Joseph Rotblat: Moral Dilemmas and the Manhattan Project
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Physics in Perspective
Joseph Rotblat: Moral Dilemmas and the Manhattan Project Lucy Veys* John Fitzgerald Kennedy famously said, ‘‘One man can make a difference and every man should try.’’1 Joseph Rotblat (1908–2005) was the quintessence of Kennedy’s conviction. He was the only scientist who left Los Alamos after it transpired that the atomic bomb being developed there was intended for use against adversaries other than Nazi Germany. I explore Rotblat’s early research in Warsaw and Liverpool, which established his reputation as a highly capable experimental physicist, and which led him to join the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in 1944. I examine his motivation for resigning from the project in 1945, and the unwillingness of his fellow scientists to follow suit, which draws attention to the continuing discourse on the responsibility of scientists for the consequences of their research.
Key words: Joseph Rotblat; James Chadwick; Otto Robert Frisch; Lise Meitner; Leslie R. Groves; Bertrand Russell; Ludwick Wertenstein; Frisch-Peierls Memorandum; MAUD Committee; Manhattan Project; Los Alamos; Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs; Nobel Peace Prize; nuclear fission; atomic bomb; nuclear deterrence; responsibility of scientists; history of physics.
Warsaw Joseph Rotblat was born in Warsaw, Poland, on November 4, 1908. At the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 his father’s business collapsed and he and his family suffered economic hardship under the oppressive German occupation. His father could not afford to send his son to secondary school, so he trained as an electrician at the local technical college. This gave him independence and provided money for his subsistence, but he found the work tedious and realized that his passion lay elsewhere—in science. He learned that the Free University of Poland did not require entering students to have passed the rigorous secondary-school leaving examination (matura) and also, uniquely at this time, did not discriminate against Jews. He sat the entrance examination and, much to his surprise, was admitted.
* Lucy Veys graduated from the University of Oxford in 2012 with a Bachelor of Arts in Physics.
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Fig. 1. Joseph Rotblat (left), Ludwick Wertenstein (center), and an unidentified member of the Radiological Laboratory in Warsaw. Credit: Courtesy of Pugwash.
The Dean of the Free University, the physicist Ludwick Wertenstein, became an important figure in Rotblat’s life—someone he later described as not only his professor and counsellor, but also ‘‘my friend.’’2 Wertenstein instilled in Rotblat a humanitarian approach to scientific research, and a feeling of responsibility for the consequences of a scientists’ discoveries. Rotblat graduated in 1932, and Wertenstein offered him an assistantship at the Radiological Laboratory in Warsaw (figure 1). This laboratory had been founded by a wealthy Jewish family, but owing to the postwar hyperinflation their legacy was essentially worthless, and the laboratory received no governmental suppo
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