out radiation.”[i] In the twenty-first century we need to heed this dire warning and we need to take steps to prevent its occurrence.
Rotblat returned to Thinkers Lodge numerous times as guest and friend of Cyrus and Anne Eaton. In 1995, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize medal, which “hangs in Thinkers Lodge, as Jo Rotblat intended, so that all who come to this place will gain inspiration from those early pioneers of the nuclear age. That medal is a reminder to us all of the work yet to be done to fulfil the mission set forward when Einstein added his signature to the Manifesto in what would be the final public act of his life. That medal is a reminder that great accomplishments can come when we work together in creative ways.”[ii]
It is prominently displayed in the Lodge and inspires visitors. In his acceptance speech of the Nobel Peace Prize, Rotblat said, “The quest for a war-free world has a basic purpose: survival. But if in the process we learn how to achieve it by love rather than by fear, by kindness rather than by compulsion; if in the process we learn to combine the essential with the enjoyable, the expedient with the benevolent, the practical with the beautiful, this will be an extra incentive to embark on this great task. Above all, remember your humanity.”
The path that led Rotblat from a Warsaw ghetto to becoming the heart of the Pugwash Conferences and an avid peace activist was arduous. “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.” [iii]His message of hope for a war-free world is inspiring.
Joseph Rotblat was born on November 4, 1904, in Warsaw (then part of Russia) to an Orthodox Jewish family. During World War I, he and his family, fearing for their lives, lived in a basement and subsisted on potatoes as a mainstay of their diet. His family spiraled from affluence to extreme poverty. By 1916, when Rotblat was twelve, there was no money, so his family urged him to do practical studies that would quickly provide him with income and a career. He studied electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and basic arithmetic. At fourteen, he became an apprentice to an electrician, a job he detested. However, he was grateful he could help support his parents. As a Jew, he could not be officially admitted to Warsaw University, but he earned his degree there unofficially.
At age thirty, he studied in Liverpool with James Chadwick, a Nobel Prize recipient in Physics. Chadwick proved the existence of neutrons. Rotblat returned to Poland to bring back his wife. Recovering from appendicitis surgery, she was unable to leave with him. Rotblat escaped Poland two days before Hitler’s Nazis invaded his country. For years, he tried to locate her, desperately hoping to be reunited with her. Breaking his heart, Tola Gryn, his beloved wife, was gassed at Belzec Crematoria, one of over six million Jews murdered.[iv]
In 1939, nuclear fission in uranium was discovered. Rotblat worked on fission first in Warsaw and next in Liverpool. In 1944, he travelled to the United States to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. Although deeply concerned about the morality of creating an Atomic weapon, he agreed to help develop the bomb believing that the Germans were close to building one that they could unleash on Europe. After he learned that the Germans did not have the scientific knowledge to build the bomb, he discovered that the United States intended to continue its work on the bomb. Despite having been allies in WW II, the US hoped that this deadly technology would deter the Soviet Union from becoming a world leader. Rotblat resigned from the Manhattan project and was suspected of being a traitor. When he departed, all his luggage disappeared, which contained photos and mementoes of his beloved wife.
In 1945 in an effort to end World War II, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, radiation poisoning of survivors and the landscape, and tortuous lingering illnesses of many thousands more shattered the country. The Cold War commenced. After the US tested more powerful hydrogen bombs, the Soviet Union tested the largest nuclear bomb every launched. Nine countries have tested nuclear weapons. Thousands of nuclear weapons are stockpiled. Today, North Korea defiantly conducts nuclear tests. Rotblat’s nightmare of a world annihilated by nuclear weapons is still a threat that we must face and prevent. In an interview at the Ikeda Center in 1997, Rotblat said, the “BBC announced on the sixth of August about the Hiroshima bomb. This came as a terrible shock to me because my idea was to make the bomb to prevent its being used, and here it had been used immediately after it was made, against civilian populations. I began to despair about the future of mankind, and I felt, ‘we must stop this.’"[v]
After the war, unable to face living in Poland without his beloved Tola, Rotblat became a British citizen. In 1955, he was one of eleven scientists who signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. Ten of them were awarded Nobel Prizes.
