51 Facts About Joseph Rotblat

Sir Joseph Rotblat was a Polish and British physicist.

Joseph Rotblat's work on nuclear fallout was a major contribution toward the ratification of the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Jozef Rotblat was born on 4 November 1908, to a Polish-Jewish family in Warsaw, in what was then Russian Poland.

Joseph Rotblat was one of seven children, two of whom died in infancy.

Joseph Rotblat then attended a technical school, where he studied electrical engineering, graduating with his diploma in 1923.

Joseph Rotblat sat the entrance examinations of the Free University of Poland in January 1929, and passed the physics one with ease, but was less successful in writing a paper about the Commission of National Education, a subject about which he knew nothing.

Joseph Rotblat was then interviewed by Ludwik Wertenstein, the Dean of the Science Faculty.

Joseph Rotblat earned a Master of Arts at the Free University in 1932.

Joseph Rotblat held the position of Research Fellow in the Radiological Laboratory of the Scientific Society of Warsaw, of which Wertenstein was the director, and became assistant Director of the Atomic Physics Institute of the Free University of Poland in 1938.

Joseph Rotblat went on to calculate that this process could occur in less than a microsecond, and as a consequence would result in an explosion.

In 1939, through Wertenstein's connections, Joseph Rotblat was invited to study in Paris and at the University of Liverpool under James Chadwick, winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize for discovering the neutron.

Chadwick was building a particle accelerator called a "cyclotron" to study fundamental nuclear reactions, and Joseph Rotblat wanted to build a similar machine in Warsaw, so he decided to join Chadwick in Liverpool.

Joseph Rotblat travelled to England alone because he could not afford to support his wife there.

Joseph Rotblat never saw her again; she was murdered in the Holocaust at the Belzec concentration camp.

Joseph Rotblat first thought that he should "put the whole thing out of my mind", but he continued because he thought the only way to prevent Nazi Germany from using a nuclear bomb was if Britain had one to act as a deterrent.

Joseph Rotblat worked with Chadwick on Tube Alloys, the British atomic bomb project.

In February 1944, Joseph Rotblat joined the Los Alamos Laboratory as part of Chadwick's British Mission to the Manhattan Project.

Joseph Rotblat continued to have strong reservations about the use of science to develop such a devastating weapon.

Joseph Rotblat then asked to leave the project on grounds of conscience and returned to Liverpool.

Chadwick learned that the chief of security held a security dossier in which Joseph Rotblat was accused of intending to return to England so that he could be flown over Poland and parachute into Soviet territory to pass on the secrets of the atomic bomb.

Joseph Rotblat was accused of visiting someone in Santa Fe and leaving them a blank cheque to finance the formation of a communist cell.

Joseph Rotblat was able to show that much of the information within the dossier had been fabricated.

Joseph Rotblat returned to Britain to become senior lecturer and acting director of research in nuclear physics at the University of Liverpool.

Joseph Rotblat was naturalised as a British subject on 8 January 1946.

Ewa, taking advantage of the fact that she was an ash blonde who, like Joseph Rotblat, spoke fluent Polish as well as Yiddish, smuggled the rest of the family out of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Displays of Polish anti-Semitism that she witnessed during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising embittered Ewa towards Poland, and she petitioned Joseph Rotblat to help the family emigrate to England.

Joseph Rotblat felt betrayed by the use of atomic weapons against Japan, and gave a series of public lectures in which he called for a three-year moratorium on all atomic research.

Joseph Rotblat was determined that his research should have only peaceful ends, and so became interested in the medical and biological uses of radiation.

Joseph Rotblat remained there for the rest of his career, becoming a professor emeritus in 1976.

Joseph Rotblat received his PhD from Liverpool in 1950, having written his thesis on the "Determination of a number of neutrons emitted from a source".

Joseph Rotblat worked on several official bodies connected with nuclear physics, and arranged the Atom Train, a major travelling exhibition for schools on civil nuclear energy.

At St Bartholomew's, Joseph Rotblat worked on the effects of radiation on living organisms, especially on ageing and fertility.

Joseph Rotblat was able to deduce that the bomb had three stages and showed that the fission phase at the end of the explosion increased the amount of radioactivity by forty times.

Joseph Rotblat's paper was taken up by the media and contributed to the public debate that resulted in the ending of atmospheric tests by the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Joseph Rotblat believed that scientists should always be concerned with the ethical consequences of their work.

In 1958, Joseph Rotblat joined the executive committee of the newly launched Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Joseph Rotblat is no doubt jealous of his independence and scientific integrity", and that securing "a new organizer for the British delegation seems to be the first need, but I do not know if there is any hope of this.

Joseph Rotblat believed that scientists have an individual moral responsibility and, just as the Hippocratic Oath provides a code of conduct for physicians, he thought that scientists should have their own code of moral conduct, a Hippocratic Oath for scientists.

Joseph Rotblat served as editor-in-chief of the journal Physics in Medicine and Biology from 1960 to 1972.

Joseph Rotblat was the president of several institutions and professional associations and a co-founder and member of the governing board of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, as well as a member of the Advisory Committee on Medical Research of the World Health Organization.

Joseph Rotblat was a programme advisor to the BAFTA award-winning nuclear docudrama Threads, produced in 1984.

Joseph Rotblat suffered a stroke in 2004, and his health declined.

Joseph Rotblat died of septicaemia at the Royal Free Hospital in Camden, London, on 31 August 2005.

Joseph Rotblat was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1965 New Year Honours.

Joseph Rotblat won the Albert Einstein Peace Prize in 1992, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1995.

Joseph Rotblat was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George in the 1998 Birthday Honours for services to international understanding.

Joseph Rotblat made important contributions to nuclear physics, both before and after working during the war on atomic energy problems at Liverpool and at Los Alamos.

Joseph Rotblat worked on the medical applications of nuclear physics, and later on the biological effects of radiation.

Joseph Rotblat was one of the founders of these conferences, and for the past 37 years has been untiring in his support and enthusiasms [sic] for the conferences, which have enabled scientists from all over the world and with opposing ideologies to talk objectively about the issues dividing them.

Joseph Rotblat shared, with the Pugwash Conferences, the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for efforts toward nuclear disarmament.

Joseph Rotblat was an honorary editorial board member for 'Journal of Environment Peace' published from the library of University of Toronto, now from Noble International University, edited by Professor Bob Ganguly and Professor Roger Hansell.