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The
Road Less Traveled IN December, Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which Rotblat helped establish, received the Nobel Peace Prize for 1995. The Nobel Committee said that it hoped the award would "encourage world leaders to intensify their efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons." That dream - nuclear abolition - has animated Rotblat for 50 years. Rotblat was born in Warsaw on November 4, 1908. Poland was still a peasant nation with a thin veneer of sophisticated city gentry. Rotblat was the fifth of seven children (the oldest two died in infancy). His parents were Jewish; his father, Zygmunt, was in the paper transport business. The family was prosperous, and life included a pony and summers in the country. The Great War ended that idyll. The family business failed, and Rotblat spent hours on bread lines. "It came to the stage of literally hunger, starvation," he says today. "In the basement in the house in which we were living we distilled somogonka-illicit vodka-as a way of earning a living. One had to fight for one's survival." When the paper business did not recover with the war's end, young Rotblat became an electrician. It was hard work. Rotblat recalls laying outside cables when the temperature in Warsaw was well below freezing; his numb hands could not even hold a hammer. Determined to educate himself, he decided to become a physicist, an unusual choice. In the first two decades of the century, atomic physics had been in an extraordinary state of excitement, flux, and confusion. In 1911 Ernest Rutherford, an English physicist, had proposed that the atom was something of a miniature solar system, with a nucleus consisting of positively charged protons surrounded by orbiting particles of negative charge, electrons. Experimental data suggested that Rutherford was right. Yet under classical electromagnetic theory, the electrons should radiate their energy as they orbited the nucleus, and eventually the electrons should plunge to the center. This did not happen. Europe's greatest physicists focused on the puzzle of the atom, particularly the nucleus. The field fired Rotblat's imagination. Working as an electrician during the day and studying at night, Rotblat obtained his master's degree in 1932. Ludwik Wertenstein, a physicist who had trained under Marie Curie, directed the Radiological Laboratory of Warsaw, and he offered Rotblat a research position. The laboratory facilities were poor. One of Rotblat's experiments involved exposing silver to neutrons from a radium plus beryllium source and then measuring the induced radioactivity on a Geiger counter. The neutron source and the counter were separated by two flights of stairs, a caretaker's apartment, and a hallway. The measurement had to be done quickly, and the experiment needed to be repeated many times. By taking each flight of stairs in a single leap, Rotblat could carry out the task in seven seconds-until the day he fell and broke his ankle. Only then were funds obtained to connect the source and the counter directly. Several years ago, Felix Lachman, a colleague of Rotblat's at the Radiological Lab, reminisced about Rotblat. "He could run very fast," was his first comment. Then Lachman turned serious. "There is hardly a man I know more devoted to science. Highly honest, a very good friend. He had high solidarity with all of his colleagues. I learned to value him and love him." Concern for others is a hallmark of Rotblat, a man of great charm and old-world politeness. The sophisticated scientist often approaches issues with great simplicity. One woman recalls visiting Rotblat in London, when the heel of her shoe broke. Rotblat, the nuclear physicist, took a stone and hammered the heel back on. In 1930, Rotblat met Tola Gryn at a student summer camp. She studied Polish literature. They fell in love and were married a few years later.