The Manifesto led to the first Pugwash Conference, hosted by Cyrus Eaton, and held in 1957 in Pugwash, a safe and neutral spot where scientists could attend as individuals and not representatives of their governments. They could freely speak their beliefs and issue statements without fearing retribution from their countries. Since then, participants from over forty countries attend the Pugwash Conferences held every year in countries around the world. Rotblat served as a key organizer and revered voice of the conferences.
In 2016, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution “Taking forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations.” In 2017, the General Assembly decided to convene a United Nations conference “to negotiate a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination.” It resulted in the adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. On July 7, 60 years after the initial Pugwash Conference in 1957, this new international agreement places nuclear weapons on the same legal footing as other weapons of mass destruction, which have long been outlawed”[vi] 122 countries approved the treaty. It is worrisome and hugely disappointing that no Nuclear States and NATO signed.
Some of the resolutions are “Each State Party undertakes never under any circumstances to: (a) Develop, test, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices; (b) Transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly or indirectly; (c) Receive the transfer of or control over nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices directly or indirectly; (d) Use or threaten to use nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.” [vii]
For the first time in the seven-decade effort to avert a nuclear war, a global treaty has been negotiated that proponents say would, if successful, lead to the destruction of all nuclear weapons and forever prohibit their use. Negotiators representing two-thirds of the 192-member United Nations finalized the ten-page treaty after months of talks. The document, called the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, was formally adopted on July 7, 2017 at United Nations headquarters in New York during the final session of the negotiation conference. It will be open for signature by any member state starting on Sept. 20, 2017 during the annual General Assembly. If 50 countries ratify it, it would enter into legal force 90 days later. As of March 30, 2018, 57 countries have signed it but only 7 have ratified it. Russia, Canada, and the United States have not signed or ratified it.[viii]
In 2017, 22 years after Joseph Rotblat received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to ICAN which has been pivotal in pushing for an end to the use of nuclear weapons through the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It is clear that Rotblat’s life-long peace efforts continue to make a difference on eliminating nuclear weapons. However, much work and commitment are still needed.
Rotblat was a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, launched in 1958, and was briefly on its executive committee. After the war, Rotblat turned his attention to medical physics research. Between 1947 and 1950, he organized the Atom Train Exhibit, to educate the public about the peaceful and military application of nuclear energy. The exhibit toured throughout Europe. From 1950-1976 he was chief physicist at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College at the University of London.
“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.”[ix] In 1992, Joseph Rotblat and Hans Bethe were jointly awarded the esteemed Einstein Peace Prize. In 1995, he was elected to the Royal Society. The accolade that he most appreciated was when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev stated 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 dozens of books and papers.
His 1995 Nobel lecture articulated the continuing danger to the world of the existence of nuclear weapons. He urged 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." Joseph Rotblat was knighted in 1998. He continued to work into his 90s with undiminished energy, lecturing in many cities in Britain and abroad - including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
“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.’
An Open Letter to My Son on the Death of Joseph Rotblat[x]
Two days after Joseph Rotblat died, Sandra Ionno Butcher, director Pugwash History Project and former Student Pugwash USA executive director, wrote a letter to her son Joey whom she named for Joseph Rotblat, her friend and mentor. Here are excerpts from that letter. I urge you to read the letter in its entirety online. Sandy called him a pragmatist with ideals.
She wrote that his name “stands for brilliance, compassion, patient optimism, humor, dogged determination, an insistence that we can all do better, energy, humility, youthfulness, and above all, humanity.”
