Joseph Rotblat, The Atomic Man

The nuclear physicist and peace activist, Joseph Rotblat, lived in West Hampstead for over 50 years.

Joseph Rotblat was born in November 1908 in Warsaw the eldest of five children. His father Zygmunt Rotblat owned a large haulage company specialising in delivering newsprint paper. His earliest years were spent in comfort, but the First World War brought ruin to his father’s firm. The business slumped and the horses were requisitioned for the Army, and the family slipped into poverty. Rotblat recalled that at one point they were reduced to eating frozen potatoes and distilling and selling illegal vodka.

At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to an electrician. But after a few months he set up his own electrical repair business. He became interested in science and attended evening classes at the Free University of Poland to take a degree in physics. After graduating with a master’s degree in 1932 Rotblat obtained a post as research assistant with Prof. Ludwik Wertenstein at the Radiological Laboratory of Warsaw. Wertenstein had studied with Marie Curie in Paris and had worked in Cambridge with Ernest Rutherford (the father of nuclear physics) and James Chadwick, who had discovered the neutron in 1932 and was awarded a Nobel prize in 1935. Wertenstein was an important influence on Rotblat and instilled in him the belief that a scientist always bears responsibility for the consequences of their work.

Joseph with Tola Gryn

In 1930 Joe met Tola Gryn, a young literature student woman from Lublin, and they later married. Rotblat accepted an invitation to join James Chadwick who had moved to Liverpool University, where he was building a cyclotron to accelerate nuclear particles. Rotblat was given a Polish government bursary, but it would not support two people, so he left for England alone in April 1939, intending that Tola should join him as soon as he could afford it. He quickly impressed Chadwick who found him a second bursary, so that summer Rotblat returned to Warsaw to collect his wife. But as they were about to leave, Tola fell ill with appendicitis and again he left alone, expecting her to follow when she recovered. However, two days later on 1 September, the Germans invaded Poland and Rotblat’s desperate efforts to get her out came to nothing.

In March 1940, two refugee scientists Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch, working at Birmingham University, identified a way of making an atomic bomb and alerted the British government. The result was a secret feasibility study under the codename MAUD, followed by the launch of a research and development programme, codenamed Tube Alloys. Rotblat played an important role when Chadwick placed him in charge of the Liverpool cyclotron, which was much in demand for the Tube Alloys work.

In late 1943, a British team led by Chadwick with Otto Frisch and Klaus Fuchs who had been with the Birmingham group since 1941, joined the Manhattan nuclear bomb project in Los Alamos. In February 1944 Rotblat who was not a British citizen, was interviewed by General Leslie Groves (in charge of the Project) and allowed to go to Los Alamos and retain his Polish citizenship. He was the only scientist to do so. But soon after starting work he was shocked when he heard General Groves say in conversation that the real purpose of making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets and defeat Stalin.

James Chadwick with General Leslie Groves at Los Alamos

Rotblat was impressed by the magnificent facilities at Los Alamos and could order any equipment he wanted. One day he ordered a barber’s chair just to see if he could get away with it. Amazingly it arrived four days later. When General Groves visited, Joe told him that working 24 hours a day the men had no time to get their hair cut!

Joseph Rotbalt's ID Badge, Los Alamos

For several years previously Rotblat had reservations about working on an atomic weapon, but these were outweighed by the fear that Nazi Germany might develop a bomb first. A pivotal moment came in the autumn of 1944 when the Allies learned that Germany had made only rudimentary progress in nuclear research and would not be able to make a bomb. Rotblat asked for permission to leave Los Alamos and return to Britain. Since neither Germany nor Japan posed a credible nuclear threat there was no moral justification for continuing work on the atomic bomb. No other scientist at Los Alamos took this stance, and the British authorities were embarrassed by his request, but he insisted on leaving in December 1944. At the time American security staff were concerned that Rotblat wanted to return to Europe to pass atomic secrets to the Soviets. There is no evidence for this, and in fact later it was found that Fuchs and other agents in America had been nuclear spies for the Russians.