WERTENSTEIN intended that Rotblat become director of the laboratory at some point. But first, the young physicist needed seasoning. In early 1939, Rotblat received invitations to work in Paris with Frederic Joliot-Curie and in Liverpool with James Chadwick. "I chose Liverpool," he says, "despite the fact that I did not know any English and I knew some French. In Liverpool, they were building a cyclotron. It was my intention to build a cyclotron when I came back to Warsaw so that we could start a proper school of nuclear physics." As he was planning his trip to England, Rotblat learned that two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, had fired "slow" neutrons at uranium atoms. The bombardment had unexpectedly produced barium, an element with about half the protons of uranium. Hahn and Strassmann were puzzled by the result, which seemed to contradict the laws of physics, and they conveyed their findings to two of their friends and colleagues, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch. Meitner and Frisch quickly recognized what had happened, and suggested that the balance of nuclear forces had abruptly changed with the addition of slow neutrons, causing the uranium nuclei to divide-or, borrowing a term from biology, to "fission." The fissioning released enormous amounts of energy, although the scale of the experiment was so small that it was scarcely detectable. The fissioning might also knock neutrons loose from the uranium nucleus. Natural uranium is composed of two principal isotopes-uranium 238 and uranium 235, in vastly unequal amounts: one atom of uranium 235 for 139 atoms of uranium 238. Denmark's Niels Bohr suggested that it was the uranium 235 that fissioned, not the uranium 238. If he was right, and if a collision released-or "freed"-more than one neutron, there was a possibility of a self-sustaining chain reaction, as increasing numbers of uranium 235 nuclei were hit. But if a neutron collision with a uranium 235 nucleus released just one neutron, a self-sustaining chain reaction would not be possible, the chain reaction would quickly die because not every newly freed neutron would hit another uranium 235 nucleus. Rotblat was among the many physicists who began to experimentally investigate whether a self-sustaining chain reaction was possible. "I decided to do that experiment very quickly, within a few days of hearing of the Frisch-Meitner result," says Rotblat. He discovered that several surplus neutrons were released by the fissioning nuclei. "I wrote up this paper for publication. Most of my work had been published in Nature. I didn't know any English; therefore I wrote articles in Polish and Wertenstein translated them. As it happens, he was away on holiday. I waited for him to come back. When he saw my report, he was very excited. He was about to translate it. Then on Saturday evening I received a telephone call from him. He had just received the latest Comptes Rendus, in which Joliot-Curie described the emission of neutrons. It was confirmation of what I had done. I lost priority. "I began to think about the consequences, and the possibility that a chain reaction can proceed at a very fast rate. Then, of course, there could be an explosion because of the enormous amount of energy produced in a short time. This occurred to me, but I did not think I should follow it up. My job was to do research, and not think about how it was to be applied. But people living in Poland were thinking about the political situation. We knew that sooner or later the Germans would attack. It was only a matter of time. We trusted that Britain and France would come to our rescue. I thought that if the Germans had such a new device, it would be quite terrible for our side. But my mind was fully occupied with the arrangements for going away."
ROTBLAT left for Liverpool in March 1939. His fellowship from the Polish government paid him 120 pounds sterling for the year. This was barely enough to support him, but certainly not enough to support his wife. She remained in Poland. Rotblat continues: "During the following months I carried out some experiments in Liverpool. Chadwick was impressed. So at the beginning of August 1939 he offered me a fellowship. As it turned out, the amount of money was exactly the same as my Polish fellowship. For me, it was a princely sum. I told him, 'Oh good, now I'll be able to bring my wife.' He said, 'Good god, two people can't live on 240 pounds a year.' "Anyhow, I decided to go back to Poland to make arrangements for my wife to join me. I took the opportunity to visit Wertenstein. By that time, I had been in England six months. This problem of a potential atomic bomb had been on my mind all the time. In Poland this was vacation time, so I went to Wertenstein's country house and showed him my back-of-the-envelope calculations. He looked, and couldn't see anything wrong with it. "Then my worries began. Should I be looking at this? By that time I had worked out a rationale for doing research on the possibility of the bomb. I convinced myself that the only way to stop the Germans from