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In Memory of Joseph Rotblat

Paolo Cotta-Ramusino
Secretary General
6 September 2005

In learning of Jo Rotblat's death, many of us experienced an immediate and almost unbearable sense of great loss. The passing away of a man whose example, words, ideas, and actions over so many years were so inspirational is certainly a dramatic event. But those of us who were so closely associated with Jo Rotblat for quite some time should really ask ourselves, what would have been Jo's suggestions at this very critical moment.

Certainly not to lock ourselves in sorrow, but instead to strengthen our activities and actions in the direction he and the Pugwash community together have been following for more than half a century. Jo was a great man whose extremely rich set of ideas can be easily traced back to one single very important and very difficult goal: to eliminate nuclear weapons, make them illegal, remove the causes that prompt States to acquire them, and prevent their use at any cost.

He always recalled, as stated in the Russell Einstein Manifesto, that war in the nuclear age could become a deadly global threat to mankind. Without Jo and people like him, we would now live in an even more dangerous world, with many more states having their people behind the nuclear button and many more available nuclear buttons.

But Jo was not satisfied with the progress towards the elimination of nuclear weapons. He saw that, after some good steps towards nuclear disarmament, the nuclear weapons states became oblivious to their commitment to disarm, which is, incidentally, required by the non-proliferation treaty. He was openly critical, in particular, of US leadership, both for not taking responsibility for getting the world out of the nuclear stalemate, and for contributing to the preservation of the dangerous nuclear status quo. He was concerned about the slow but persistent nuclear proliferation: the new "unoffical" nuclear weapons states, the situation in the Middle East, the Korean peninsula, the Indian subcontinent and others places. He was worried about the failure of the NPT Review Conference, which happened in a period where he was already critically ill, but nevertheless always extremely attentive to what happened in the world.

The task for Pugwash, and for those who were associated with Jo Rotblat, is to remember him in deeds. Critics at times called his ideas utopian, but the real "utopia" (in Greek "something that exists nowhere") is to believe that mankind can continue for ever in allowing some states to have nuclear weapons and others not, that nuclear weapons can be accumulated in various arsenals and never be used, that non-nuclear-weapon States when pressured by nuclear States will not try to acquire nuclear weapons, that dangerous fissile materials are well-enough protected so as to never fall into potential terrorists' hands. Seeking an international order where nuclear weapons are banned, and understanding the required steps in the difficult path toward the elimination of nuclear weapons, is not an utopia—it is in fact realism, if we care about the future of humanity. We need to be realists as Jo Rotblat was for his long and extremely rich life.