Klaus Fuchs ID Badge, Los Alamos

Rotblat was appalled when he heard the BBC news of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. He talked to colleagues about the idea of a nuclear moratorium and took the lead in setting up the Atomic Scientists Association to stimulate discussion. They created the ‘Atom Train’ in two carriages showing exhibits, which was visited by 150,000 people as it travelled.

On 1 March 1954 the Americans carried out their second test of the much more powerful thermonuclear Hydrogen bomb on Bikini Island. In April the BBC Panorama prgramme asked Rotblat, Cyril Garbett the Archbishop of York and the philosopher Bertrand Russell to discuss the bomb. This was the beginning of a long friendship between Russell and Rotblat.

Rotblat’s personal and professional life underwent upheaval in the post-war years. Soon after his return to Liverpool he heard from his family in Poland that his widowed mother, two sisters, and a brother had survived the Nazis by hiding in the countryside. Tola, however, his beloved wife was dead, the family had learned that she died in the Majdanek concentration camp outside Lubin, probably in 1942. Rotblat was heartbroken, and for the rest of his life he thought he should have done more to save her. He never remarried.

He arranged for his surviving relatives to join him in Liverpool, and in the process, he abandoned his proud Polish nationality and became a British subject on 28 December 1945.

In 1949 Rotblat changed the direction of his scientific career by accepting the post of professor of medical physics at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. He bought a house at 8 Asmara Road in West Hampstead and the family moved there from Liverpool in December 1949. Rotblat gave lectures to students at Bart’s three times a week for 26 years without missing one. He pioneered work in radiation therapy and remained at Bart’s until his retirement in 1976.

In March 1954 Japanese fishermen on a boat called the Lucky Dragon 5 were showered with fallout from an American thermonuclear test on Bikini Island. Several became ill and one died six months later. After some hesitation, Rotblat published a paper about the case, prompting public alarm and official fury in London and Washington.

Rotblat was approached by Bertrand Russell, who was alarmed by the nuclear arms race and the dangers of fallout from tests and conceived the idea of issuing an international appeal for action. Rotblat lent his support, scientific knowledge, and organisational skills. The result was the ‘Russell–Einstein Manifesto’ of July 1955, which bore the signatures of Russell, Albert Einstein (who died two days later), eight other Nobel prize winners, and Rotblat.

The Manifesto ended by saying:
‘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.’

The initiative won widespread support and led to the birth, two years later of the Pugwash Conferences on science and world affairs. The name came from the small town in Nova Scotia which was the home of the Canadian billionaire Cyrus Eaton who agreed to pay the expenses of the delegates.

Pugwash became the great work of Rotblat’s life. At the start, the official Pugwash office was 8 Asmara Road until 1968 when they were offered space in Great Russell Street. In 1997 when Joe presided over a fortieth anniversary gathering at Lillehammer in Norway, there had been 229 meetings in forty countries, attended by 3,360 people from more than 100 countries. Pugwash had a governing council and thirty-eight national groups. Its reports were widely read and influenced governments around the world.

Rotblat with the Nobel Peace Prize, Oslo 1995

In 1995, the 50th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Rotblat and Pugwash were jointly awarded the Nobel prize for Peace (he donated his prize money to Pugwash), and in the same year he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. In 1998 he was knighted with a KCMG (Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George) which he said mischievously was called in the civil service, ‘Kindly Call Me God’. He also received a different sort of honour, but one he also greatly appreciated, when he appeared on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs programme.

Rotblat’s energy was phenomenal. He traveled tirelessly and wrote more than 300 books and articles. He summed up his career as: 20 years in nuclear research, 30 years in medical physics and 40 years in Pugwash.

In 2004 he suffered a minor stroke, which finally put a stop to his travels, and his health declined from then until his death at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead on 31 August 2005, of septicaemia.