Joseph Rotblat’s Memories of 6 August 1945

"The first inkling that I had that the [Manhattan] project was successful in the sense that it achieved what it wanted to achieve was on the 6th of August 1945.  I can remember very well.  It was a Monday, a bank holiday in England, and I came back from being away and I switched on the radio at 6:00 in the evening and there was the announcement that we had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.  And so I knew from this that what were before purely theoretical speculations turned out to be reality.  To me it was a great shock because, for one, I still had some faint hope that maybe all these theoretical calculations would turn out to be wrong and the whole thing would be a fizzle, and secondly, I thought even that if it were successful that it would not be used against populations, but rather as we used to discuss before I left Los Alamos, to try to demonstrate to the Japanese the acquisition of the new type of weapon and get them to agree before it should be used on populations.  Both of these hopes, albeit faint hopes, were completely turned out to be wrong.  And then I was of course also very much afraid about what was going to happen because I was very much influenced by my discussions in the previous summer, 1944, at Los Alamos with Neils Bohr, the famous Danish physicist… he foresaw that this was going to lead to an arms race.  … I knew also at that time, that the atom bomb that was used on Japan was the first step in nuclear weaponry.  Because in the office next to me was Edward Teller who was not actually involved in the work on the atom bomb itself.  He already at that time worked on the super project, the hydrogen bomb.  One of Teller’s helpers was also a Polish man and therefore we used to talk to each other in Polish.  I knew a little bit more than other people about what was going on.  So I knew that it would begin an arms race and that the hydrogen bomb would come in.  And then, remembering what Bohr was saying, I was very much…for the first time I became worried about the whole future of mankind.  Because I knew that…once you are going to develop these huge weapons, where are you going to stop?  And this was my reaction on the 6th of August.”

[Source: Personal interview with Sandra Ionno Butcher, Washington, DC, 13 July 2003.  The photo is a picture of paper cranes made by children in Japan and given to Joseph Rotblat.]

1986 Interviews with Joseph Rotblat Available

A three part 1986 WGBH video interview with Joseph Rotblat is available.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three (post war) (the laughter in the beginning shows a side of his personality)

Videos of Rotblat Biography Launch Now Available

British Pugwash held a launch in February of the new biography of Joseph Rotblat, written by Andrew Brown, "Keeper of the Nuclear Conscience" (described in an earlier post).  Videos of this event are now available on you tube.

Andrew Brown (author)
Paul Rogers, Professor of Peace Studies, Bradford University
Sandra Ionno Butcher, Director, Pugwash History Project

New Biography of Joseph Rotblat

Keeper of the Nuclear Conscience: The Life and Work of Joseph Rotblat

By Andrew Brown. Oxford University Press; 347 pages

This comprehensive biography of Joseph Rotblat has been reviewed by several major publications, including The Economist, Nature (Sir Martin Rees),  New Scientist (Edwin Lyman), The Lancet (Andrew Robinson), and the Wall Street Journal, Times Higher Education, History Today, among other publications.  Check it out!

Pugwash Role in Cuban Missile Crisis

I just came across a quote from Bernie Feld, former Secretary General of Pugwash, who makes the most direct statement I have seen about Pugwash's role during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis:

"During the Cuba missile crisis in 1962, President Kennedy came under pressure to act militarily. But a group of American scientists urged negotiations. Through British colleagues in Pugwash, a message was conveyed to the Russians offering to withdraw American missiles near the Turkish-Soviet border if the Russians removed their missiles from Cuba. Nothing was said about this at the time. However, shortly after the Soviets pulled back from Cuba, the US removed its missiles from the sensitive spots in Turkey." (Elon Salmon, "Against the Bomb," Financial Times, 11/12 February 1989.)

Rotblat, who was Secretary General at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, did not make such direct claims. For example, in his 1972 history, Scientists in the Quest for Peace, he wrote:

[T]he Secretary-General called an emergency meeting of influential scientists from the United States and the Soviet Union to discuss means of solving the crisis. For several days he was in almost continuous telephone communication with Washington and Moscow. Such a meeting could obviously not be held without the approval of the highest authorities in the countries concerned, but this approval was very quickly obtained, and an agreement was reached to hold the meeting in London within a few days; however, the resolution of the crisis made the meeting unnecessary. While it is impossible to say how useful this meeting would have been if it had been held, the very fact that in a time of crisis it was possible to plan at very short notice, for a meeting of eminent scientists, with top level approval for it, shows the importance of the channel of communication provided by Pugwash."

These two versions are not necessarily incompatible and clearly need further study in the archives of the two countries.

Photo Source: United Nations http://www.un.org/UN50/Photos/un50-049.gif

Rotblat & Szilard, First Pugwash Conference, 1957

Szilard played an important role in the First Pugwash Conference and the development of the Pugwash Movement.

Szilard’s biographer, William Lanouette, wrote that the Pugwash meeting was “the international forum that finally coupled Szilard’s eclectic brainstorming with his fervent desire to curb the U.S.-Soviet arms race”. Quoting Lanouette again, "…the Russians quickly warmed to Szilard’s candor and wit. ‘They really loved Leo,’ recalled Ruth Adams, an editor at the Bulletin who attended the First Pugwash Conference and many to follow. ‘He never tried to disguise anything, and they appreciated that.’"

William Lanouette with Bela Silard, Genius in the Shadows. 587 pages, Scribner's, New York, 1992, ISBN 0-684-19011-7. For a review, see: David Hafemeister, American Journal of Physics, Sept 1993 (reprinted Physics and Society Newsletter, Jan 1994.)

Rotblat: Leaving the Bomb Project (and not an absolute pacificist)

Joseph Rotblat, the only project scientist to leave the Manhattan Project on moral grounds, tells his story in this classic 1985 article, "Leaving the Bomb Project," in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Leaving the Manhattan Project was a courageous step for Rotblat, and one with serious personal implications. He was accused of being a spy, his personal belongings mysteriously 'disappeared' on his train ride home, and he was not allowed to tell his fellow Project scientists why he was leaving.

"Chadwick ... was shown a thick dossier on me with highly incriminating evidence. It boiled down to my being a spy: I had arranged with a contact in Santa Fe to return to England, and then to be flown to and parachuted onto the part of Poland held by the Soviets, in order to give them the secrets of the atom bomb. ..."

People are often surprised to hear that Prof said he would not rule out working on a similar weapon again in the future. I suspect this was his scientific precision and exact language more than anything else:

"After 40 years one question keeps nagging me: have we learned enough not to repeat the mistakes we made then? I am not sure even about myself. Not being an absolute pacifist, I cannot guarantee that I would not behave in the same way, should a similar situation arise."