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00:00:27I was here as a kid
00:00:29and I wanted to show the rest of the family.
00:00:33It's a place you only get to see a couple times a year,
00:00:35so we thought we'd take a look.
00:00:46Nothing to worry about.
00:00:47Yeah.
00:00:49Just, hey, you're hot.
00:00:51Yeah.
00:00:52You're dead.
00:00:53Yeah.
00:00:58It can't be just open to the public.
00:01:00We have to actually be here.
00:01:01Especially after 9-11, they've really, you know,
00:01:04made the bases inaccessible.
00:01:06Oh, that's nice.
00:01:07Everything that you see on the table,
00:01:09they're all radioactive.
00:01:11What do we have from the site?
00:01:13What do we have from the site?
00:01:14The Trinit site.
00:01:15You have no concerns about that?
00:01:16No.
00:01:17It's not a danger to you from the radiation aspect
00:01:20unless you eat it.
00:01:25We heard about this place,
00:01:28and we wanted to show our children ground zero,
00:01:33where the first atomic bomb was detonating.
00:01:52on the eve of July 16, 1945,
00:01:56at the isolated and desolate Trinity test site in New Mexico,
00:02:02final preparations were being made by the most brilliant team of scientists ever assembled.
00:02:11Their goal was the successful construction and detonation of the first weapon of mass
00:02:17destruction. Only one scientist among the hundreds chosen for the Manhattan Project
00:02:24would turn his back on the terrible madness soon to be unleashed.
00:02:30His name was Joseph Rotblatt.
00:02:34If my work is going to be applied I would like myself to decide how it will be applied.
00:03:20For the first time it became possible to destroy the whole of the human species.
00:03:32This heralded entirely new situation in the world. For many years in perhaps a few centuries
00:03:46scientists lived in the so called ivory tower. Many scientists felt that their job is just
00:03:55to pursue pure knowledge. Science have no relation with any human feelings. Scientists have got
00:04:06a lot at all because what they are doing today will tomorrow be applied by technology and then
00:04:12may have an enormous impact on the whole life of everybody.
00:04:17Joseph Rotblatt may have renounced the atomic bomb, but he would struggle for the rest of
00:04:23his long life to dispel its shadow. He became the visionary force behind the Pugwash Conferences
00:04:34on Science and World Affairs. International gatherings of scientists and statesmen designed to discuss
00:04:42the dangers of nuclear proliferation and expose the futility of war.
00:04:50Dear colleagues and friends, we have really the opportunity in this meeting to establish dialogue
00:04:58and communication across different viewpoints. I am Secretary General of Pugwash and on behalf
00:05:05of all of us, I welcome you warmly to Cairo. With the end of the Cold War, the world breathed
00:05:14a sigh
00:05:15of relief and stumbled on. But for the members of Pugwash, the threat of nuclear weapons never really
00:05:24went away. The US has very clearly been signaling that they see a role for using nuclear weapons. They talk
00:05:34not only
00:05:35about preemption, but also about retaliation. In the wake of being included in the axis of evil.
00:05:45There was a real rush in North Korea. And of course, this nuclear test, whether or not it was a
00:05:51successful
00:05:51nuclear test is not the issue. Nuclear weapons have not gone away.
00:06:00It's not scientists who make nuclear weapons anymore. It's a technical matter. It's engineers,
00:06:06it's technicians, it's how much material you can afford to buy your suppliers. And in fact, the technology
00:06:15now is pretty standard. In fact, you can download a lot of stuff from the internet these days. If I
00:06:22gave my graduate
00:06:22student a project to make a simple atomic bomb, if he didn't come up with a reasonable design four years
00:06:29later,
00:06:29I don't think he should get a PhD. So it's come down to that.
00:06:34There is a fear that a non-state actor might be able to create some kind of a radiological weapon.
00:06:44There is a big worry whenever you have this many nuclear weapons in the world, accidents are possible.
00:06:51And also in some of the regions where nuclear weapons are now becoming part of the mainstream,
00:06:58who knows what might happen between India and Pakistan, for example. Are they at the same place
00:07:04where America and the Soviet Union were during the Cold War?
00:07:09The Soviet Union and the United States, they managed to avoid a catastrophe.
00:07:16But this kind of deterrence would not necessarily work for the Middle Eastern countries.
00:07:23The Israelis, they would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons.
00:07:26But we know that they have the capability. If two or more countries have nuclear weapons,
00:07:36I think we will have chaos in the region.
00:07:42The existence of nuclear weapons means that we could potentially create a disequilibrium,
00:07:48an imbalance on the planet and the atmosphere by the launching of some of these systems.
00:07:58Some of these systems. There are 27,000 of these systems.
00:08:04This is more than enough to wipe out the whole planet.
00:08:11You also got people working to say, you know, we've got to save the planet.
00:08:16Well, you're right. We've got to save the planet.
00:08:20And so the whole environmental effort, as laudable and as absolutely critical as it is,
00:08:27can be for absolutely not in a space of hours if these guys actually went at each other.
00:08:39Meeting annually since 1957, this gathering marks the first time they've assembled
00:08:46without Joseph Rotblat's guiding hand.
00:08:49Pugwash conferences and Pugwash members have been involved not only in all the nuclear weapon treaties,
00:08:57or I think all of them, during the Cold War era, but in chemical and biological weapons.
00:09:04And it's played a role in bringing the Vietnam War to an end.
00:09:11I don't think Pugwash would have achieved what it did achieve without his guidance and help.
00:09:20Just coming to this office, one misses him.
00:09:24He should be sitting behind his desk, getting up, shaking your hand.
00:09:31He was genial, wonderful old-fashioned politeness,
00:09:36in which he would shake your hands every time he met you.
00:09:39It's sort of Polish politeness.
00:09:43He was a man of absolute integrity.
00:09:50Joseph Rotblat was born in Warsaw in 1908, the fifth of seven children.
00:09:58My memories of him as a young man are mixed up with what I remember of him as an older
00:10:04man,
00:10:05tall, handsome and charming, because he was always that.
00:10:09I have a clear memory of returning by tram from his flat in Mokotów, near Warsaw,
00:10:18where he lived with his wife, my aunt Tola.
00:10:21I remember the tram, but I don't remember the actual occasion.
00:10:25But I know that on that day, he and Tola told me that I needn't call them aunt and uncle,
00:10:33but I could call them by their first names.
00:10:35I was very proud of that.
00:10:36I was probably about two and a half, and it seemed to me a very grand thing to do.
00:10:42I think my uncle got his deep moral sense from his father.
00:10:47My grandfather was something of a patriarch,
00:10:50called on for advice by many people.
00:10:53He was very religious, and Joseph very early showed a precocious talent.
00:10:59He was the star of his cheder class at the age of four, I gather.
00:11:03So I think my grandfather must have had some hopes that his brilliant eldest son would be a rabbi.
