People
JOSEPH ROTBLAT
(Physicist, United States and Britain, Pugwash founder, disarmament activist)
People > Scientists
Joseph Rotblat was born in Warsaw, Poland, on November 4, 1908, into a relatively prosperous Jewish family. The First World War ruined the family's fortunes, and after the war he became an electrician to support himself, while attending evening classes at the Free University of Poland where he earned a masters degree in 1932. He then studied physics at the University of Warsaw, earning his Ph.D. in 1938. In April 1939, he went with a small stipend from the Polish government to the University of Liverpool to work with James Chadwick who had earned the Nobel Prize in 1935 for the discovery of the neutron. Rotblat could not afford to bring his wife to Liverpool, and she remained in Warsaw. When Chadwick, impressed with his work, offered him a fellowship with more money, Rotblat returned to Poland in August 1939 to get his wife. She was ill, however, and could not travel, and they agreed that he would return to England alone, with the expectation that she would follow later. He left Warsaw two days before the German invasion of Poland and the outbreak of the Second World War. He would never see his wife again. 
With the discovery in December 1938 of fission and the possibility of a chain reaction, Rotblat, as a number of physicists did, speculated on the possibility of an atomic bomb. Concerned that research by German scientists might lead to a Nazi bomb, Rotblat in November 1939 broached the issue with Chadwick, noting that an explosion would probably require a chain reaction with fast neutrons. Three days later, Chadwick told him they would proceed with fast neutron research, observing that they would do so systematically and secretly and giving him two research assistants. As Chadwick became more involved with British bomb research, so did Rotblat. "We established in Liverpool actually experimentally," Rotblat later observed, "that the bomb is feasible." This in conjunction with other research became the basis for the British MAUD Report in 1941 that helped convince the Americans to move forward with their atomic bomb program. When Chadwick went to the United States in fall 1943 as head of the British Mission of scientists assisting the Manhattan Project, he left Rotblat in charge of the depleted research group at Liverpool. Chadwick, however, soon convinced General Leslie Groves that the Polish national was too valuable not to be brought into the project. Rotblat arrived in New York in mid-February 1944, went to Washington for a personal interview with Groves, and then to the Los Alamos laboratory. Rotblat found working at Los Alamos with some of the world's greatest scientists to be "very marvelous," but, as he later noted, he was "very unhappy during my whole stay there." Rotblat was dedicated to the idea that the only purpose of the work at Alamos was to build a bomb as a deterrent to a possible German bomb. But by 1944, he faced the growing realization that it was "very likely" that the war in Europe would be over before the project was completed, which would render his "participation in it pointless." This questioning of the ends of the building of the bomb was only compounded when, according to Rotblat, Groves at a dinner party told him and Chadwick that "You realize, of course, that the whole purpose of this project is to subdue our main enemy, the Russians." Thus, in November 1944 when Chadwick informed him that intelligence information indicated that the Germans were not working on the atomic bomb project, Rotblat immediately asked to leave and return to Britain. Despite suspicions by Los Alamos security that he was a Soviet spy, Rotblat was allowed to depart with the stipulation that he not talk to anyone about his reasons for leaving. He was the only wartime Los Alamos scientist to walk away from the project for moral reasons. 
Rotblat returned to the University of Liverpool and was put in charge of nuclear physics. He became a British citizen in 1946. Seeking an area where he could use his skills in the nuclear sciences for the benefit of mankind, he became professor of physics in 1949 at London University's St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College where he spent the rest of his career. Rotblat also grew increasingly concerned about the development and spread of nuclear weapons. He devoted himself to alerting the scientific community to the danger and educating the general public on these issues. He was a founder of the London-based nuclear disarmament organization, the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs. For this work he was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for peace. He died in 2005 at the age of 96.
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The text for this page is original to the Department of Energy's Office of History and Heritage Resources. Major sources consulted include the following. Joseph Rotblat, "Leaving the Bomb Project," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 41 (August 1985): 16-22, "participation in it pointless" quote on p. 18. Interview with Joseph Rotblat, 1986, at https://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_58342D1ADB7D4B0C971422389150CAC2, quotes in 3rd paragraph other than "participation" from Part 2 of 3. Interview with Joseph Rotblat, aired November 15, 1998, as part of CNN Cold War series, at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-8/rotblat1.html, "We established in Liverpool" quote on first page. Andrew Brown, Keeper of the Nuclear Conscience: The Life and Work of Joseph Rotblat (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Martin Underwood, Joseph Rotblat: A Man of Conscience in the Nuclear Age (Portland, Oregon: Sussex Academic Press, 2009). See Rotblat's curriculum vitae and read his Nobel lecture at https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1995/rotblat/lecture/. The first two images of Rotblat are courtesy Los Alamos National Laboratory. The photograph of the first Pugwash Conference is courtesy of Pugwash: Conferences on Science and World Affairs.