Józef Rotblat – Tireless Worker for Peace
A genius physicist who had placed the laws of moral ethics above the laws of physics. He co-created the atomic bomb and then spent most of his life protesting against its use. His efforts to eliminate nuclear arms were rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize.
Józef Rotblat is born into a Jewish-Polish family in Warsaw. During this time, his parents are well-to-do: his father is the owner of a horse-drawn carriage business. They live in an elegant tenement house by Miła Street. Everything changes in 1914 when the war crisis suffocates small businesses. The Rotblats go bankrupt and move to a less prestigious area. However, their new street is the same one where 50 years earlier Maria Skłodowska-Curie used to live (Józef likes to mention this fact a lot).
From electrician to physicist
Since his family cannot afford to fund his further education, the future Nobel laureate enrols in vocational courses. He becomes an electrician. As a teenager, he makes extra money doing odd jobs for his neighbours: fixing electric installations, radios or lamps. Józef knows he’s talented and he wants to study. He applies to the Free Polish University and starts studying physics. There, he meets Professor Ludwik Wertenstein, his future mentor and friend, a brilliant – if unappreciated – scientist.
Wertenstein offers Rotblat a position in the Radiological Laboratory, established in 1914 (headed remotely by Maria Skłodowska-Curie from Paris). Here, Rotblat begins his studies on radiation. It’s the 1930s, and physicists all over the world are experimenting with radioactive elements: also to turn them into weapons. The threat of war is looming over Europe, and the nuclear race is on.
In the spring of 1939, Rotblat leaves for a scholarship to Liverpool. At first, he speaks no English and struggles to make ends meet. Then, he joins the laboratory of Professor James Chadwick, a key figure in the research on the splitting of the atom. Rotblat joins his work on developing a nuclear weapon, believing Britain must do it before Germany does.
In 1943, Chadwick takes Rotblat to the USA: they go to the secret base in Los Alamos, where the most accomplished scientists from all over the world are building the atomic bomb (the base, strictly protected and hidden in the middle of nowhere, is often referred to as a concentration camp for Nobel laureates). Project Manhattan bears fruit: the first nuclear load is detonated in July 1945 at a test site in New Mexico.
By that time, Rotblat is no longer in the USA: he goes back to the UK a year earlier. It’s unclear why: the physicist himself reminisces that he had had doubts about whether Germans are actually working on nuclear weapons. Moreover, Rotblat wanted to search for his family who had stayed behind in Poland. Another version says that the Americans suspected Rotblat of espionage for the USSR and made him leave (the physicist did not conceal his left-wing sympathies and chose not to adopt British citizenship as he didn’t want to give up his Polish passport).
By late 1945, Rotblat already knows his wife has died in Majdanek, but his family survived the Holocaust thanks to Polish people who hid them in an old villa in Otwock on the outskirts of Warsaw. Later, the physicist helps his family emigrate from Poland and eventually does take up British citizenship. He decides to apply his skills and knowledge to medicine. The events of August 1945 convince him that he’d made the right choice to leave physics: atomic bombs are dropped on two Japanese cities. ‘I have become a part of science ill-used. I want to be sure that in the future science will only be used for the right causes. And I should lead by example’, he said in one of his interviews.
Józef Rotblat moves to London and becomes a professor of physics at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. He researches radiobiology and still analyses the consequences of exposure to radiation in humans and soil. He is a co-creator of the Atom Train: a mobile exhibition on the horrific implications of nuclear weapons, travelling around Europe.
In 1955, Rotblat becomes one of the signatories of the Russel-Einstein Manifesto (the British mathematician and philosopher came up with the idea, and Albert Einstein was one of its main supporters). The document, signed by many eminent scientists and intellectuals, called for end to the arms race and urged world leaders to seek international peace instead.
The morality of a scientist
In 1957, as an aftermath of the manifesto, Józef Rotblat and Bertrand Russel establish an international organisation, The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. The society organises conferences, prepares reports on weapons of mass destruction, participates in nuclear disarmament activities and promotes peaceful solutions to tensions between countries. In 1995, Pugwash and Józef Rotblat, the organisation’s president at the time, receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
Despite having retired in 1974, Rotblat campaigns for peace and disarmament until his death in 2005. He insists that scientists are morally responsible for their research and inventions, calling for the establishment of a declaration of morality for researchers (especially physicists and chemists), modelled on the Hippocratic Oath. Rotblat’s work and personal experiences made him realise with painful clarity that science can change the world: but not always for the better.
Translated by Agata Zano
Tytuł (nagłówek do zdjęcia)
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