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Tribute
from the Pugwash Secretary General | Pugwash
Council Statement | From
Polish Pugwash Group Monday Sept. 5, 2005
In the
midst of the death and destruction of last week - a thousand pilgrims,
many of them children, trampled to death in Iraq; uncounted hundreds,
perhaps thousands, mostly poor, dying in the rot in New Orleans
from a foreseeable and foreseen catastrophe - we need also to pause
and note the passing of one of the best persons of the past century,
physicist and pacifist Joseph Rotblat.
He led
a remarkably good and productive life. He deserves to be thrice
celebrated. First, he performed one of most principled acts of the
twentieth century, a lonely act of great moral courage. Second,
for using his skills to help rather than hurt people. Third, for
building a movement to which he devoted his life, giving it the
strength to go on without him. Rotblat
was one of many physicists in a so-called crowd of geniuses, who
worked on the Manhattan Project that built the first American atomic
bomb. Then and later, they mostly gave the same reason for doing
such a dastardly thing: they had to do it before Hitler's scientists
did it - surely a powerful and compelling argument. With his wonderful
sense of humour, Rotblat liked to smile and say that the bomb was
a deterrent before it even existed. By late
in 1944, the fatal flaw in this line of reasoning was known with
certainty to those in power, including the scientists at Los Alamos:
There was no German bomb, nothing even close to it. Logically, those
who were building the bomb, in order to beat Hitler to it, should
have stopped. In fact,
incredibly, only one did, and that was Rotblat. American security
officials were deeply suspicious of what he was doing. They thought
he was a Soviet spy who might defect to the USSR, and he was barred
entry to the US until 195l. Because
the scientists didn't stop, the bomb was built. Once built, its
use was inevitable - leading to the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And, though Hitler is long dead, nuclear weaponry has grown into
one of the greatest threats our world faces and shows no sign of
going away. Historians,
if they even bother to take note of what Rotblat did, treat his
action as a mere gesture. It is not Rotblat's fault that others
were unwilling or unable to break away. His quitting the Manhattan
Project was an extraordinary act that deserves never to be forgotten
and forever to be celebrated. Rotblat,
who had fled Poland for Britain before going on to the United States,
returned to Britain. He abandoned work on weapons and turned his
knowledge of nuclear physics to the field of medicine. From 1950
to his retirement in 1976, he was Chief Physicist at St Bartholomew's
Hospital Medical College at the University of London. In the 1980s
he was an advisor to the World Health Organization on the effects
of radiation on health. Out of
that Manifesto came the idea to bring together scientists from both
sides of the Cold War, who had the ear of their respective governments,
to discuss ways of moving toward abolition through arms control.
Such a meeting, organized mainly by Rotblat, met in Pugwash, Nova
Scotia, in 1957. It created the Pugwash Conference, a peace movement
with Rotblat as its Secretary General. In 1995
Rotblat, personally, and the Pugwash Conference were jointly awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize. Rotblat wryly observed: "We have been
trying for forty years to save the world, sometimes against the
world's wishes." Pugwash
is the legacy of Rotblat and is part of the broader peace movement
which must, for all our sakes, be supported. A personal
note: When Pugwash (the movement of which I am a member) met in
Halifax, I had the good fortune to accompany Sir Joe on a return
trip to Pugwash (the community) some two hours each way. When we
went to pick him up in good time in the morning, he was already
in the lobby of the hotel and he briskly walked out. When we talked
about all the globetrotting he did, and I suggested it must be tiring,
he said, not at all, he loved to fly. He thought the plane was a
marvelous technological achievement. Indeed, though he was hardly
rich, he had bought a ticket on the last flight of the Concord just
to have the exhilarating experience of supersonic travel. On the
way down, we stopped at Tim Horton's. He clearly wondered why. I
bought some Timbits, which we shared. Then he knew why. He confessed
he had a sweet tooth. I told him I had been so informed and he chuckled.
Please
join me in mourning his passing and celebrating his goodness and
gutsiness and greatness. Should the day come that the story of the
abolition of nuclear weapons is written, it will begin with the
name of Joseph Rotblat. Mel Watkins is a political economist and a political activist who speaks and writes extensively on contemporary issues. © Straight Goods,
2000-2005. All Rights Reserved. |
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