The Scientist as Rebel (18 page)

JOSEPH ROTBLAT HAS
devoted the greater part of his long life to the struggle to eliminate nuclear weapons from the earth. Unfortunately he was still in Poland in January 1939 when the possibility of nuclear weapons first became generally known. He was aware of the possibilities, but his voice was not heard in the public discussions of that year. If his voice had been heard, it is possible that history might have taken a different course. In 1939 a great opportunity was missed. That year was the last chance for physicists to establish an ethical tradition against nuclear weapons, similar to the Hippocratic tradition that stopped biologists from promoting biological weapons. The chance was missed, and from that point on the march of history led inexorably to Hiroshima.

In January 1939 a meeting of physicists was held at George Washington University in Washington, D. C. The meeting had been planned by George Gamow long before fission was discovered. It was one of a regular series of annual meetings. It happened by chance that Niels Bohr arrived in America two weeks before the meeting, bringing from Europe the news of the discovery of fission. Gamow quickly reorganized the meeting so that fission became the main subject. Bohr and Enrico Fermi were the main speakers. For the first time, the splitting of the atom was publicly described, and the consequent possibility of atomic bombs was widely reported in newspapers. Not much was
said at the meeting about atomic bombs. Everyone at the meeting was aware of the possibilities, but nobody spoke up boldly to suggest that questions of ethical responsibility be put on the agenda. The meeting came too soon for any consensus concerning ethical responsibilities to be reached. Most of the people at the meeting were hearing about fission for the first time. But it would have been possible to start a preliminary discussion, to make plans for an informal organization of physicists, and to prepare for further meetings. After several weeks of preparation, a second meeting might have been arranged with the explicit purpose of reaching an ethical consensus.

Within a few months after the January meeting, Bohr and John Wheeler had worked out the theory of fission in America, the possibility of a fission chain reaction had been confirmed by experimenters in several countries, by Rotblat in Poland among others, and Yakov Zeldovich and Yuli Khariton had worked out the theory of chain reactions in Russia. All this work was openly discussed and rapidly published. The summer of 1939 was the moment for decisive action to forestall the building of nuclear weapons. Nothing was then officially secret. The leading actors in all countries, Bohr and Einstein and Fermi and Werner Heisenberg and Pyotr Kapitsa and Khariton and Igor Kurchatov and Frédéric Joliot and Rudolf Peierls and J. Robert Oppenheimer, were still free to talk to one another and to decide upon a common course of action. The initiative for such a common course of action would have most naturally come from Bohr and Einstein. They were the two giants who had the moral authority to speak for the conscience of mankind. Both of them were international figures who stood above narrow national loyalties. Both of them were not only great scientists but also political activists, frequently engaged with political and social problems. Why did they not act? Why did they not at least try to achieve a consensus of physicists against nuclear weapons before it was too late? Perhaps they would have acted, if Joseph Rotblat had been there to urge them on.

Thirty-six years later, the sudden discovery of recombinant DNA technology presented a challenge to biologists, similar to the challenge which the discovery of fission had presented to physicists. The biologists promptly organized an international meeting at Asilomar, at which they hammered out an agreement to limit and regulate the uses of the dangerous new technology. It took only a few brave spirits, with Maxine Singer in the lead, to formulate a set of ethical guidelines which the international community of biologists accepted. What happened at George Washington University in 1939 was quite different. No brave spirits emerged from the community of physicists at the meeting. Instead of coming together to confront the common danger facing humanity, the two leading figures, Bohr and Fermi, began to argue about scientific credit. Fermi read aloud a telegram that he received during the meeting from his colleague Herb Anderson at Columbia University, announcing the successful verification of the fission process by direct detection of the pulses of ionization produced by fission fragments. Bohr objected to the claim of credit for Anderson, and pointed out that the same experiment had been done earlier by Otto Frisch in his own institute in Copenhagen. Bohr was worried because Frisch’s letter to
Nature
reporting his experiment had not yet appeared in print. Fermi was fighting for his friend Anderson and Bohr was fighting for his friend Frisch. Scientific priority was more important than common danger. The habit of fighting for priority, as prevalent in the scientific community of the 1930s as it is today, was hard to break. Neither Bohr nor Fermi was able to rise above these parochial concerns. Neither of them felt any urgent need to deal with the larger issues that fission had raised.

As soon as Hitler overran Poland in September 1939 and World War II began, the chance of achieving a tacit agreement of physicists in all countries not to build nuclear weapons disappeared. We know why the physicists in Britain and America felt compelled to build weapons. They were afraid of Hitler. They knew that fission had been
discovered in Germany in 1938 and that the German government had started a secret uranium project soon thereafter. They had reason to believe that Heisenberg and other first-rate German scientists were involved in the secret project. They had great respect for Heisenberg, and equally great distrust. They were desperately afraid that the Germans, having started their project earlier, would succeed in building nuclear weapons first. They believed that America and Britain were engaged in a race with Germany which they could not afford to lose. They believed that if Hitler got nuclear weapons first he could use them to conquer the world. Joseph Rotblat was marooned in Britain with his homeland destroyed and his wife in mortal danger. He had more reason than anybody else to be afraid of what Hitler might do with nuclear weapons.