00:11:09But Joseph, he became a skeptic quite early on in his youth, which I think was a grief to his
00:11:16father.
00:11:17My grandfather was a prosperous businessman.
00:11:21He owned a transport firm using horses and carts.
00:11:26I'm talking about the eight years before World War One.
00:11:30And he did well. He had a nice house.
00:11:33All this came to an end with the First World War.
00:11:38And they ended up living in a rather pokey flat in Warsaw, practically penniless.
00:11:46That was almost the end of my uncle's schooling, because there was no money.
00:11:52This is why, as soon as he'd finished primary school, he was sent off to be, he learned to be
00:11:57an electrician.
00:12:00I know that he had more or less given up hope of ever becoming a scientist,
00:12:05but he carried on with his scientific reading and studies well enough to pass the examination to the free evening
00:12:11school,
00:12:12where he got his first degree.
00:12:17Rothblatt would come here to the University of Warsaw and complete a PhD.
00:12:24It was the age of great discoveries in physics.
00:12:27And many scientists, including the Germans,
00:12:30had established that a nuclear bomb was at least theoretically possible.
00:12:38And very soon after the fishing discovery came, I verified this experimentally.
00:12:45From this, it was quite easy to imagine, make an imaginary experiment,
00:12:50a chain reaction could occur in which a large amount of energy is released in a very short time,
00:12:55in other words, an atom bomb.
00:12:57But I immediately put it out of my mind, because as a scientist,
00:13:00I felt it's not my job to devise methods of destruction.
00:13:04It's quite contrary to all my upbringing.
00:13:07And therefore, I just didn't want to think about it.
00:13:11His mind was engaged in other matters, matters of the heart.
00:13:16He married Tola Grin, a university student from Lublin.
00:13:21Friends described them as made for each other.
00:13:30Their life together would be interrupted by an invitation from the University of Liverpool.
00:13:39It was an offer to work alongside James Chadwick,
00:13:44the Nobel Prize-winning British scientist who had discovered the neutron.
00:13:53When Joseph came back to Warsaw for Tola in the summer of 1939,
00:13:58she was ill with appendicitis and unable to travel.
00:14:05Within days of returning to his work in England,
00:14:09Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
00:14:23The Second World War had begun.
00:14:27Tola was trapped.
00:14:38Tola, she was unable to join Joseph.
00:14:41He tried to get her out, then she was ill, and then that was it.
00:14:45The last train had gone.
00:14:47He tried to get her out through Italy, but even that failed when Italy ended the war.
00:14:52So she went to Lublin to live with her parents.
00:14:55My parents asked her to join us, to throw her lot in with ours in Warsaw, but she wouldn't.
00:15:03And then, of course, it was impossible.
00:15:05The ghetto was up.
00:15:06Nobody travelled anywhere, at least if you were a Jewish.
00:15:09And we lost all contact with her.
00:15:20I became very worried that indeed the Germans may make the bomb.
00:15:24So I overcame my scruples.
00:15:30James Chadwick and Joseph Rotblatt assembled a team to begin work on an atomic bomb.
00:15:36They realised that their project would require a hugely expensive technological effort
00:15:42that Britain, struggling for its very survival, could ill afford.
00:15:48Their work was disrupted nearly every night.
00:15:54Strikes by Luftwaffe bombers set the evening skies ablaze.
00:15:59Although the Liverpool docks were their primary target, bombs landed all around the university.
00:16:08Chadwick went out to check bomb craters with his Geiger counter.
00:16:13He feared the Germans might mix radioactive material with conventional explosives and create the world's first dirty bomb.
00:16:23The only way in which we could prevent the Germans from using if they have a bomb against us would
00:16:30be if we too had it and threatened to retaliate.
00:16:33In other words, the idea of deterrence, which is now the official policy of superpowers, occurred to me at that
00:16:42time.
00:16:44Of course, looking back, it was a silly idea.
00:16:49For one thing, the deterrence assumes that you deal with a rational person who will respond in a rational way.
00:16:58Hitler was not a rational person.
00:17:04The Americans had their own fears about Hitler's nuclear ambitions
00:17:08and began construction on a new town in a remote part of New Mexico.
00:17:17The locals called it the City on the Hill.
00:17:22The town was Los Alamos.
00:17:24It came complete with houses, schools, supermarkets and one purpose.
00:17:32A mission so secret only a handful of people knew.
00:17:41There was only one entrance and the entire town was surrounded by barbed wire.
00:17:48Armed G.I.s patrolled the perimeter in jeeps.
00:17:53Led by U.S. Army General Leslie Groves and the brilliant physicist Robert Oppenheimer,
00:18:00it was codenamed the Manhattan Project.
00:18:05Here the energies of scientists, technicians, office workers and soldiers
00:18:10were committed to a project far more expansive and expensive than future missions to the moon.
00:18:21I wasn't asked what I wanted to do, but I was told that what the project was about in very
00:18:27rough terms,
00:18:28and that I would be assigned to one of the implosion groups.
00:18:37Oppenheimer insisted that people would be free to interact with each other and help solve each other's problems.
00:18:45It took enormous creativity to assemble the genius category experts from different countries,
00:18:57different disciplines, and expect them and persuade them to work together harmoniously.
00:19:06They were prima donnas in their old positions, but here they had to conform.
00:19:17Early 1944 marked the arrival of James Chadwick's team of British physicists.
00:19:26From my point of view as a young scientist, it was almost like a paradise, you know,
00:19:32having always been used to difficulties.
00:19:35Here you find yourself in a place where money didn't matter at all.
00:19:40You find yourself talking to the people about whom you only read before.
00:19:52What I mainly remember about Rothblatt, he was very pleasant and very bright.
00:19:58And he was very worried about Hitler getting the atomic bomb.
00:20:09And you know, there was reason for him to worry.
00:20:12It was critical that we get this project completed and end this war.
00:20:22People understood very well from Hiroshima and all these other places how desperate would have been an invasion of Japan.
00:20:37How many lives would be lost.
00:20:43If we had to invade Japan, the Soviets would have come in from the other direction.
00:20:50Rothblatt's mentor and friend Niels Bohr, the brilliant Danish physicist,
00:20:55wanted to share the technology with the Soviet Union in order to prevent a nuclear arms race.
00:21:03Roosevelt was sympathetic, but Churchill wanted Bohr jailed as an enemy alien.
00:21:12The Los Alamos team included European refugees like Rothblatt,
00:21:17socialists, communists, anti-communists, patriots and pacifists.
00:21:23None of whom were noted for keeping their opinions to themselves.
00:21:34Maintaining secrecy and setting the party line was the responsibility of General Groves,
00:21:40who often hosted dinner parties for the senior scientists.
00:21:45After dinner we just sat and talked and began to talk about all sorts of world affairs.
