The Manhattan Transfer

April 2, 2009 by: Andy Carling

Caroline Lucas MEP held a screening of Canadian Director Eric Bednarski’s latest film, The Strangest Dream. In it he tells the story of nuclear physicist Sir Joseph Rotblat, the only scientist to quit the Manhattan Project, the builders of the first atomic weapons, on moral grounds.

Sir Joseph Rotblat Copyright NFB Canada

Believing that scientists had a moral and ethical obligation to consider the consequences of their work. To this end he teamed up with British philosopher Bertrand Russell to found a series of peace conferences, in 1957, that take their name from the small town of Pugwash, Nova Scotia.

In 1939 he fled Poland, leaving his wife behind, whom he never saw again. He had realised through his work, that nuclear fission could be used to make a bomb. Eventually he ended up in Los Alamos in 1944, working on the Manhattan Project. He believed that making a nuclear weapon was the only way of stopping the Nazi’s from developing and using one of their own, but he later came to understand that the real motivation for possessing a bomb was to subdue the Soviets and that Germany had terminated it’s nuclear ambitions.

"I did not imagine that the second half of my life would be spent on efforts to avert a mortal danger to humanity created by science. " - Sir Joseph Rotblat

This realisation led him to leave the project on ethical grounds, the only scientist to do so before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. He was accused of being a spy and of planning to defect. However, he did not do so, rather he turned to medical uses if radiation and campaigning against weapons of mass destruction alongside Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell.

With his growing association with Russell, he became co-founder of the modern peace movement. Their Pugwash conferences gained credibility and were widely respected. Ex-President, Mikhail Gorbachev described Joseph Rotblat as “a truly visionary leader…who did not succumb to panic or despair, and worked persistently to make people and politicians understand the pernicious futility of the arms race.” In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. In his acceptance speech he ended with his epigraph; “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”

The Pugwash conference is little known by the general public, but top scientists gather each year for free-ranging discussions under Chatham House rules. Their expertise has brought them the respect of governments and they have played a role in facilitating dialogu behind the scenes, such as designing verification tools under SALT reduction treaties.

Bednarski paints a portrait of of a family man horrified by the effects of war and the film is poignant but not preaching. He describes Rotblat as “an incredible man and it’s remarkable what he accomplished. I was inspired by his work and I felt his story needed to be told”. After leaving Brussels, the film will be shown at the Imperial War Museum, London and at the United Nations.

Rotblat’s legacy lives on today as President Obama’s director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, John Holdren was a pupil of the great scientist and involved for many years in Pugwash.

Click here for an interview with the Director