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  • 13 hours ago
The Strangest Dream 2008
Transcript
00:00:00.
00:00:28Well, I was here as a kid and I wanted to
00:00:31show the rest of the family. It's a place you only get to see a couple times a
00:00:35year or so. We thought we'd take a look.
00:00:46Nothing to worry about. Hey, you're hot!
00:00:52You're dead.
00:00:58It can't be just open to the public. We have to actually be here. Especially after 9-11,
00:01:02they've really, you know, made the bases inaccessible.
00:01:07Everything that you see on the table, they're all radioactive.
00:01:11What do we have from the site?
00:01:12The Trinit site.
00:01:15You're not concerned about that?
00:01:16No. It's not a danger to you from the radiation aspect unless you eat it.
00:01:25We heard about this place and we wanted to show our children ground zero,
00:01:33where the first atomic bomb was detonating.
00:01:45The Trinit test site.
00:01:52On the eve of July 16th, 1945, at 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 destruction.
00:02:19Only one scientist among the hundreds chosen for the Manhattan Project would turn his back
00:02:26on the terrible madness soon to be unleashed.
00:02:30His name was Joseph Rotblat.
00:02:35If 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 world of the world of the world
00:03:26of the world of the world.
00:03:32This heralded entirely new situation in the world.
00:03:42For many years, perhaps a few centuries, scientists lived in the so-called ivory tower.
00:03:52Many scientists felt that their job is just to pursue pure knowledge.
00:03:59Science has no relation with any human feelings.
00:04:04Scientists have got a role because what they are doing today will tomorrow be applied by technology
00:04:11and then may have an enormous impact on the whole life of everybody.
00:04:17Joseph Rotblat may have renounced the atomic bomb, but he would struggle for the rest of his long life to
00:04:24dispel its shadow.
00:04:30He became the visionary force behind the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.
00:04:37International gatherings of scientists and statesmen designed to discuss the 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 and communication across different viewpoints.
00:05:01I am Secretary General of Pugwash and on behalf of all of us, I welcome you warmly to Cairo.
00:05:11I am Secretary General of Pugwash.
00:05:12With the end of the Cold War, the world breathed a sigh of relief and stumbled on.
00:05:19But for the members of Pugwash, the threat of nuclear weapons never really went away.
00:05:26The US has very clearly been signaling that they see a role for using nuclear weapons.
00:05:33They talk not only about preemption, but also about retaliation.
00:05:39In the wake of being included in the axis of evil, there was a real rush in North Korea.
00:05:48And of course, this nuclear test, whether or not it was a successful nuclear test is not the issue.
00:05:54Nuclear weapons have not gone away.
00:06:00It's not scientists who make nuclear weapons anymore.
00:06:03It's a technical matter.
00:06:05It's engineers.
00:06:06It's technicians.
00:06:08It's how much material you can afford to buy your suppliers.
00:06:13And in fact, the technology now is pretty standard.
00:06:16In fact, you can download a lot of stuff from the internet these days.
00:06:21If I gave my graduate student a project to make a simple atomic bomb,
00:06:26if he didn't come up with a reasonable design four years later,
00:06:29I don't think he should get a PhD.
00:06:31So 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's a big worry whenever you have this many nuclear weapons in the world,
00:06:48accidents 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.
00:07:03Are they at the same place where 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 say we will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons,
00:07:27but we know that they have the capability.
00:07:30If two or more countries have nuclear weapons, I 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.
00:08:00There 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.
00:08:17Well, 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 Rotblath'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.
00:09:25He 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.
00:09:40It's sort of Polish politeness.
00:09:43He was a man of absolute integrity.
00:09:50Joseph Rotblath 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.
00:10:10I 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, called 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.
00:11:18My 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 I.
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.
00:11:47That 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, and 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 fission discovery came, I verified this experimentally.
00:12:45From this, it was quite easy to imagine, make an imagine experiment, a chain reaction could occur,
00:12:52which a large amount of energy is released in a very short time, in other words, an atom bomb.
00:12:57But I immediately put it out of my mind, because as a scientist, I felt it's not my job to
00:13:01devise methods of destruction.
00:13:04It's quite contrary to all my upbringing, and 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,
00:13:59she was ill with appendicitis and unable to travel.
00:14:05Within days of returning to his work in England, Nazi 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 traveled 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 realized that their project would require a hugely expensive technological effort that Britain, struggling for its very survival, could
00:15:46ill 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.
00:16:09Chadwick went out to check bomb craters with his Geiger counter.
00:16:14He 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, 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 and began construction on a new town in a remote
00:17:12part of New Mexico.
00:17:17The locals called it the city on the hill.
00:17:22The town was Los Alamos.