using it against us would be if we, too, had the bomb and threatened to retaliate. I asked him what he thought. Should I pursue this issue? He thought a long time. He said that he himself would not work on such a subject, but that the decision must be mine. This wasn't a great help, I'm afraid." In late August 1939, Rotblat returned to England; his wife was to join him shortly. As it turned out, he was on one of the last trains to leave Poland. Germany's Blitzkrieg against Poland began September 1. The speed of the war was a shock. Rotblat continued his efforts to bring his wife, Tola, to England. As soon as they reestablished contact in early 1940, he arranged for her passage through Belgium, but that nation was invaded before her trip could occur. With the help of Niels Bohr, Rotblat next tried to arrange transit through Denmark. But it, too, fell before the trip could be arranged. Through Wertenstein's cousins in Milan, Rotblat obtained a visa to Italy for Tola. But Italy entered the war on Germany's side, and she was turned back at the Polish border. After that, Rotblat was not able to contact her. Almost immediately after the start of the war, says Rotblat, "the whole power of the Nazi regime became clear. I decided the immediate danger was so great that one had to put aside one's moral scruples regarding the bomb. "I couldn't do anything at that stage. Two days after the outbreak of the war, all the senior people disappeared. They were called up to work on radar. So I had to wait until Chadwick came back at the beginning of October. He immediately arranged that I would get a lectureship, but then I had to lecture in English. This took up quite a bit of time. It wasn't until November 1939 that I felt I had time again to start thinking about the possibilities of the bomb." Rotblat passed his ideas on to Chadwick. "He was a very reticent fellow," recalls Rotblat. "Usually when he listened to you, he would just grunt, 'Ummmmh.' He wouldn't give away if he knew about it before. Within a few days, he came back and said, 'Yes, go ahead.' He gave me two young people as assistants. So we started experiments. Eventually, Otto Frisch came to Liverpool. We set up a routine. Liverpool was under almost nightly air raids. The department was actually hit, but the bomb didn't cause too much damage. Almost every night, I was doing several hours of firewatching, for incendiary bombs. All of us who were working on the project would do other jobs so as not to give away that we were working on the bomb. So I began to take a big part in the teaching. My time was taken up. But we managed to carry out those experiments. By 1941 we had established that the bomb was theoretically possible." A neutron will be captured by an atom only if it is within the effective "target range" of the nucleus. This measure, which physicists call the "cross-section," is affected by several variables, including the speed of the traveling neutrons. "Many people did not realize this point," says Rotblat. "It was the fast neutrons that mattered." While Chadwick's team in Liverpool focused on making a bomb, researchers in the United States were still intent on building the theoretical and experimental basis for a self-sustaining nuclear reaction-an "atomic pile." Progress toward conceptualizing an explosive device was slow, partly because the U.S. uranium project had fallen into a bureaucratic swamp. British science helped rescue it. Mark Oliphant, a member of a British scientific delegation to the United States in the summer of 1941, unofficially informed the Americans of British progress toward a bomb. The United States decided to expand its bomb program. The following year-in June 1942, at President Roosevelt's home in Hyde Park- Prime Minister Churchill and Roosevelt agreed that the United States and Britain would combine their programs, and that the work would be carried out in the United States, far from the reach of German bombers. "We agreed at once to pool all our information, work together on equal terms and share the results equally," Churchill later wrote of the meeting. "It was a hard decision to spend several million pounds sterling not so much of money as of competing forms of war-energy." The United States, however, insisted that the scientists from Britain be British citizens. The Americans trusted the British not to grant anyone citizenship unless that person had been subjected to a thorough investigation. But speed was important. There were a number of emigrés involved in the British atomic effort; overnight, they became British subjects. Rotblat chose not to take British citizenship, intending to return to Poland at the end of the war. He was left behind when the first British group traveled to Los Alamos in late 1943. Chadwick then intervened with Gen. Leslie R. Groves, who now headed the bomb effort, and Groves waived the citizenship requirement for Rotblat. "I traveled a few weeks after the others," says Rotblat, "just at the beginning of 1944. I went first to Washington and met General Groves. He wanted to know the person who was being so obstinate."