00:21:49In the course of the conversation he said to Chadwick,
00:21:53you realise of course that the whole purpose of this project is to subdue the Russians.
00:22:02It came as a terrible shock to me.
00:22:04Because you have to remember this was at a time when the main part of the war was going on
00:22:09in Russia.
00:22:09It was the Russians who tried to stem the advance of the Germans.
00:22:14And they suffered all the casualties.
00:22:17The Russians were our allies.
00:22:20Groves said Russia is our enemy and the project proceeds on this basis.
00:22:25From that moment onwards I felt that the whole thing is wrong.
00:22:29And then I was told through Chadwick from intelligence sources that the Germans had given up their idea of working
00:22:38on the project.
00:22:38I decided that I should leave.
00:22:41That's the reason why, before the end of 1944, I told the people of Salomon that I wanted to leave.
00:22:47I was the only one to do this.
00:22:50Sworn to secrecy, Rothblatt was allowed to leave the Manhattan Project.
00:22:56The intelligence community was highly suspicious of his motives.
00:23:03Chadwick found this absurd dossier against my uncle,
00:23:06which claimed that he intended to return to Britain, join the RAF, hijack a plane, fly it to Poland,
00:23:15parachute into Poland and then hand over what he knew to the Russians.
00:23:19I can't imagine anything more absurd.
00:23:24On the way back, all his effects disappeared.
00:23:28He had a suitcase in which he had all sorts of things he treasured, including pictures of his wife.
00:23:34And many other family photographs and many other things he treasured.
00:23:39His case disappeared, sorry stolen, can't trace it.
00:23:42I myself believe that somewhere in the bowels of the FBI, that suitcase still exists.
00:23:52In July of 1945, the highly secret device, which the Los Alamos scientists referred to simply as the gadget, was
00:24:01ready.
00:24:03There was speculation that the chain reaction might set the Earth's atmosphere on fire.
00:24:12Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, now.
00:24:38After the training test, the reaction was pure relief and pure joy.
00:24:44People were really happy that this intense, enormous effort was successful.
00:25:00Scientists have a responsibility to the society that they live in.
00:25:06If they decide to shut their eyes to this,
00:25:09they are just as culpable as the generals and the soldiers who actually fire those weapons.
00:25:17I met and I was inspired by several people who had worked on the Manhattan Project
00:25:24and had then turned against it, but they turned against it years later,
00:25:30well after the bomb had been tested and had been used.
00:25:35My admiration for Joseph Rothblatt comes from the fact that he was there at that time.
00:25:41He didn't say, oh, on the one hand this, and on the one hand that.
00:25:46No, he said, this is what I have to do.
00:25:49And that took a lot of courage.
00:25:51As I looked at his history, I was filled with admiration
00:25:54because here was a man who knew war was evil and catastrophic.
00:26:03Back in Liverpool, Joseph Rothblatt waited out the remaining months of the war,
00:26:09anxious to learn the fate of Tola and his family.
00:26:16Six of us survived together in hiding.
00:26:20We have been through the Warsaw Ghetto.
00:26:24We escaped from the ghetto shortly before it was blown up house by house.
00:26:30We were hidden in the country by a Polish family.
00:26:33But we did survive. Somehow we did it.
00:26:38What was tragic for my mother was that when she telephoned him at Liverpool University
00:26:44after the war to tell him we were alive, he said,
00:26:49And where is Tola? And my mother had to say she is dead.
00:26:55But I don't think that even then he had totally given up hope.
00:27:00But I'm afraid there was no hope.
00:27:09He never remarried.
00:27:11I think he could have done so.
00:27:13He had plenty of female admirers.
00:27:16But no, he never considered marriage again.
00:27:28Within weeks of the successful testing of the atomic bomb,
00:27:32two more of the fearsome weapons had been shipped to an American airbase
00:27:36on the Pacific island of Tinian.
00:27:41On August 6th, 1945, the bomb called Little Boy was loaded into a B-29 super fortress.
00:27:56It was released above Hiroshima.
00:28:04Three days later, Nagasaki suffered a similar fate.
00:28:15An estimated 145,000 people died within seconds.
00:28:21And tens of thousands more would later die from radiation sickness.
00:28:34Joseph Rotblat heard the news he was dreading on the radio.
00:28:40When the BBC announced the destruction of Hiroshima.
00:28:45This is what I had here for the first time.
00:28:48Oh, it's a terrible time because I still hoped that there was a chance it wouldn't work,
00:28:53but it did work.
00:28:55Then I hoped even if it did work, it wouldn't be used against civilian populations.
00:29:01But it did.
00:29:03And I was shocked.
00:29:05And there was a fear about further developments.
00:29:18People read lists of casualties, numbers of people killed.
00:29:22They don't see beyond that to all the bereaved families and the horror of war.
00:29:31The trouble is that the politicians we have now in the world haven't known war.
00:29:36And haven't really known the aftermath of war.
00:29:40War is an incredible...
00:29:43My parents, my brother died slowly of wounds in an open boat in the Atlantic.
00:29:50My parents never got over that.
00:29:54I would like all political leaders to go and see the Peace Museum in Hiroshima.
00:30:07There was one extraordinary display of this young girl who was only two when the bomb fell.
00:30:15She grew up into a healthy girl and then after ten years, the radiation sickness took her and she died
00:30:23slowly.
00:30:27She believed in a Japanese myth that if you made a thousand paper cranes, you could have your dearest wish.
00:30:36She didn't quite make it.
00:30:38Her school friends made the rest for her funeral.
00:30:41...
00:30:47...
00:31:10...
00:31:21The only one of the Japanese government is,
00:31:25first, to be honest,
00:31:30to learn the experience of the attack and the research of the attack of the attack.
00:31:33It is a duty to spread the world.
00:31:42Kibakusha, that's the Japanese word for the survivors of bombing.
00:31:52What they went through is simply beyond words.
00:31:59We just don't have the vocabulary by which we can accurately represent the suffering.
00:32:07So, as a result, the only expression that really, really expresses the agony of Hibakusha is,
00:32:17no one else should ever suffer as I did.
00:32:20That's, in a sense, the most accurate description of what they went through.
00:32:25And when they say that, that includes that no one includes everybody, literally everybody,
00:32:33including those whom you would normally call enemies.
00:32:39You know, all these years, the Hibakusha have been advocating that nuclear weapons have no place on this earth.
00:33:20I think that Hiroshima was a terrible crime.
00:33:25It was a crime against humanity because it targeted innocence.
00:33:30Of course, the Japanese lost hugely from this.
00:33:34But perhaps the real consequence of this was that atomic weapons became legitimized around the world.
00:33:43And countries looked at Hiroshima and said, we want a bomb too.
00:33:48Otherwise, this may happen to us.