Professor Rotblat was brilliant. I am not just referring to the cleverness of a young boy who, after having experienced hunger and disease and squalor during WWI, learned a trade and set up his own business at the age of 15 without formal schooling and during a time of religious persecution. I am not dwelling on the intellectual courage of a busy young electrician taking intimidating entrance exams for the Free University and going to school in the evenings after arduous days at work, who quickly secured a position teaching at the school (and who would later earn a doctor of physics, a PhD, a DSc and at least 8 honorary degrees). I am not only thinking of the pure genius of a pioneer of the nuclear age, who saw the future in chain reactions and brought that lofty science down to reality. I am not only contemplating the forward thinking of a man who recognized the need for a new type of international effort to confront the nuclear danger, which he rightly predicted would become one of the greatest scourges facing humanity. I am not even at this point referring to the ingenuity of a scientist who, in the middle of a prestigious career, changed his line of work and helped harness for medical purposes the very atoms he had previously engineered for war. I am instead remembering the brilliance of his being. Prof had a presence unlike any I have ever encountered. I have seen him rally a room full of a thousand peace activists into a chanting fervor, and I have seen him in very intimate discussions with former heads of state. I have seen him talk to awe-struck high school students and to taxi drivers. In all his interactions, Prof propelled discussions and hopes forward. He had a force of personality that left people inspired and his smile filled a room with light.
Prof had compassion. He was so touched, once, by an older man’s decision to leave a small inheritance to Pugwash that he was going to change his travel plans and fly all the way to Canada to thank the man personally before he passed away. He told me he thought it was the only decent thing to do. One time, after speaking at a Student Pugwash USA event, he was deeply concerned when a student came up to him in tears after his talk to thank him for saying words that changed her life. He asked me to make sure that she was okay, and seemed unprepared to realize that he could have that impact on others (and he did have that impact, often). He always had a kind word, an interest in others. He made people feel appreciated.
He had a patient optimism. Here he was, a man who experienced two world wars, a man who lost the woman he loved most dearly to an inconceivable hatred that spread across countries and devastated his hopes for the future. Here was this person who had been vilified for standing up for his principles and refusing to use his considerable talents to further the development of nuclear weapons after he learned Hitler was not developing these weapons. “How can you be so optimistic,” I once asked him, “after all that you have seen and experienced?” He looked thoughtfully at me and replied, “What is the alternative?”
He was willing to change his strategies, and found himself, he said, at the end of his life right back where he began his anti-nuclear career: focusing on the need for a vast public education campaign. After Prof left Los Alamos, he organized a traveling exhibition called the Atom Train that toured throughout England and in different parts of the world. Early on, he took his concerns to the BBC and other media outlets. Likewise, in the final months of his life he had an op-ed in the New York Times and helped to launch a Weapons of Mass Destruction Awareness Campaign in the UK, which is involving students, world leaders, and rock stars. In the years in between, he focused on engaging scientists, policy makers, and scholars in more private discussions, where new ideas could be discussed in a unique environment.
When asked, “Could you share your thoughts about the social responsibility of scientists toward creating a sustainable environment and protecting life?” Rotblat stated, “This is very important, and it is the main purpose of Pugwash — to make sure that scientists' work is not causing damage to human society and the environment” (Ikeda Center Interview).
[i] Joseph Rotblat - Nobel Lecture, The Official Web Site of the Nobel Prize, 1995
[ii] “Canadian Pugwash, Existential Threats to Humanity, and the 60th Anniversary of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto” by Sandra Butcher, The Lobster Factory, Thinkers Lodge, July 11, 2015
[iii] Obituary of Sir Joseph Rotblat - The Guardian, Friday 2 September 2005
[iv] Keeper of the Nuclear Conscience: The Life and Work of Joseph Rotblat by Andrew Brown, Oxford University Press, 2012
[v] Thinking Beyond Nuclear Weapons - Interview with Joseph Rotblat, The Ikeda Center for Peace, Learning and Dialogue, Cambridge, MA, 1997
[vi] Treaty adopted on 7 July 2017, United Nations Conference to Negotiate a Legally Binding Instrument to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, Leading Towards their Total Elimination
[vii] Text of UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons provided by International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, 2017
[viii] International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
[ix] Obituary of Sir Joseph Rotblat - The Guardian, Friday 2 September 2005
[x] An Open Letter to My Son on the Death of Joseph Rotblat from Sandra Butcher, September 2, 2005
From the first Pugwash Conference on Science and Human Affairs held at Thinkers Lodge in 1957, until his death at age 96 on September 2, 2005, Joseph Rotblat played a pivotal role in the struggle to eliminate nuclear weapons. At the second Pugwash Conference in Lac Beauport, Montreal, Rotblat quoted from the 1957 Pugwash Statement. “It cannot be disputed that a full-scale war would be an utter catastrophe. In the combatant countries, hundreds of millions of people would be killed outright, by the blast and heat, and by the ionizing radiation produced at the instant of explosion. If so-called “dirty” bombs were used, large areas would be made uninhabitable for extended periods of time, and additional hundreds of millions of people would probably die from delayed effects of local fall-out radiation.”[i] In the twenty-first century we need to heed this dire warning and we need to take steps to prevent its occurrence.