LOS Alamos, located on a mesa 40 miles northwest of Santa Fe, was remote and beautiful. The Chadwicks invited Rotblat to stay with them, a generous act that was to have unintended consequences. Rotblat recalls: "In March, Groves came. When he visited Los Alamos, he would come to dinner at the Chadwicks and talk about various things. I was too junior to participate in the discussion, and Chadwick spoke very little. There was plenty of room for Groves to talk. It was at this time that he mentioned that the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets. "I was terribly shocked. My unhappiness about the weapon had started even before this, but this certainly was wrenching. Fairly early on when I came to Los Alamos and realized the magnitude of the project, I could see the enormous amount of resources that were needed. In 1944 the fortunes of war were changing. Germany would not have the resources. It was being bombed too heavily. Gradually the reasons why I had decided to work on the project were no longer valid. But Groves's comment was a shock. I felt that what I was doing was for no purpose. "I had discussions with Niels Bohr. The reason why was rather silly. We wanted to listen to the radio to hear what was going on, in England, on the Continent. But American radio was really exasperating. There was half a minute of news, and five minutes of commercials. One which comes to mind is Ex-Lax. I had a radio set from which one could receive the BBC. So I used to listen every morning to the BBC 'News Bulletin.' Bohr used to come to my room and listen to the news, and then naturally we would discuss it. Gradually I got to know him better, and I used to go for long walks with him. He told me about the problems that would go on after the war." Despite the fact that Bohr had spent the first four years of the war in Denmark (three of them under Nazi occupation), he had made some of the fundamental discoveries that led to the bomb. But by 1944 Bohr was more concerned with the political implications of fission than with the physics. He met with Churchill in England in an attempt to persuade the prime minister that only international control of the bomb would prevent a nuclear arms race. The meeting was a disaster. Churchill was irritated by what he perceived to be Bohr's meddling. "Bohr didn't tell me at the time about the great disappointment he had with Churchill, but I became familiar with the idea that we were going to have a nuclear arms race after the war," says Rotblat. "The whole project was taking on a different dimension. It was not anymore something to prepare against the Nazis. Certainly I was not at all enamored of Stalin. The pact that Stalin made with Hitler started the war. Nevertheless, I felt that the Russians were allies. How was it possible that we should betray those people?" "It became clear to me that the project would not play any role in the European war," Rotblat says. "It took such a long time, and such an effort. America was almost in a peaceful condition. There were no air raids. There were no shortages; all supplies were available. How could the Germans manage this? When I talked to other people, they said, 'We started an experiment, we must see it through.'" In June 1944, the Allies landed at Normandy. By August 25, they had reached Paris. A team of American physicists followed right behind (and occasionally in front of) the Allied tanks. Their mission-code-named Alsos- was to determine German progress on the bomb. The universe of nuclear physics was still small in 1944; the Americans knew who to look for and approximately where to look. At the University of Strasbourg, they found a memo to physicist Werner Heisenberg confirming their suspicions. The Germans had no real bomb program; they had not even achieved a self-sustaining chain reaction, a feat that had been accomplished in Chicago in December 1942. "In late 1944," says Rotblat, "Chadwick told me that an intelligence report indicated that the Germans weren't working on the bomb. A few days later I told him I wanted to leave. He was very unhappy about it, mainly because I was the first person to leave and I was on the British team. He said he would inform the Los Alamos authorities." Rotblat's departure was not made easy. During his time in Los Alamos, he had taken up flying. On his Sunday excursions for lessons, he sometimes stopped in Santa Fe to visit a young deaf woman. When her hearing-ear dog was taken away for the war effort, Rotblat rigged a system of lights that would flash when her doorbell rang. In a breach of Manhattan Project regulations, Rotblat failed to tell Los Alamos security about these visits. Instead, he discussed the situation with Chadwick, who gave his permission. But that was not enough. Rotblat's unreported visits put him in technical violation of security rules, and security had amassed a thick file on Rotblat. In the file was a complex scenario, which suggested that Rotblat was a spy who intended to parachute into the Russian-occupied zone of Poland after he returned to England. The file was full of errors, which Rotblat was easily able to refute. Nevertheless, he was threatened with arrest, should he speak about his intended departure with other scientists. Rotblat told his colleagues that he was returning to Europe to be closer to his family. (In fact, he had heard nothing from his family since June 1940. He later learned that his wife had perished, although his mother, sister, and two brothers had survived. One brother, who had been a partisan in eastern Poland during the German occupation, found himself in the Soviet Union when the borders were redrawn at the end of the war. Only after Stalin's death was he allowed back into Poland.)