00:33:50And so you had the Soviet Union enter into the atomic race and then you had one country after the
00:33:56other,
00:33:57out of fear and also out of reasons of wanting prestige, wanting this bomb.
00:34:06Stalin understood that the nuclear bomb, when it was dropped in Nagasaki and Hiroshima mostly,
00:34:13was aimed against the Soviet Union.
00:34:19When we talk about the Cold War, we have to understand that in the beginning,
00:34:26the Soviet Union was in the losing position.
00:34:30It was more nuclear warheads on the American side.
00:34:33The Soviet Union was surrounded by the air bases with the strategic bombers.
00:34:42We live under the pressure that Americans can attack us any day,
00:34:47and we can be this just sitting duck.
00:35:06When the Soviets tested the nuclear bomb in 1949, it was some feeling of relief.
00:35:16The scientists who tested them in Kazakhstan, they eager to go to epicenter,
00:35:23when it was not too hard to walk there, just to look inside.
00:35:27And I remember I walk in the Kapustin yard near Stalingrad,
00:35:33and it was rumors that they will test nuclear warheads on the anti-aircraft missile.
00:35:39And we were on the airfield, there was no airport there, waiting for flying back to Moscow.
00:35:45And we were eager to witness this explosion nearby.
00:35:49So we saw this bright flush, nothing else, and then this big bomb.
00:35:57And so it was close to the explosion.
00:36:01At that time, people, except few scientists who were very close to this,
00:36:07never thought how dangerous it was.
00:36:11Because nobody tested how you was much exposed, and nobody was interested.
00:36:18Many of my friends died young from the cancer, but at that time we didn't think about this.
00:36:35I came early to the conclusion that the nuclear test could be a hazard to health.
00:36:42Many other people did not believe this.
00:36:45From this point in view, I was a rebel.
00:36:57To further study the effects of radiation and cancer,
00:37:02Joseph Rotblat left Liverpool for London in 1950.
00:37:07He accepted a position as professor of physics at St. Bartholomew's Hospital.
00:37:14There, he pioneered the use of radioactive isotopes as a diagnostic tool,
00:37:19and helped develop the first scanner for the detection and treatment of disease.
00:37:25Some of us physicists who were somewhat disillusioned with the way our physics was being applied,
00:37:32we felt that we should perhaps try to find other ways in which we could be,
00:37:35which our work could be of more direct use to mankind than nuclear physics turned out to be.
00:37:43And I began to do research work on medical applications of nuclear physics.
00:37:49Well, this is where physicists produce instruments which helped in treatment or diagnosis of disease.
00:37:57Which brought me into problems of the effects of radiation on the human body.
00:38:05And I felt much greater satisfaction from this.
00:38:09I went to work for Professor Joseph Rotblat in St. Bartholomew's Hospital.
00:38:14Well, it was a bit strange because when you first went there,
00:38:18all the rest of the people on the floor were scientists, you know,
00:38:21they were all physicists or radio biologists.
00:38:24He could be quite hard.
00:38:26He used to sometimes say things like,
00:38:29this office, you start work at nine.
00:38:32But he never used to join in very much in sort of like coffee breaks or anything like that.
00:38:40The only relationship was with Patricia, really.
00:38:43They were very close.
00:38:46She was a student of profs and therefore she worked very closely with Professor Rotblat.
00:38:53They were trying to find out what caused cancer and what radiation,
00:38:58but they were using animal research and they were using a lot of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki data.
00:39:11Rotblat bought a house in North London, which he rewired himself.
00:39:16He planned to make this a home base for what remained of his family in Poland.
00:39:23The reason he was able to secure visas for us all was because of his work at Los Alamos.
00:39:30I think the British government felt that he ought not to have family behind the Iron Curtain
00:39:36because of, you know, the possibilities of blackmail and so forth,
00:39:40but he did get us all visas.
00:39:42We all came to England.
00:39:45My parents and my grandmother and my uncle and aunt.
00:39:51And he was able to work in non-military uses of atomic energy, which is what he wanted to do.
00:39:58He was not the kind of man to be told what to think.
00:40:03We didn't understand how important he was.
00:40:05We just thought he was just a slightly mad Polish physics lecturer.
00:40:10Once you'd been to two or three lectures as Joseph Rotblat,
00:40:13you realised you were in the presence of an absolutely unique human being.
00:40:18I suppose my favourite lecture was the one he did, taking us from Newton to Einstein.
00:40:24We had just about grasped the notions of basic laws of thermodynamics
00:40:28as to how A led to B to move and so forth.
00:40:31And somehow, during the course of that time, he took us to E equals MC squared.
00:40:35He said, there, that's simple, he said.
00:40:38We came out of that lecture thinking, the world has changed.
00:40:43He really wanted to try and transform physics into a humanitarian project,
00:40:48into something that would help people help people.
00:40:52I used to sort of have, almost have nightmares sometimes.
00:40:55I used to dream quite a lot of bombs exploding, you know,
00:40:59and didn't go into too many details, but I did used to,
00:41:02it did used to sort of pull me down a bit.
00:41:05And I once asked Professor Rotblat, what would he do if they were from there?
00:41:10And he said, run towards it and make sure you got killed right at the beginning.
00:41:19The nuclear club was expanding.
00:41:23Britain tested in Australia on Aboriginal lands.
00:41:31France was next, testing in Africa and Polynesia.
00:41:39And then China would become the fifth country to conduct atmospheric nuclear tests.
00:41:57America, the charter member of the club, tested constantly, enthusiastically.
00:42:02Britain tested in Africa.
00:42:02Britain tested in Africa.
00:42:10Even including scheduled test dates in Nevada tourism brochures.
00:42:17There was little concern for radiation hazards.
00:42:27Now they knew they could safely cross the area under an aerial atomic explosion shortly after it had occurred.
00:42:34They hauled out some brooms and gave us the brush off before we left position two for camp.
00:42:40Decontamination, they called it, in case we had some radioactive particles on us.
00:42:49Faced with the intensive buildup of weapons among the member nations of NATO,
00:42:54the Soviet Union defiantly showed itself capable of mutually assured destruction.
00:43:01Khrushchev tried to play this game threatening Americans that we produce missiles as sausages.
00:43:08And I was starting to work in the rocket science.
00:43:13And he smiled at me and told me it was important that Americans will think that we have many more
00:43:20than we really had at that time.
00:43:23And it was very supportive to the American military industrial complex that really started the missile race.
00:43:41We're standing in the missile park, which has an example of almost every missile or rocket that's ever been tested
00:43:49at White Sands.
00:43:50One of the most important is the Nike Ajax and the Nike Hercules.
00:43:55Those were Cold War missiles.
00:43:57They were put around every large city in the United States during the Cold War, during the 50s.
00:44:06Scientists sometimes themselves get out of control.
00:44:09Nuclear arms race was largely the result of such scientists being simply interested in new discoveries, making new gadgets.
