August 13, 2005

HE IS the greatest scientist that ever existed in the world. However, I became involved with Einstein not as a scientist, but as a pacifist. He inspired me very much, as a young physicist in Liverpool before the war.

Einstein had transformed all our ideas about time and space. We knew many laws of nature but here comes a scientist who taught us these were only approximations and under certain conditions they are not valid. Many of the things we took for granted were overturned. It was such a tremendous revolution.

I had started to work on the atom bomb in November 1939 at Liverpool University. I do not believe that making WMD is in the remit of scientists — however, I was afraid that if we in England had thought of the idea, German scientists would too.

My rationale, which maybe turned out to be flawed, was that the only way we could prevent this happening was if we also had the bomb and threatened with retaliation. My intention was that it should not be used.

Making the bomb was much more complicated than we had thought. It required the separation of isotopes which was something beyond our means in the UK during wartime. After Pearl Harbour, America began the Manhattan project. Between Churchill and Roosevelt, it was decided that British scientists would join the project. So I went to Los Alamos.

It was a paradise for scientists. In Los Alamos, whatever you wanted, you got. If I needed something, from a bicycle to a cyclotron, I only had to write out a chit. I met many of the big names of science. Niels Bohr was already a hero for me. Dick Feynman was there and very young: 23, and I could see straight away he was a genius.

In 1944, when I learned the Germans had given up the project, the whole rationale for my being there disappeared. I said I wanted to resign. I was accused of being a Soviet spy.

I was eventually allowed to go on condition that I must not contact my colleagues. So, I became the only scientist to leave the Manhattan Project and returned to Liverpool with no idea about its progress until I heard about Hiroshima on the BBC on August 6 1945.

In Los Alamos, we were not quite sure if the whole thing would work — the atom bomb, after all, was based purely on calculations. I had some faint hope it would be a fizzle. And then, if it did work, that it would not be used against civilians but then it was used against them immediately. This was a terrible shock to me and I knew that a weapon 1,000 times more powerful was possible.

I decided I should devote a great deal of my time to prevent another such catastrophe and began to go around and talk to scientists in Britain about the dreadful effects of the atom bomb. I came to think of Einstein more.

I read about his involvement in the same ideas — he declared himself a pacifist. The emergency committee in the US, of which he was chairman, became very involved in the same activities as we did here, so I made an arrangement to go to America and meet him, but was refused a visa because of what happened in Los Alamos.

I met Bertrand Russell and became an information source for him. There was the idea that high-level scientists should issue a manifesto to the world to draw attention to the dangers of a nuclear war. Russell wanted to get the best scientists in the field and the greatest scientist at the time was Einstein. So Russell wrote a letter.

By the time Einstein’s reply reached London, he was dead. He had immediately replied, the last act of his life.

We called it the Russell-Einstein manifesto. It was signed by 11 scientists. Russell insisted they were Nobel laureates, but asked me to sign even though I was not one. He said: “You will get it, I’m sure. “Einstein’s endorsement made an enormous difference his name was recognized by every person on the planet. Now I’m the only one of the signatories still alive. Because of this I feel it’s my duty to go on carrying the message from Einstein.

Was our effort successful? When I received the Nobel peace prize, the committee said our efforts had contributed to preventing a nuclear war. Maybe to a tiny extent, we did.

Einstein made us think about everything — nothing is absolute, everything is relative. He was a scientist but a realist and aware of what was going on in the world. He was quite the opposite of what people think about scientists — being absent-minded and immersed in their work and naive.

He was fully aware and trying to do something about it. I admire him not only as a great man of science but also as a great human being. I think if he were still alive, he would still be working on his theories. But he would be working towards peace. (This piece is based on an interview conducted by Simon Rogers) — Dawn/The Guardian News Service

Joseph Rotblat is a cofounder of the Pugwash Conference. In 1995, he won the Nobel peace prize.

Moral dilemma revealed

Previously unpublished letters from Albert Einstein to a Japanese pen pal show the physicist to be defensive over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which became possible through his genius.

The widow of Seiei Shinohara, a philosopher and German-Japanese translator who corresponded with Einstein in the last years of the scientist’s life, chose to go public with the letters in the run-up to the 60th anniversary of the world’s only nuclear attacks.

Einstein’s opposition to nuclear warfare has been documented, but his letters to Shinohara show him trying to reconcile his pacifism with his scientific work.

The correspondence began in 1953 when Shinohara sent a letter to Einstein criticizing the physicist over his role in developing nuclear weapons. Einstein responded by hand on the back of the typed letter.

“I have always condemned the use of the atomic bomb against Japan but I could not do anything at all to prevent that fateful decision,” Einstein wrote in German to Shinohara. This year also marks the centenary of Einstein’s theory of relativity, essential in the US development of the atomic bomb.

The Hiroshima bombing killed about 140,000 people, almost half the city population of the time. More than 70,000 died three days later in the bombing of Nagasaki.

“The only consolation, it seems to me, in the development of nuclear bombs is that this time the deterrent effect will prevail and the development of international security will accelerate,” Einstein wrote in another letter.

But Einstein, whose Jewish origins led him to flee Germany in 1933, also said war was sometimes acceptable. “I didn’t write that I was an absolute pacifist but that I have always been a convinced pacifist. That means there are circumstances in which in my opinion it is necessary to use force,” he wrote.

“Such a case would be when I face an opponent whose unconditional aim is to destroy me and my people.” — Shingo Ito/The Guardian

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