Rotblat returned to Thinkers Lodge numerous times as guest and friend of Cyrus and Anne Eaton. In 1995, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize medal, which “hangs in Thinkers Lodge, as Jo Rotblat intended, so that all who come to this place will gain inspiration from those early pioneers of the nuclear age. That medal is a reminder to us all of the work yet to be done to fulfil the mission set forward when Einstein added his signature to the Manifesto in what would be the final public act of his life. That medal is a reminder that great accomplishments can come when we work together in creative ways.”[ii]
It is prominently displayed in the Lodge and inspires visitors. In his acceptance speech of the Nobel Peace Prize, Rotblat said, “The quest for a war-free world has a basic purpose: survival. But if in the process we learn how to achieve it by love rather than by fear, by kindness rather than by compulsion; if in the process we learn to combine the essential with the enjoyable, the expedient with the benevolent, the practical with the beautiful, this will be an extra incentive to embark on this great task. Above all, remember your humanity.”
The path that led Rotblat from a Warsaw ghetto to becoming the heart of the Pugwash Conferences and an avid peace activist was arduous. “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.” [iii]His message of hope for a war-free world is inspiring.
Joseph Rotblat was born on November 4, 1904, in Warsaw (then part of Russia) to an Orthodox Jewish family. During World War I, he and his family, fearing for their lives, lived in a basement and subsisted on potatoes as a mainstay of their diet. His family spiraled from affluence to extreme poverty. By 1916, when Rotblat was twelve, there was no money, so his family urged him to do practical studies that would quickly provide him with income and a career. He studied electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and basic arithmetic. At fourteen, he became an apprentice to an electrician, a job he detested. However, he was grateful he could help support his parents. As a Jew, he could not be officially admitted to Warsaw University, but he earned his degree there unofficially.
At age thirty, he studied in Liverpool with James Chadwick, a Nobel Prize recipient in Physics. Chadwick proved the existence of neutrons. Rotblat returned to Poland to bring back his wife. Recovering from appendicitis surgery, she was unable to leave with him. Rotblat escaped Poland two days before Hitler’s Nazis invaded his country. For years, he tried to locate her, desperately hoping to be reunited with her. Breaking his heart, Tola Gryn, his beloved wife, was gassed at Belzec Crematoria, one of over six million Jews murdered.[iv]
In 1939, nuclear fission in uranium was discovered. Rotblat worked on fission first in Warsaw and next in Liverpool. In 1944, he travelled to the United States to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. Although deeply concerned about the morality of creating an Atomic weapon, he agreed to help develop the bomb believing that the Germans were close to building one that they could unleash on Europe. After he learned that the Germans did not have the scientific knowledge to build the bomb, he discovered that the United States intended to continue its work on the bomb. Despite having been allies in WW II, the US hoped that this deadly technology would deter the Soviet Union from becoming a world leader. Rotblat resigned from the Manhattan project and was suspected of being a traitor. When he departed, all his luggage disappeared, which contained photos and mementoes of his beloved wife.
In 1945 in an effort to end World War II, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, radiation poisoning of survivors and the landscape, and tortuous lingering illnesses of many thousands more shattered the country. The Cold War commenced. After the US tested more powerful hydrogen bombs, the Soviet Union tested the largest nuclear bomb every launched. Nine countries have tested nuclear weapons. Thousands of nuclear weapons are stockpiled. Today, North Korea defiantly conducts nuclear tests. Rotblat’s nightmare of a world annihilated by nuclear weapons is still a threat that we must face and prevent. In an interview at the Ikeda Center in 1997, Rotblat said, the “BBC announced on the sixth of August about the Hiroshima bomb. This came as a terrible shock to me because my idea was to make the bomb to prevent its being used, and here it had been used immediately after it was made, against civilian populations. I began to despair about the future of mankind, and I felt, ‘we must stop this.’"[v]
After the war, unable to face living in Poland without his beloved Tola, Rotblat became a British citizen. In 1955, he was one of eleven scientists who signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. Ten of them were awarded Nobel Prizes.