00:44:18The military loved it.
00:44:22Ever more missiles with even greater range and destructive power inspired the most senseless spending the world had ever seen.
00:44:34People look at the days of the Cold War.
00:44:37My comment is how many skirmishes and attacks and wars were avoided because of the threat to the would-be
00:44:46attacker of being wiped out with the touch of a button.
00:44:51On March 1st, 1954, a button was pressed in the South Pacific.
00:44:57It set off an explosion 1,000 times more powerful than the weapon dropped on Hiroshima and produced temperatures rivaling
00:45:07the surface of the sun.
00:45:11The age of the hydrogen bomb had dawned over Bikini Atoll.
00:45:22The extent and range of the fallout was grossly underestimated, and unsuspecting commercial vessels well outside of the restricted test
00:45:31area were contaminated.
00:45:33One of these was the Lucky Dragon, a Japanese fishing trawler now on display in a Tokyo museum.
00:45:52Visitors to the museum are moved by the story of the Lucky Dragon, especially when they hear it first hand
00:45:59from Matashichi Oishi, one of the surviving crew members.
00:46:32The
00:46:38I thought it would be a good thing to do with the wind.
00:46:41I didn't see the wind.
00:46:43I saw the wind.
00:46:45It was about 7 or 8 minutes.
00:46:49It was about the wind.
00:46:57It was about the wind.
00:46:59It's not just the wind from the bottom, but the wind from the bottom, the wind from the bottom, the
00:47:06wind from the bottom.
00:47:11The wind from the bottom of the bottom is 1 hour long ago.
00:47:17It's a lot of rain from the bottom.
00:47:23We are now at the height of the wheat, and if the wheat is steady, I'll catch it all at
00:47:33once.
00:47:33I only just said the wheat resistant to the wheat on top of the wheat.
00:47:33Sometimes if the wheat is good, or a scent of the wheat,
00:47:41it's only a little bit of a taste.
00:47:46I thought that the wheat is bad.
00:48:08The crew members of the Lucky Dragon were plagued with radiation sickness, and within months, one fisherman was dead.
00:48:20American authorities insisted that the effects of the fallout should be no greater than the radiation from an ordinary X
00:48:28-ray.
00:48:30That summer, Rotblat met Japanese scientist Professor Yasushi Nishiwaki.
00:48:36He gave Rotblat samples of the radioactive ash and the victim's medical records.
00:48:43When he reported and made public the size of the thermonuclear test at Bikini Atoll, which affected the Japanese fishermen
00:48:58on the Lucky Dragon,
00:48:59you know, that was originally reported in the papers as a far smaller explosion.
00:49:05Prof worked out, probably here in the office, that the effects that it had had meant that it must have
00:49:13been a much bigger explosion.
00:49:14And he did the maths and he did the physics.
00:49:16And he was persuaded not to publish it for some little time, because of the difficulties it would make between
00:49:26the British and the American governments.
00:49:29But he became convinced that it was totally undemocratic not to let people know what was going on.
00:49:36So he published it, and the whole full anger of the establishment came down on him yet again.
00:49:45Scientists have a responsibility.
00:49:50They have the duty to inform the public, and not just leave it to the politicians to tell or not
00:49:57to tell or they're often misinformed.
00:50:01They have the duty to tell or not to tell or not to do that to tell or not to
00:50:01tell or not to tell or not to tell or not to tell or not to tell or not to
00:50:01tell or not to tell or not to tell or not to tell.
00:50:01Terrible truths began to crystallize.
00:50:07At Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market, the largest in the world, a plaque marks the spot where tons of contaminated tuna
00:50:15were buried.
00:50:18It was estimated that 800 fishing boats were in the test area.
00:50:24Radioactive poisons had entered the human food chain and through ocean currents and
00:50:30the atmosphere spread throughout the world.
00:50:35The tragedy of the lucky dragon was the spark that set off a worldwide movement to ban nuclear
00:50:42weapons.
00:50:46Let me start with a simplified picture of the atom of which all matter is built.
00:50:53Each atom resembles the solar system.
00:50:56In April of 1954, the BBC broadcast a program outlining the dangers arising from the development
00:51:04of the hydrogen bomb.
00:51:08Joseph Rottblatt was asked to explain the physics of the bomb.
00:51:30Rottblatt met another guest backstage.
00:51:33The esteemed British philosopher Lord Bertrand Russell.
00:51:39The two quickly became friends.
00:51:44Russell shared Rottblatt's dismay over the development of the hydrogen bomb.
00:51:49They worked together to begin the campaign for nuclear disarmament and to organize an international
00:51:55conference of scientists to discuss the peril.
00:52:00Russell drafted a manifesto calling for humanity to take action.
00:52:06He sought the endorsement of the leading scientists and Nobel laureates of the day.
00:52:13The signed letters arrived, except one from Albert Einstein.
00:52:22When Bertrand Russell was flying from Rome to Paris, when the captain announced that he just had the news that
00:52:31Einstein had died.
00:52:32And so when Russell heard the news, he was completely shattered because he felt that without Einstein's endorsement, the whole
00:52:41project would collapse.
00:52:44But when he arrived in Paris, there was a letter, a letter from Albert Einstein with his signature endorsing the
00:52:51statement.
00:52:59The statement came to be known as the Russell Einstein Manifesto.
00:53:05It's written in the most glorious English prose.
00:53:10And Rottblatt was the youngest of all the signatories on this.
00:53:15And it was he who arranged the first press conference, which was at Caxton Hall here in London, when this
00:53:22was announced to the world's press.
00:53:23And I'll just read to you just a few of the paragraphs.
00:53:29In the tragic situation which confronts humanity, we feel that scientists should assemble in conference to appraise the perils that
00:53:39have arisen as a result of the development of weapons of mass destruction.
00:53:44We're speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent or creed, but as human beings,
00:53:53members of the species man, whose continued existence is in doubt.
00:54:02Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable.
00:54:10Shall we put an end to the human race or shall mankind renounce war?
00:54:23The manifesto had a very good reception in the media.
00:54:31And we have received a number of letters from people offering their support.
00:54:35One of these letters was from Mr. Cyrus Eaton, who said he would be willing to pay for the whole
00:54:42conference on the condition that it was held in Pagvosh.
00:54:47Now, in those days, the only word Pagvosh known in England was that of a comic character, Captain Pagvosh.
00:54:56He appears in a children's comic.
00:55:00It was just a hoax.
00:55:02In fact, Russell asked me to look at this and I said, it's not worth it.
00:55:07But then, of course, I looked up in the gazetteer and I find a place Pagvosh does exist.
00:55:17Pagvosh is a small village in Nova Scotia on the east coast of Canada.
00:55:22This is the site of Thinker's Lodge, former summer home of Cyrus Eaton, a multimillionaire industrialist.