UPON returning to Britain, Rotblat became acting director of Chadwick's old laboratory in Liverpool, and he kept his silence about the bombs until they were used against Japan. After that, Rotblat began giving talks throughout England, attempting to convince his fellow physicists of the need for a moratorium on nuclear weapons. He also became executive vice president of a new British group, the Atomic Scientists Association (ASA), whose purpose was to help shape British policy regarding nuclear energy and to educate the public. Meanwhile, Rotblat was increasingly drawn to the medical applications of nuclear physics. In 1949, he went into medical physics full time, at the Medical College of St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London. Some of his colleagues in nuclear physics "saw it as a sort of desertion." At St. Bart's, Rotblat worked with Patricia Lindop, a physiologist, on a program of study of the effects of radiation on living organisms, including their effects on aging. This led to a study of the effects of radiation on aging, on fertility, on the kidneys, on the ovaries, and on blood vessels. Rotblat found himself, somewhat unintentionally, becoming an expert on the hazards of nuclear radiation, particularly from nuclear tests. "This research brought me back to the bomb, although I had decided I wouldn't have anything more to do with weapons. I became somewhat of an authority on the hazards resulting from exposure to radiation. The ASA set up a subcommittee to deal with the hazards of ionizing radiation. I was the chairman. We produced a document pointing out the dangers of strontium 90 from the tests, how this may cause cancer. This was published in the press." By then, Rotblat had become a British citizen. The communist takeover of Poland had short-circuited his plans to return to Poland, where he still held citizenship. His surviving family wanted to immigrate to Britain. To make that possible, Rotblat became a British subject. "The BBC had a program called 'Panorama.' It was once a week. It discussed serious problems, topical issues. This was the time-March 1954-when the Americans tested 'Bravo' on Bikini Island. This was the test where the Japanese fishermen got caught." Winds had unexpectedly shifted before the test, and the Fukuryu Maru ("Lucky Dragon"), a fishing boat, had sailed through the fallout, with disastrous consequences for the crew. "Newspapers wrote about this business and the BBC was going to have a full evening program. They asked me to start off the program with an explanation of what the hydrogen bomb was. I tried to explain the difference between the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb. I said that, based on what I knew, the hydrogen bomb has got one thousand times more destructive power, but radioactivity is not increased. The big bomb still has the same amount of radioactivity as the fission bomb." A few months later, Rotblat attended a conference on radiation biology in Belgium. There he met a Japanese scientist, Yasushi Nishiwaki, who had analyzed the radioactivity received by the crew of the Fukuryu Maru. "I was puzzled," says Rotblat, "because his results didn't tie in with my idea of the bomb and the amount of radioactivity produced, or the type of elements. At the time I couldn't understand the discrepancy. "Gradually it occurred to me how this happened. The bomb was not a two-stage bomb as everybody thought, namely fission triggering the fusion reaction. It was really a three-decker bomb, which I called fission-fusion-fission. The radioactivity is increasing in the same proportion as the total power-in other words, a factor of one thousand. "I came to this conclusion by Christmas 1954. I felt that I had let down the British public by misinforming them. How could I remedy this?" Rotblat did the natural thing for a scientist. He wrote a paper describing his understanding of the nuclear reaction that had occurred in the Bravo shot. But he hesitated to publish. "Then something happened that to this day I cannot understand," Rotblat says. "People began getting worried about all these tests. In order to pacify the people, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission issued a statement-this was the beginning of 1955-saying you didn't need to worry at all about the fallout because the dose which people in the United States had received from the tests was not more than from a chest X-ray. "Most people didn't know how much radiation you get in chest X-rays. I knew. I worked it out. If everybody in the United States-and also probably in other parts of the world-had received as much radiation from those few tests as you get from one X-ray, then the radioactivity comes down very rapidly, before it has time to decay. One of the reasons why I had not published before was that I didn't know how much radiation was really released. I couldn't measure it, you see. But after this statement, I thought this was terribly dangerous. "I published the paper. It produced a terrible reaction. The government came down on me like a ton of bricks. They wanted to continue testing and they realized this was going to cause much trouble for them. Questions were asked in Parliament. "As it turned out, the statement by the Atomic Energy Commission was wrong, and the amount of radiation was much less than you get from a chest X-ray. As a result of investigations, we learned that the mushroom from the hydrogen bomb goes up into the stratosphere, and it takes a long time before it comes down again. It may take months or years, and by that time the radiation is much reduced. But I didn't know at the time about this. I was as confused as the Atomic Energy Commission itself. The main thing was that people discovered it was a dirty bomb."