The Manifesto led to the first Pugwash Conference, hosted by Cyrus Eaton, and held in 1957 in Pugwash, a safe and neutral spot where scientists could attend as individuals and not representatives of their governments. They could freely speak their beliefs and issue statements without fearing retribution from their countries. Since then, participants from over forty countries attend the Pugwash Conferences held every year in countries around the world. Rotblat served as a key organizer and revered voice of the conferences.
- Did the Conferences Make a Difference?
In 2016, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution “Taking forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations.” In 2017, the General Assembly decided to convene a United Nations conference “to negotiate a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination.” It resulted in the adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. On July 7, 60 years after the initial Pugwash Conference in 1957, this new international agreement places nuclear weapons on the same legal footing as other weapons of mass destruction, which have long been outlawed”[vi] 122 countries approved the treaty. It is worrisome and hugely disappointing that no Nuclear States and NATO signed.
Some of the resolutions are “Each State Party undertakes never under any circumstances to: (a) Develop, test, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices; (b) Transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly or indirectly; (c) Receive the transfer of or control over nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices directly or indirectly; (d) Use or threaten to use nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.” [vii]
For the first time in the seven-decade effort to avert a nuclear war, a global treaty has been negotiated that proponents say would, if successful, lead to the destruction of all nuclear weapons and forever prohibit their use. Negotiators representing two-thirds of the 192-member United Nations finalized the ten-page treaty after months of talks. The document, called the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, was formally adopted on July 7, 2017 at United Nations headquarters in New York during the final session of the negotiation conference. It will be open for signature by any member state starting on Sept. 20, 2017 during the annual General Assembly. If 50 countries ratify it, it would enter into legal force 90 days later. As of March 30, 2018, 57 countries have signed it but only 7 have ratified it. Russia, Canada, and the United States have not signed or ratified it.[viii]
In 2017, 22 years after Joseph Rotblat received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to ICAN which has been pivotal in pushing for an end to the use of nuclear weapons through the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It is clear that Rotblat’s life-long peace efforts continue to make a difference on eliminating nuclear weapons. However, much work and commitment are still needed.
Rotblat was a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, launched in 1958, and was briefly on its executive committee. After the war, Rotblat turned his attention to medical physics research. Between 1947 and 1950, he organized the Atom Train Exhibit, to educate the public about the peaceful and military application of nuclear energy. The exhibit toured throughout Europe. From 1950-1976 he was chief physicist at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College at the University of London.
“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.”[ix] In 1992, Joseph Rotblat and Hans Bethe were jointly awarded the esteemed Einstein Peace Prize. In 1995, he was elected to the Royal Society. The accolade that he most appreciated was when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev stated 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 dozens of books and papers.
His 1995 Nobel lecture articulated the continuing danger to the world of the existence of nuclear weapons. He urged 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." Joseph Rotblat was knighted in 1998. He continued to work into his 90s with undiminished energy, lecturing in many cities in Britain and abroad - including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
“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.’
An Open Letter to My Son on the Death of Joseph Rotblat[x]
Two days after Joseph Rotblat died, Sandra Ionno Butcher, director Pugwash History Project and former Student Pugwash USA executive director, wrote a letter to her son Joey whom she named for Joseph Rotblat, her friend and mentor. Here are excerpts from that letter. I urge you to read the letter in its entirety online. Sandy called him a pragmatist with ideals.
She wrote that his name “stands for brilliance, compassion, patient optimism, humor, dogged determination, an insistence that we can all do better, energy, humility, youthfulness, and above all, humanity.”