The fear of Hitler was so pervasive that hardly a single physicist who was aware of the possibility of nuclear weapons could resist it. The fear allowed scientists to design bombs with a clear conscience. In 1941 they persuaded the British and American governments to build the factories and laboratories where bombs could be manufactured. It would have been impossible for the community of British and American physicists to say to the world in 1941, “Let Hitler have his nuclear bombs and do his worst with them. We refuse on ethical grounds to have anything to do with such weapons. It will be better for us in the long run to defeat him without using such weapons, even if it takes a little longer and costs us more lives.” Hardly anybody in 1941 would have wished to make such a statement. Even Rotblat would not have made such a statement. And if some of the scientists had wished to make it, the statement could not have been made publicly, because all discussion of nuclear matters was hidden behind walls of secrecy. The world in 1941 was divided into armed camps with no possibility of communication between them. Scientists in Britain and America, scientists in Germany, and scientists in the Soviet Union were living in separate black boxes. It was too late in
1941 for the scientists of the world to take a united ethical stand against nuclear weapons. The latest time that such a stand could have been taken was in 1939, when the world was still at peace and secrecy not yet imposed.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that if the physicists in 1939 had quietly agreed not to push the development of nuclear weapons in their various countries, there was a good chance that the weapons would not have been developed anywhere. In every country it was the scientists and not the political leaders who took the initiative to begin nuclear weapons programs. Hitler, as we learned afterward, was never seriously interested in nuclear weapons. The Japanese military leaders were not seriously interested. Stalin was not seriously interested until he was secretly informed of the size and seriousness of the American program. Roosevelt and Churchill only became interested after their scientific advisers pushed them into it. If the scientific advisers had refrained from pushing, it is likely that World War II would have ended without any Manhattan Project and without any Soviet equivalent. It would then have been possible, as soon as the war was over, to begin negotiations among the victorious allies to establish a nuclear-weapon-free world with some hope of success. We cannot know whether this road not taken would have avoided the nuclear arms race altogether. At least it would have been a saner and wiser road than the one we followed.

In October of 1995, I was giving a lunchtime lecture to a crowd of students at George Washington University about the history of nuclear weapons. I told them about the meeting that had been held in a nearby building on their campus in January 1939. I told them how the scientists at the meeting missed the opportunity that was fleetingly placed in their hands, to forestall the development of nuclear weapons and to change the course of history. I talked about the nuclear projects that grew during World War II, massive and in deadly earnest in America, small and halfhearted in Germany, serious but late-starting
in Russia. I described the atmosphere of furious effort and intense camaraderie that existed in wartime Los Alamos, with the British and American scientists so deeply engaged in the race to produce a bomb that they did not think of stopping when the opposing German team dropped out of the race. I told how, when it became clear in 1944 that there would be no German bomb, only one man, of all the scientists in Los Alamos, stopped. That man was Joseph Rotblat. I told how Rotblat left Los Alamos and became the leader of the Pugwash movement, working indefatigably to unite scientists of all countries in efforts to undo the evils to which Los Alamos gave rise. I remarked how shameful it was that the Nobel Peace Prize, which had been awarded to so many less deserving people, had never been awarded to Rotblat. At that moment one of the students in the audience shouted, “Didn’t you hear? He won it this morning.” I shouted, “Hooray,” and the whole auditorium erupted in wild cheering. In my head the cheers of the students are still resounding.

Joseph Rotblat died in 2005 at the age of ninety-six. He shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize with the Pugwash organization, which he had founded and served as director-general for many years. He continued to be vigorously active until a few weeks before his death.

ARMAGEDDON
¹
IS A
mosaic composed of hundreds of brightly colored fragments, each one a story told by an eyewitness. Most of the fragments occupy less than a page. The mosaic is a panorama of the last eight months of World War II in Europe, between September 1944 and May 1945. These were the months in which British and American armies in the West and Russian armies in the East fought their way across the frontiers of Germany and finally defeated German armies on German soil. The panorama is remarkable in many ways. The toll of death and destruction and misery during these eight months was unequaled by any similar period in the long history of human misfortunes, wars, and persecutions. The German armies fought with extraordinary skill and bravery to defend their shrinking territory, long after any realistic hope of victory had disappeared. The invading armies, in spite of profound political and cultural differences, succeeded in working together until their job was done. Each of these aspects of the panorama is illuminated by personal experiences described in the individual fragments.

The eyewitnesses are divided more or less evenly between soldiers and civilians, between males and females, between Germans, Russians,
Poles, Jews, Britons, and Americans. Max Hastings interviewed most of them personally during the year 2002, when he traveled to their countries and met them in their homes, most of them by then old people recalling events that happened when they were in their teens or twenties. Hastings is well aware that memories recalled after fifty-eight years are unreliable. As he says, these memories are not history. They are the raw material out of which history may grow. They provide a useful corrective to official histories based on written documents, which may be equally unreliable. They give us direct access to the human face of war, the face that the official histories usually ignore.

To interview German and Russian witnesses, Hastings used interpreters whose help he gratefully acknowledges. The interpreters not only translated but also helped him to find witnesses with good stories to tell, and these witnesses then led him to others among their friends and acquaintances. Two groups of witnesses that he found in this way were Russian women who had been girl-soldiers in the Red Army, and German women who had been refugees escaping from East Prussia when the Red Army overran their homeland. The Russians describe a tough but in many ways joyful atmosphere of comradeship and shared hardship on the road to victory. The Germans describe a nightmare of death and destruction as they made their way as exiles from a lost paradise. It is not surprising that the best witnesses are usually female, since women live longer than men in all countries, and especially in Russia.

In addition to the recent interviews, Hastings also includes in his account interviews that he recorded long ago as raw material for his other historical books,
Bomber Command
, a history of the British strategic bombing of Germany published in 1979, and
Overlord
, a history of the invasion of France by British and American armies published in 1984. The earlier interviews are mostly with senior commanders and politicians who were no longer alive when
Armageddon
was written. Hastings also includes quotations from letters and documents that he
found in Russian archives and in various other archives that recently became accessible to historians.