LONDON, Sept 1: Joseph Rotblat, a scientist who worked on the atomic bomb but went on to win the Nobel peace prize as a leading campaigner against nuclear weapons, has died at the age of 96, his organisation said on Thursday.

A Polish-born British citizen whose wife was killed in the Holocaust, Rotblat was the only scientist to quit the Manhattan Project which developed the atomic bomb for the United States during World War Two.

He said he had only favoured developing the bomb to stop Germany from using a similar weapon and was horrified when the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Japan in 1945. He became a leading organiser of the Pugwash Conferences, which brought together scientists from East and West during the Cold War.—AFP