BERTRAND Russell, the British philosopher, had grown increasingly alarmed by the nuclear arms race, and he talked to Rotblat after the "Panorama" program. Russell then approached Albert Einstein, suggesting that a group of scientists be convened for the purpose of discussing nuclear disarmament and ways in which war could be abolished. With Einstein's agreement, he drafted a statement urging such a congress. Eleven distinguished scientists put their names to it. Nine were Nobel laureates, including Einstein, Frederic Joliot-Curie, Linus Pauling, Hideki Yukawa, and Max Born. Rotblat, eminent in science and disarmament work, also signed. On July 9, 1955, Russell and Rotblat held a press conference to publicize what became known as the "Russell-Einstein Manifesto." Neither Russell nor Rotblat knew what to expect from the press conference. East-West tensions were high. Stalin had recently died, and the Soviet Union was in political turmoil. In the United States, Sen. Joseph McCarthy had been in his heyday only a couple of years earlier. The Americans had exploded the first hydrogen device in 1952, and the Soviets had tested their device in 1953. The world's press came to the news conference. The New York Times carried the story on page one of its Sunday edition. Both The Times of London and Le Monde had articles, but Pravda did not. Invitations were forthcoming. Cyrus Eaton, a Canadian industrialist, offered to fund an international meeting of scientists if it were held in his hometown of Pugwash, Nova Scotia. "We just dismissed it as a hoax," Rotblat says of the Eaton offer. "But I took out the gazetteer and discovered this place called Pugwash existed." With the Suez Canal crisis intervening, it took two years to arrange the first Pugwash Conference, which convened in July 1957 at Eaton's lodge in Pugwash. "It was very small, with 22 people," says Rotblat. But what 22 people! The participants included three Nobel laureates, the vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a former director-general of the World Health Organization, as well as the editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. These were scientists to whom the world's leaders listened. It was an extraordinary undertaking, at a complicated moment in world affairs. "It is difficult to imagine the climate of mistrust and fear that existed at the time," says Rotblat. "It required a great deal of civic courage to come. Anyone in the West who came to such a meeting, who talked peace with the Russians, was condemned as a Communist dupe. This was probably the first time that eminent scientists from the East and the West had come together to discuss problems which were rather political, arising out of scientific work. It was a risk, a gamble. It could have just broken up in disarray. As it turned out, people really spoke up and argued-but argued as scientists." The conference's brief report detailed the radiation hazards of nuclear testing ("we estimate that the tests conducted over the past six years will be responsible . . . over the next 30 years . . . [for] about a hundred thousand additional cases of leukemia and bone cancer"); made recommendations on arms control; and stated several principles regarding the social responsibility of scientists. "We sent the report to Eisenhower, to Khrushchev, to Prime Minister Macmillan, and to Diefenbaker, the prime minister of Canada," Rotblat says. "We had some very good responses from them-but not from Macmillan. The Soviet Academy of Sciences met in August and unanimously endorsed the report. But the main outcome was that it turned out to be so successful. Because of that, we decided to go ahead with more meetings. The great majority of senior scientists were in favor of very small meetings, private meetings, with the aim of reaching conclusions which could be directly conveyed to decision makers." A Pugwash conference brought Alexander Topchiev, vice-president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, to Vermont in 1961, a year of high tension between East and West. Afterward, Jerome Wiesner, Kennedy's science adviser and a Pugwashite, took him to meet with the president, and the three had a long discussion about a nuclear test ban. A treaty banning above-ground testing of nuclear weapons was signed in 1963. In 1967 Pugwash established the first contacts between Ho Chi Minh and Henry Kissinger, who at the time was an adviser to Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York and a presidential candidate. The result: a better definition of the conditions needed to open negotiations on the Vietnam war. Pugwash took an early look at anti-ballistic missile systems. ABM systems sound reasonable-they are, after all, defensive machines. Their fatal flaw is that additional offensive weapons are cheaper to build than ABMs. If one side deploys ABMs, the other side is most likely to respond by building more offensive weapons, leading to an escalation of the arms race. In 1964, Mikhail Millionshchikov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and speaker of the Supreme Soviet, was arguing in favor of ABMs at Pugwash meetings. By 1967 he had come around; in 1972 the United States and the Soviet Union had signed an ABM treaty. Pugwash participants are extraordinary. They include Nobel laureates and advisers to presidents, heads of atomic energy commissions, and advisers to prime ministers and premiers. Although its work is familiar to readers of the Bulletin, it is no accident that Pugwash is largely unknown to the public. To facilitate candid communication among participants, meetings are closed to the press, although frequently a communiqué is issued at the end of a conference. Ground rules are simple. Scientists come as representatives of no one but themselves. All attendees are scientists or scholars, although that latter designation is defined broadly enough to include men and women who work in the political arena. Rotblat's role? For years, his office at St. Bart's served as Pugwash headquarters. Rotblat organized the conferences, the symposia, the workshops, edited the proceedings, and wrote histories of the movement. He was Pugwash's first secretary-general, a position he held for 14 years. In 1988 he was elected president of Pugwash, a position he still holds.
