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| Peacenik’s atomic energy |
Professor Rotblat dies after more
than 60 years fighting for world peace
HE walked straight-backed to the lectern in the packed hall,
glanced at his notes, and then, with only a moment’s hesitation,
started out on an hour long lecture – illustrated with slides
– on the danger posed by nuclear weapons.
This is how the famous Professor Joseph Rotblat delivered a lecture
at the Imperial War Museum two years ago – at the age of 94.
I had met him two or three times before – once when he was
awarded with the Freedom of the Borough in 1996. But this was the
first time I had seen him in full flow prosletysing a cause that
had consumed him since he walked out of the Manhattan atom-project
in the US in the early 1940s – the need to curb the proliferation
of nuclear weapons.
I was amazed at the energy of a man who was then well into his 90s.
He delivered the lecture with the mental vigour and power of concentration
of a young scientist.
Even this year at the age of 96 he travelled to Italy for a conference
on the nuclear problem.
He was due to give a talk at the Hay Festival recently along with
Robert McNamara, a fellow peacenik but once a formidable war-like
Secretary of Defense in the US government during the Vietnam War
in the 1960s. But Professor Rotblat fell ill, and a month ago was
admitted to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead where, it is understood,
he had made it clear that at the end he would not want to have any
further medical intervention.
He died last Wednesday night. Professor Rotblat, one of the world’s
most eminent physicists, will be buried, as a free-thinker, following
a humanist funeral at West Hampstead cemetery on Monday.
Although Professor Rotblat had become a world figure, having founded
the Pugwash Conference in the 1950s, the international body dedicated
to the abolition of nuclear weapons, he remained an unassuming modest
man. He would fly economy class as a guest speaker to conferences
in Europe, Japan or the US and keep all expenses to a minimum.
He maintained a steady work pattern which seemed changeless throughout
his life as a scientist right up to the last few weeks before his
death.
This year, for instance, it seemed natural for him to continue working
at his desk at the Pugwash office in Bloomsbury from 10 to 4, with
just a 20 minute break for lunch, usually a smoked salmon sandwich.
Then he would travel by Tube to his West Hampstead home with his
briefcase overflowing with documents.
One day he bumped into a young man on the Tube who said to him:
“You’re an old man, you shouldn’t be in such a hurry.”
Rotblat replied: “It’s precisely because I am an old man
that I am in a hurry.”
He was born into a fairly prosperous Jewish family in Poland in
1908 but with the outbreak of World War I his father’s business
collapsed and Rotblat had to train as an electrician. By night,
however, he studied for a physics degree and in the 1930s was accepted
to do radiation research.
Perhaps it was in those years that he developed an unrelenting work
ethic that remained with him throughout his life.
For a man who became recognised as such an eminent physicist, and
later a leading researcher in nuclear medicine, it seems strange
to think that he climbed such academic heights from such a small
beginning.
It was then at the end of the 1930s that tragedy struck him –
and few people, except relatives and a few close friends, ever knew
about it. He had married a young Jewish girl, Tola Gryn, and, aware
of the coming war, Rotblat found a job around 1939 lecturing at
Liverpool University.
But when his wife was about to join him she fell ill with appendicitis
and couldn’t make the journey because war had broken out. Trapped
in Poland the love of his life disappeared – and he never saw
her again.
It is understood that British intelligence knew of her death in
the Holocaust in 1941 but this was not passed onto Rotblat until
1945. After the war, the British government helped him to search
for his mother and brothers. They were found and brought to Liverpool,
and later came to live in London.
When the war started he was enlisted to help develop the atom bomb
in the US. Rotblat was wanted at the heart of the research in Los
Alamos in New Mexico but there was a delay because Rotblat refused
to give up his Polish nationality.
Eventually, the US authorities gave in. Perhaps, this was an early
indication of the man’s stubborn sense of direction in life,
a characteristic that expressed itself in his total dedication against
the concept of atomic weaponry.
He had been drawn to research on the atom bomb in the US out of
fear that the Germans would develop the bomb first, but when it
became clear that they wouldn’t and that it was being developed
as an advantage to the US in the arms-race with Russia, he packed
up his job and announced he would return to England.
This is believed to have enraged the FBI who smeared him as a spy
and he left the US under a cloud. Oddly enough, all his private
papers were lost, or, as he sometimes thought, stolen by the FBI
– and with them vanished all his family photographs, including
the picture of his wife.
Once again he settled in Liverpool, and when he heard in 1945 about
Hiroshima and Nagasaki his destiny was decided.
He was to use all his intellect, passion, fund-raising skills and
connections in the world scientific community to oppose nuclear
tests which, he warned, were more dangerous and ‘dirty’
than the public had been led to believe. He became involved with
Bertrand Russell to try and stop testing.
A Canadian millionaire, Cyrus Eaton, offered Rotblat a chance to
host a conference of scientists with this purpose in mind in his
town of Pugwash. Thus was born the Pugwash Conference that spawned
a world anti-nuclear bomb movement whose offices were set up in
Bloomsbury.
Along with all this work for world peace, Rotblat from 1950 to 1976
carved a national reputation on nuclear medicine as professor of
physics at St Barts Medical College.
He also managed to write 24 books including seminal works on nuclear
and medical physics and the hazards of nuclear war.
All this work was honoured when he was awarded the Nobel peace prize
in 1995. A year later, Camden Council made him a Freeman of the
Borough, the only other being Michael Foot. Then in 1998 he was
knighted.
A galaxy of honours had already fallen on him from the 1960s –
membership of academies of sciences and universities in various
countries, Fellow of the Royal Society and the CBE – but, like
so many truly great men he remained very simple, modest and human.
Whenever I rang him up for a story he would talk very simply and
amiably. He didn’t try to impress. He wouldn’t dream of
coming up with a sound-bite. He had qualities that were almost saintly.
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