Professor Rotblat was brilliant. I am not just referring to the cleverness of a young boy who, after having experienced hunger and disease and squalor during WWI, learned a trade and set up his own business at the age of 15 without formal schooling and during a time of religious persecution. I am not dwelling on the intellectual courage of a busy young electrician taking intimidating entrance exams for the Free University and going to school in the evenings after arduous days at work, who quickly secured a position teaching at the school (and who would later earn a doctor of physics, a PhD, a DSc and at least 8 honorary degrees). I am not only thinking of the pure genius of a pioneer of the nuclear age, who saw the future in chain reactions and brought that lofty science down to reality. I am not only contemplating the forward thinking of a man who recognized the need for a new type of international effort to confront the nuclear danger, which he rightly predicted would become one of the greatest scourges facing humanity. I am not even at this point referring to the ingenuity of a scientist who, in the middle of a prestigious career, changed his line of work and helped harness for medical purposes the very atoms he had previously engineered for war. I am instead remembering the brilliance of his being. Prof had a presence unlike any I have ever encountered. I have seen him rally a room full of a thousand peace activists into a chanting fervor, and I have seen him in very intimate discussions with former heads of state. I have seen him talk to awe-struck high school students and to taxi drivers. In all his interactions, Prof propelled discussions and hopes forward. He had a force of personality that left people inspired and his smile filled a room with light.
Prof had compassion. He was so touched, once, by an older man’s decision to leave a small inheritance to Pugwash that he was going to change his travel plans and fly all the way to Canada to thank the man personally before he passed away. He told me he thought it was the only decent thing to do. One time, after speaking at a Student Pugwash USA event, he was deeply concerned when a student came up to him in tears after his talk to thank him for saying words that changed her life. He asked me to make sure that she was okay, and seemed unprepared to realize that he could have that impact on others (and he did have that impact, often). He always had a kind word, an interest in others. He made people feel appreciated.
He had a patient optimism. Here he was, a man who experienced two world wars, a man who lost the woman he loved most dearly to an inconceivable hatred that spread across countries and devastated his hopes for the future. Here was this person who had been vilified for standing up for his principles and refusing to use his considerable talents to further the development of nuclear weapons after he learned Hitler was not developing these weapons. “How can you be so optimistic,” I once asked him, “after all that you have seen and experienced?” He looked thoughtfully at me and replied, “What is the alternative?”
He was willing to change his strategies, and found himself, he said, at the end of his life right back where he began his anti-nuclear career: focusing on the need for a vast public education campaign. After Prof left Los Alamos, he organized a traveling exhibition called the Atom Train that toured throughout England and in different parts of the world. Early on, he took his concerns to the BBC and other media outlets. Likewise, in the final months of his life he had an op-ed in the New York Times and helped to launch a Weapons of Mass Destruction Awareness Campaign in the UK, which is involving students, world leaders, and rock stars. In the years in between, he focused on engaging scientists, policy makers, and scholars in more private discussions, where new ideas could be discussed in a unique environment.
When asked, “Could you share your thoughts about the social responsibility of scientists toward creating a sustainable environment and protecting life?” Rotblat stated, “This is very important, and it is the main purpose of Pugwash — to make sure that scientists' work is not causing damage to human society and the environment” (Ikeda Center Interview).
[i] Joseph Rotblat - Nobel Lecture, The Official Web Site of the Nobel Prize, 1995
[ii] “Canadian Pugwash, Existential Threats to Humanity, and the 60th Anniversary of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto” by Sandra Butcher, The Lobster Factory, Thinkers Lodge, July 11, 2015
[iii] Obituary of Sir Joseph Rotblat - The Guardian, Friday 2 September 2005
[iv] Keeper of the Nuclear Conscience: The Life and Work of Joseph Rotblat by Andrew Brown, Oxford University Press, 2012
[v] Thinking Beyond Nuclear Weapons - Interview with Joseph Rotblat, The Ikeda Center for Peace, Learning and Dialogue, Cambridge, MA, 1997
[vi] Treaty adopted on 7 July 2017, United Nations Conference to Negotiate a Legally Binding Instrument to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, Leading Towards their Total Elimination
[vii] Text of UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons provided by International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, 2017
[viii] International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
[ix] Obituary of Sir Joseph Rotblat - The Guardian, Friday 2 September 2005
[x] An Open Letter to My Son on the Death of Joseph Rotblat from Sandra Butcher, September 2, 2005