PUGWASH'S raison d'être is the eradication of nuclear weapons, although many years ago the organization broadened its focus to consider such issues as the relationship between world security and the economic problems of the developing nations. Clearly, Pugwash has so far failed to achieve its primary objective, a nuclear weapons-free world. In 1957 the world had four nuclear powers; now there are presumed to be eight: the five "declared" nuclear powers, plus India, Pakistan, and Israel. Nevertheless, the United States and Russia-the nuclear superpowers-are now dismantling nuclear weapons rather than designing and building new weapons. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has been extended indefinitely. And a comprehtest ban treaty, a decades-old dream, may be achieved by the end of this year. How much has Pugwash contributed to this trend toward nuclear sanity? It is impossible to quantify. But it is clear that, time and again, Pugwash established contacts, created networks, and aided negotiations by providing thoughtful, fact-based background information and analyses. It is easy to believe that with the end of the Cold War and and the slow dismantling of nuclear weapons, Pugwash's objectives have been achieved. Rotblat knows well that the world is not so simple. The new situation has new instabilities-Russia is a prime example. Further, the end of the Cold War has not diminished the desire of certain nations to enter the nuclear club. "I have begun a project in Pugwash that we call 'A Nuclear-Weapon-Free World: Is it Desirable? Is it Feasible?,'" says Rotblat. "A group of people met, and this has resulted in a book by that name that came out in 1993. It has been translated into six languages. "This is what Pugwash is doing. It is one of our biggest projects now. I do not believe that a permanent division into those who are allowed to have nuclear weapons and those who are not is a basis for stability in the world. Therefore the ultimate solution is the elimination of nuclear weapons, but this will not be easily acceptable unless we can assure that the world will live securely with an agreement to abolish all nuclear weapons. "How can we prevent one nation from secreting a few weapons away? This is a task for scientists, primarily a technological problem ensuring that no one is cheating. That is one task for Pugwash. "The other problem is that if we no longer have the enemy, what do we do with all the scientists and labs-Los Alamos, Livermore, Chelyabinsk, Aldermaston. There are thousands of scientists who were once employed in designing nuclear weapons. If we are to have disarmament, we have to see that the transition from military industries to peaceful industry-the problem of conversion-can be arranged so as not to cause economic upheavals, for example, by unemployment. We have to convert these establishments which initiate the ideas for military projects; they should initiate peaceful ones. "Beyond these technological solutions I believe that in order to create stability in the world, one has to create the appropriate political climate, a climate of trust and good will. We have to develop in each of us a sense of loyalty to mankind which will be an extension of our present loyalties to our family, our city, our nation. This is a process of education which science can and should undertake because science is already cosmopolitan in nature. Its methods and ethics are universal. Scientists are, to a large extent, citizens of the world and therefore it is their duty to cultivate this in the rest of the community." Rotblat has amassed a large classical record collection for his retirement. But that time has not yet come. In the last year, he has lectured in Edinburgh, Scotland; Rio de Janiero, Brazil; Bariloche, Argentina; Mons, Belgium; Kyoto, Japan; and Milan, Pisa, Genoa, and Bari, Italy. He has gone to Paris to address a conference of non-governmental organizations, to New York for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review and Extension Conference, and to Brussels to meet with members of the European Parliament. Rotblat has been to Hiroshima for the annual Pugwash meeting, to Nagasaki for a Pugwash forum, and to Geneva and Malta for Pugwash workshops. And, of course, to Oslo in December, to receive his Nobel Peace Prize. That is quite a distance for a nuclear physicist whose first venture outside Poland was at the age of 30, in the spring of 1939.
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