00:55:31Although he had trained to become a Baptist minister, a summer job with John D. Rockefeller set Eaton off on
00:55:38a different path.
00:55:41He did, however, retain his early instinct to do good in the world.
00:55:47This earned him the label capitalist with a conscience.
00:55:58He had money and that gave him independence.
00:56:02And certainly, the scientists, Bertrand Russell and Joseph Rotblatt and the others, had the right idea, but they didn't have
00:56:10the resources.
00:56:13This was not a place set up with hotels and restaurants where you would want to normally be bringing people
00:56:20from around the world.
00:56:24There were a few rooms here at Thinker's Lodge, and beyond that, they billeted people in private homes.
00:56:33It was a somewhat unbelievable scene.
00:56:39So you'd have these people that were really in charge of the Soviet Union's nuclear weaponry program, having tea and
00:56:47toast with a very local family.
00:56:58This really became not just Thinker's Lodge, but the whole Pugwash community involved in these events.
00:57:06It was the only place in the world bringing together the East and West to talk about this perilous threat
00:57:14of nuclear weapons.
00:57:17Led by Joseph Rotblatt, 22 of the most influential scientists in the world came together from both sides of the
00:57:25ideological divide.
00:57:29Among them, Chao Bei Wan, the first scientist from Communist China to visit the West.
00:57:36Kuzin, the brilliant Russian.
00:57:39And the Hungarian-American, Leo Szilard, an eccentric genius.
00:57:43The politics of the Cold War made the meeting remarkable.
00:57:48It was, in effect, fraternizing with the enemy.
00:57:53Their mandate was simple.
00:57:55How could they stop nuclear war?
00:58:01Their bond was their sense of moral responsibility for unleashing on the world a perversely beautiful weapon of mass destruction.
00:58:13The very first topic for discussion at the very first Pugwash conference were radiation hazards.
00:58:24And the government at that time assured us that there are no health risks whatsoever.
00:58:35They say, we don't need to worry at all.
00:58:52Pugwash is unique in several important characteristics.
00:58:56One is that people come to Pugwash as individuals.
00:59:01We have small meetings so we can sit around the table rather than making speeches which turn very often into
00:59:08propaganda.
00:59:09One of the ways of doing this is to exclude the press from it as our meetings are private.
00:59:16To a certain extent this is our weakness because the world doesn't know about us.
00:59:22Pugwash would meet on an annual basis at conferences all over the world.
00:59:27Returning for a 50th anniversary meeting in Nova Scotia in 2007.
00:59:32Everyone, right here.
00:59:35The organizers of the meeting have agreed for a photo only opportunity in the room.
00:59:41No audio though.
00:59:44And this is because it's a 50 year tradition within the Pugwash movement of something called Chatham House Rules.
00:59:52Anything that's said can't be attributed to any one person in the room.
00:59:58So that they could get the high level people to speak relatively freely without fear of any retribution because of
01:00:07those comments.
01:00:08It's something that's been the key to Pugwash's success.
01:00:15The risk of idealistic scientists revealing state secrets over a lobster dinner spooked every major spy agency.
01:00:24The FBI, the CIA, MI5 and the KGB.
01:00:31Premier Khrushchev of the Soviet Union made his a very personal interest.
01:00:38All the Pugwash conferences was widely covered in the Soviet Union.
01:00:45Khrushchev, my father, he met with the Soviet scientists when they asked them to meet with him.
01:00:52And he discussed with them what they would do there.
01:00:57Mostly he supported their ideas because it was not pro-Soviet, but it was not pro-American.
01:01:05Khrushchev became a close friend of Cyrus Eaton.
01:01:08Using his considerable resources, Eaton campaigned to halt the arms race,
01:01:14normalize relations with the Soviet Union and recognize Communist China.
01:01:19It made him the lifelong nemesis of J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI.
01:01:25Eaton was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
01:01:31Pugwash members got the same sort of scorn and some were denounced as Communist sympathizers or even Eastern Bloc spies.
01:01:44It's quite true that the Soviet government tried to use us.
01:01:48Interestingly enough, it took only a few years before the governments in the West,
01:01:52they tried in town to take over Pugwash.
01:01:55And they came to me and said, told me who should be invited, what we should discuss and so on.
01:02:01And I said, thank you very much, but we know how to do it ourselves.
01:02:04And so we had to fight for both sides.
01:02:06And I keep saying all the time that the path, you know, of independence is a very narrow one.
01:02:12But we managed to keep on it.
01:02:15Walking that narrow path led the Pugwash scientists to most of the world's continents.
01:02:22Discussions dealt primarily with nuclear issues, but also broadened to include chemical and biological weapons,
01:02:29the environment, arms trade and regional conflict.
01:02:36The delegates often brought their spouses.
01:02:43The lasting friendships that formed across political divides became critical in times of international crisis.
01:02:52Sometimes not the formal part of the meeting that is the best thing.
01:02:56It's the, you know, the dialogue between people or just that they meet someone from another country, you know,
01:03:02and then they can go on from there.
01:03:05There was lots of very strong personalities.
01:03:07And so the arguments were often quite fierce.
01:03:12Most of the time that it was resolved, but there was quite often sort of simmering things going on in
01:03:18the background.
01:03:22Sometimes the information exchanged would have shocked their respective governments.
01:03:30The Pugwashites had tried to transcend the vested interests of military and industrial and scientific powers
01:03:39that were behind these war machines to try and find a pathway to safety.
01:03:46Through that long twilight period of the Cold War, people genuinely were getting up every day waiting for nuclear annihilation.
01:04:00The threat of global annihilation became a part of popular culture in literature, music and the movies.
01:04:08The 1959 hit film, On the Beach, depicted the aftermath of a nuclear war.
01:04:15As the winds carried radioactive fallout to every continent,
01:04:19the last people on Earth awaited certain death in Australia.
01:04:24They didn't think we'd fight no matter what they did.
01:04:27And they were wrong.
01:04:28We fought.
01:04:28We expunged them.
01:04:30We didn't do such a bad job on ourselves.
01:04:33We're all doomed, you know.
01:04:35The whole silly, drunken, pathetic lot of us.
01:04:38We haven't got a chance.
01:04:40Stop it!
01:04:40I won't have it, Julian.
01:04:42I won't.
01:04:44There is hope.
01:04:46There has to be hope.
01:04:47There's always hope.
01:04:53Fears of Armageddon took on a chilling reality with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
01:04:59October 22nd, 1962.
01:05:03President Kennedy confirms reports that the Soviet Union is installing missiles with nuclear warheads in Cuba.
01:05:09To halt this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated.
01:05:18All ships of any kind bound to Cuba, from whatever nation or port, where they're found to contain cargoes of
01:05:26offensive weapons, be turned back.
01:05:28It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in
01:05:36the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States.
