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Rotblat, Joseph
(b. Nov. 4, 1908, Warsaw, Pol., Russian Empire [now in Poland]), Polish-born
British physicist who became a leading critic of nuclear weaponry. He was a
founding member (1957), secretary-general (1957-73), and president (from 1988)
of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs
, a London-based worldwide organization of scholars that seeks solutions
to problems of national development and international security. In 1995 Rotblat
and his organization were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for their
longtime promotion of nuclear disarmament, most notably by sponsoring
discussions between scientists from the United States and the Soviet Union. (see
also Pugwash
Conference)
Rotblat was educated in Warsaw at the
Free University of Poland (M.A., 1932) and at the University of Warsaw (Ph.D.,
1938). In 1939 he won a fellowship to the University of Liverpool, England, with
which he was associated until 1949. In 1944 he moved to the United States to
work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, N.M., but quit the project and
returned to Britain that same year after learning that Nazi Germany would not
build a competing atomic bomb. After the war he shifted the focus of his
research to medical physics. In 1950 he became a professor of physics at St.
Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College at the University of London.
In 1955 Rotblat was among a handful of
prominent scientists, including Albert Einstein, who signed a manifesto by
Bertrand Russell that criticized the proliferation of nuclear arms. The
manifesto led to the founding of the Pugwash Conferences, named for the native
village in Nova Scotia, Can., of the industrialist and philanthropist Cyrus
Eaton, where they were inaugurated in 1957. The conferences have gathered
scientists from many countries and are held regularly at various sites
throughout the world. Rotblat published several works on the Pugwash movement,
nuclear physics, and world peace.
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