Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash conferences for science and world affairs

Abstract

Joseph Rotblat (1908–2005) trained initially as a physicist during the early 1930s and transitioned to medical physics during the late 1940s. Born in Poland, he spent about 5 years working as an electrician before taking an entrance examination in 1929 to study physics at the Free University. As a Jew living in a nation that Germany intended to invade, he moved to the University of Liverpool in April 1939. In February 1944, he relocated to the Los Alamos, New Mexico, to join the Manhattan Project and about 10 months later upon hearing that the Germans were no longer developing an atomic bomb Rotblat left the Project. He was the only scientist to leave the Manhattan Project before a bomb was detonated. He returned to Liverpool and in 1949 moved to London for a job in medical physics with the Medical College of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Brown states that ‘‘Rotblat masterminded the development of International Pugwash’’ (290). Indeed, Rotblat organized and contributed to the Pugwash conferences in the years leading up to the first conference of 1957 through the end of his life almost 50 years later. He shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize with Pugwash Conferences for Science and World Affairs which was awarded ‘‘for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms’’ (http://www.nobelprize.org). Rotblat’s efforts to secure peace consisted of three facets. He worked to eliminate nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. He promoted social responsibility among scientists. Lastly, he relied on the public to be an effective policing body that could force transparency into public affairs (288–89). Andrew Brown’s biography of Joseph Rotblat offers a list of events that allow the reader to understand how Rotblat fits into a broader history that has been told through various social and scientific histories of nuclear weapons and through