01:05:42We are lucky that in the time of the Caribbean crisis, President Kennedy, Prime Minister Khrushchev, my father, were a
01:05:52brave person.
01:05:53They thought that they must try to prevent the war, not to start the war, because they didn't know these
01:05:59consequences.
01:06:01The Cuban Missile Crisis was emotional and psychological shock to the American society, that now they're the same as others,
01:06:10because the danger was in Cuba, 90 miles from American soil.
01:06:16And it was not such a fact in the Soviet Union, because the Soviets all the time lived under this
01:06:22pressure of the possible war.
01:06:26After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Pogwash idea of a permanent hotline between Moscow and Washington was implemented.
01:06:34Both sides agreed to talk about the arms race.
01:06:38A fragile first step was taken in 1963, when a meeting chaired by Joseph Rotblatt discussed the idea of a
01:06:46ban on nuclear testing.
01:06:49We could use the fact that scientists knew each other so personally, to use this channel of communication to try
01:06:57to influence events, for example, like during the time of the Cuban crisis.
01:07:03Khrushchev, my father, he supported this movement to stop nuclear testing.
01:07:08And I was at that time in this rocket science, and I knew that the new warhead will be much
01:07:18lighter and much more powerful.
01:07:19And when he announced this moratorium without consulting with us, we were ready to test it.
01:07:26And I came to him and told him, why are you doing this?
01:07:29And he answered me, these new inventions are endless, you can make it more and more destructive.
01:07:36We now can destroy the world. We have to think now how to save it.
01:07:46Less than a year after the crisis, the USA, the USSR and the United Kingdom all signed a treaty.
01:07:55The partial test ban treaty ended testing in the atmosphere and brought in controls for testing underground.
01:08:06The success of Pugwash depends on its impeccable scientific integrity.
01:08:13It's been able to advise governments and governments have listened to it.
01:08:19One of their main contributions being to produce means of verifying whether the treaties were being held,
01:08:28because you can't have a treaty not to use, let's say, chemical weapons or nuclear weapons,
01:08:34unless there's a means for verifying that they aren't being manufactured or tested.
01:08:44The monitoring of the underground tests was done by automatic sealed seismic black boxes,
01:08:51a Pugwash initiative which satisfied a Soviet concern over intrusive inspections.
01:08:59We admit that you cannot disinvent nuclear weapons, we never say it cannot be done.
01:09:05But what we are saying, we can create a system of verification.
01:09:09We look at it and we find it can be done.
01:09:15Nuclear weapons are easier and easier to make, but they do need fissile material.
01:09:23Work in a direction where fissile materials are controlled, where the particular parts that are needed for nuclear weapons are
01:09:31strictly regulated to the extent possible.
01:09:33You then decrease the possibilities.
01:09:36You never eliminate them, but you decrease the possibilities and probabilities for any group or country to make nuclear weapons.
01:09:44And so you've got to work incrementally.
01:09:49Throughout the Cold War, the nuclear powers continued to engage in conflicts around the globe.
01:09:56North Korea, the Middle East, Africa, Vietnam.
01:10:03Although no nuclear devices were ever used, the threat of a tactical nuclear strike hung over every battlefield.
01:10:12The Pugwash leadership realized the Vietnam War was a very dangerous development.
01:10:19An attempt was made to set up negotiations by using a direct channel, so to say, to reach Ho Chi
01:10:29Minh.
01:10:30The person involved from the American side as a liaison to the American government was Henry Kissinger.
01:10:39In fact, it was the beginning of the career of Kissinger.
01:10:43At that time he was a professor at Harvard.
01:10:47I think that the discussion of scientists from all over the world, discussing frankly among each other what the problems
01:10:54are,
01:10:56has contributed to clarifying the various points of view and therefore, I believe, has made a contribution towards the easing
01:11:05of international tensions.
01:11:09Utilizing Pugwash back channels, North Vietnam and the United States eventually came to the table in Paris and signed a
01:11:17peace treaty.
01:11:20The idea was mainly at that time to hold the arms race and to prevent a nuclear war.
01:11:27I might say that the fact that there has been no nuclear war, no further use of nuclear weapons, to
01:11:35a certain extent, may be the result of our work.
01:11:38It may sound very, very immodest, but speaking now from the way people told us, including the person who really
01:11:46factually stopped the nuclear arms race,
01:11:49and that is Mikhail Gorbachev, and he told me directly, our effort has been helping in this direction.
01:11:58We had some very influential scientists in the Soviet Union who came to our meetings.
01:12:04And this process worked very well in the case of Gorbachev because our ideas percolated to him.
01:12:15I have great admiration for him because he had the courage to come out and say, enough is enough. We
01:12:21can't go on like this.
01:12:26I now call upon the Peace Prize Laureate of 1995, Professor Joseph Rothblatt.
01:12:37The Nobel Committee informed Joseph half an hour before the official announcement, and they asked him not to tell anybody.
01:12:48And Joe violated this prescription and made a phone call to me because I was then the Secretary General of
01:12:56Pagwash.
01:12:57It was the first time that the Nobel Prize was shared between an individual and an organization.
01:13:05I said to him, can I have an invitation? He said, do you want one? Why? He was a modest
01:13:11man, really.
01:13:13And I said, are you serious? Do you think I will ever again be present at a Nobel Prize ceremony
01:13:21for an uncle of mine?
01:13:23Of course I want to go.
01:13:24Long before the terrifying potential of the arms race was recognized, there was a widespread, instinctive abhorrence of nuclear weapons.
01:13:34But the world was then polarized by the bitter ideological struggle between East and West.
01:13:41However, after the collapse of communism, any rationale for having nuclear weapons disappeared.
01:13:51The nuclear powers still clinged tenaciously to their weapons.
01:14:03Into his eighties and nineties, Rotblatt walked from his home to the Kilburn station, his briefcase bulging with papers, then
01:14:12took the tube to Bloomsbury.
01:14:15He then walked to the modest Pagwash headquarters across the street from the British Museum.
01:14:25Two offices, jam-packed with creaking floors, which he shared with his assistant, Sally Milne.
01:14:35It made a huge difference to him and to the work of Pugwash getting the Nobel Prize,
01:14:41because suddenly you just have more access to people.
01:14:48Rotblatt was tireless, taking his message to the highest places and to the streets.
01:15:00He kept vigil in a mock cell in support of Mordecai Venunu.
01:15:07Venunu, an employee at the Nuclear Research Center in the Negev Desert, alerted the world to a top secret Israeli
01:15:14nuclear weapons program.
01:15:18Tried on charges of treason and espionage, he spent eighteen years in prison, twelve of them in solitary confinement.
01:15:27For years, Rotblatt praised Venunu's courage and campaigned for his release.
01:15:34Rotblatt, because of his personal history, was a strong defender of whistleblowers, of which Venunu was a prime example.
01:15:52When the Cold War ended, things changed quite a bit.
01:15:58He gave a very sort of important speech at Halifax in 2003, Pagwash,
01:16:06when he thought that the dangers of nuclear proliferation were such and were becoming such,
01:16:14that, in his view, it was as dangerous as some of the most dangerous times of the Cold War.
01:16:25The difficulty is that the mood in Russia has changed in relation to nuclear weapons.
01:16:34And now, the general move is that Russia must keep the nuclear weapons.
01:16:41They must keep nuclear weapons almost as the only sort of expression of being, still being a superpower.
01:16:52And this means they want to keep on with them, and this has created a new, difficult situation.
01:16:57We have to, somehow, to deal with this.
01:17:12Thank you all very much.
01:17:13Prof was by no means anti-American, but he was devastated,
01:17:19and he knew what the administration of George Bush would mean.
01:17:26They hate the fact that we love freedom, and so they attacked us.
01:17:31And they thought we'd quit.
01:17:35They thought we were soft.
01:17:38We love our freedoms.
01:17:40Our biggest job is to make sure the American homeland is secure.
01:17:49Anyone criticizing the Bush administration has immediately been branded as anti-American.
01:17:57The current polarization in the world is largely the consequence of the Bush slogan,
01:18:05you are either with us or you are against us.
01:18:11The use of nuclear weapons is explicitly contemplated.
01:18:17They will be used in a conflict just like any other explosives.
01:18:24The danger of a new nuclear arms race is real.
01:18:36Today in New Mexico, the scientists of Los Alamos are designing a whole new generation of nuclear weapons.
01:18:46It's really an incredible thing to see the origins of it.
01:18:51And just see how it's set American foreign policy and domestic policy for the next, well, right now.
01:18:59What sort of an impact it's having on the world today, you know,
01:19:01and the view of the world towards us as being the only people who have detonated not one but two
01:19:07bombs.
01:19:09For me, it puts it into perspective why the world looks upon us with such a fearful eye.
01:19:15We were the only ones to use this extraordinarily destructive weapon.
01:19:26I have very mixed feelings about commemorating it.
01:19:31You know
01:19:57The
01:19:58whole house filled up with his papers, not just the garage, not just
01:20:02the loft, but his, well, it started like this. He filled up his study with tottering
01:20:08piles of papers. Then, having filled up his study, he had nowhere to work, so he moved
01:20:13into the dining room next door. He worked at the dining room table. Pretty soon, that
01:20:19too was covered with tottering piles of papers. Also the floor all around, the piano, and every
01:20:28other inch of space. I would sit down and chat to my uncle, and we discussed the news,
01:20:36we discussed all sorts of things. For instance, I asked him if he was an atheist, and he said,
01:20:41not an atheist, but an agnostic. I said, why? Because I call myself an atheist. And he said,
01:20:48as a scientist, I can never say that something is impossible.
01:20:54He was certainly a very busy man and a very important man, and yet he still took time to
01:20:59ask about children. He kept a supply of children's books in his house, so that if any kids came
01:21:04around that he would have a gift for them. He was just a very, very generous and very sweet
01:21:11man. When you work on these big issues of nuclear weapons, it can get very discouraging. And one
01:21:17time I asked Joseph Rotblatt, I said, how is it possible with everything that you have seen in
01:21:23the course of your life, how is it possible that you remain optimistic? And he looked at me with this
01:21:29wonderful contemplative look for a little while, and he just said, well, what's the alternative?
01:21:35Joseph Rotblatt, whose life spanned nearly a full century, experienced the most murderous
01:21:42period in all of human history. Somehow, he remained optimistic.
01:21:49Europe, look at history. Full generations were slaughtered in wars. It's no longer conceivable for the
01:22:02countries which fought each other, mortal enemies, in both the world wars. And now you've got the
01:22:08European Union. And this is a very important step, which occurred in our lifetime. And this
01:22:15gives me great hope. If you want peace, prepare for peace. And I want to change their mindset
01:22:24to along these lines. And this is the only way in which we could save the future of mankind.
01:22:35If one of his great dreams for Pugwash was the elimination of nuclear weapons, the other was the
01:22:42elimination of war itself. Wherever one views us and them and looks at the world in these terms, conflict
01:22:56comes about. That kind of hatred, which is then put into children, results in people being at war against
01:23:05each other. And when peoples go to war against each other, then it's much worse than states.
01:23:15That's what we have to avoid. It's important not to put hatred in them.
01:23:25We don't have a Eurocentric fear anymore. What we have is a world full of imploding nations. We have extremism
01:23:37that is interpreting itself into a rage that is a
01:23:43articulated through terrorism. As we saw the reaction in the United States and the Western world to the two towers
01:23:53coming down, we have seen nothing until the first dirty bomb is blown by some terrorist and wipes out a
01:24:04good part of a city.
01:24:09If that ever happens, the impact on our civil liberties, on our human rights, those components of why humanity is
01:24:18advanced will take a nosedive.
01:24:21And we'll turn into police states and God knows what other paranoia, panic reaction that we create.
01:24:28The aim of the exercise of Pugwash is to say, hey, that sort of warm, fuzzy feeling you had in
01:24:37your tummy about the Cold War echolidrium, even though you didn't agree with it, was there, doesn't exist anymore.
01:24:44You're in a whole new era with a lot of different players and with those who are not necessarily going
01:24:53to play by the rules.
01:24:57I think people actually believe that we'll never use them. I think people actually believe that it won't happen.
01:25:27My nature is not to distress, just the opposite.
01:25:30By nature, I believe fundamentally in the goodness of man.
01:25:38Last night I had a strange extreme I'd never dreamed before.
01:25:49I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war.
01:26:03In the same year he was knighted, Sir Joseph Rodplat was a guest on a popular radio show.
01:26:09Among his favorite selections was the 60s peace anthem, Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream.
01:26:25I would like everybody to be conscious that they are members of a species which has a marvelous history, but
01:26:35whose continuous existence can no longer be guaranteed.
01:26:44The joy of life, the beauty, continuation of life, beauties in the world, to retain it, to preserve it, not
01:26:58to let it disappear.
01:27:08I dreamed I saw a mighty room filled with women and men.
01:27:17In the same time in the air with women, they were familiar with women.
01:27:20And the papers they were signed and said they'd never fight again.
01:27:30And when the papers all were signed
01:27:36A million copies made
01:27:40They all joined hands and bowed their heads
01:27:46And grateful prayers were prayed
01:27:53And the people in the streets below
01:27:58Were dancing round and round
01:28:02And guns and swords and uniforms
01:28:08Were scattered on the ground
01:28:16Last night I had the strangest dream
01:28:21I never dreamed before
01:28:26I dreamed the world had all agreed
01:28:33To put an end to war
01:29:08To put an end to war
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