00:17:25It 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, it was codenamed the Manhattan Project.
00:18:05Here, the energies of scientists, technicians, office workers and soldiers were committed to a project far more expansive and expensive
00:18:15than future missions to the moon.
00:18:20I 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, different disciplines, and expect them and persuade
00:19:02them 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, having always been
00:19:33used to difficulties.
00:19:35Here you find yourself in a place where money didn't matter at all.
00:19:41You 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, and he was very worried about Hitler
00:20:06getting 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, wanted to share the technology with the Soviet Union in
00:20:59order 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, socialists, 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, who often hosted dinner parties for the
00:21:43senior scientists.
00:21:45After dinner, we just sat and talked and began to talk about all sorts of world affairs.
00:21:50And in the course of the conversation, he said to Chadwick,
00:21:53You realize, 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 to 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.
00:22:41It's the reason why, before the end of 1944, I told the people in the asylum that I wanted to
00:22:46leave.
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, saw it 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.
00:24:43People 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, they are just as culpable as the generals and the soldiers
00:25:13who actually fire those weapons.
00:25:17I met and I was inspired by several people who had worked on the Manhattan Project,
00:25:23and had then turned against it, but they turned against it years later, well after the bomb had been tested
00:25:33and 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. And that took a lot of courage.
00:25:51As I looked at his history, I was filled with admiration because here was a man who knew war was
00:25:58evil and catastrophic.
00:26:04Back 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.
00:26:21We have been through the Warsaw ghetto.
00:26:24We escaped from the ghetto shortly before it was blown up house by house.
00:26:29We 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 after the war to tell
00:26:46him we were alive,
00:26:47he 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 if he 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 air base on 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 heard 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, but it did
00:28:53work.
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 the 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...
00:29:44My parents, my brother died slowly of wounds in an open boat in the Atlantic.
00:29:50My parents never got over there.
00:29:54I would like all political leaders to go and see the Peace Museum in Hiroshima.
00:30:07There's 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
00:30:24slowly.
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.
00:30:41So yes, I would do this for her lovers.
00:31:22The only one of the people of the war is to learn the fact that the war is the only
00:31:26one.
00:31:27First of all, we are going to learn the war and the history of the war.
00:31:33We are going to explore the world's responsibility.
00:31:43that's a Japanese word for the survivors of bombing what they went
00:31:54through is simply beyond words we just don't have the vocabulary by which you
00:32:03can accurately represent the suffering so as a result the only expression that's
00:32:12really really expresses the agony of hibakusha is no one else should ever
00:32:18suffer as I did that's in a sense the most accurate description of what they
00:32:25went through and when they say that that includes that no one includes everybody
00:32:31literally everybody including those whom you would normally call enemies
00:32:39you know all these years the hibakusha have been advocating that nuclear weapons
00:32:45have no place on this earth
00:32:51so
00:32:59so
00:33:20i think that hiroshima was a terrible crime it was a crime against humanity because it targeted
00:33:27innocence of course the japanese lost hugely from this but perhaps the real consequence of this
00:33:38was that atomic weapons became legitimized around the world and countries looked at hiroshima and said
00:33:45we want a bomb too otherwise this may happen to us and so you had the soviet union enter into
00:33:53the
00:33:53the atomic race and then you had one country after the other out of fear and also out of reasons
00:34:00of wanting prestige
00:34:02wanting this bomb
00:34:06stalin understood that the nuclear bomb when it's dropping nagasaki and harashima mostly was aimed against the soviet union
00:34:19when we talk about the cold war we have to understand that in the beginning soviet union was in the
00:34:28losing position
00:34:29it was more nuclear warheads on the american side soviet union was surrounded by the air bases with the strategic
00:34:40bombers
00:34:42we live under the pressure that americans can attack us any day and we can be this just sitting duck
00:35:06when the soviets tested the nuclear bomb in 49 it was some feeling of relief
00:35:14when the soviets tested the nuclear bomb in 49 it was some feeling of relief
00:35:21the eager to go to epicenter when it was not too hard to walk there just to look inside and
00:35:27i remember
00:35:28i work in the kapustin yard near stalingrad and it was rumors that they will test nuclear warhead on the
00:35:38anti-aircraft missile and we're on the airfield it was no airport there waiting for flying back to
00:35:45moscow and we'll eager to witness this explosion nearby so we saw this bright flush nothing else and then
00:35:56this big ball and so it was close to the explosion at that time people except few scientists who was
00:36:05very close
00:36:06to this never thought how dangerous because nobody tested how you was uh much exposed and nobody was
00:36:17interested many 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
00:36:43many other people did not believe this from this point of view i was a rebel
00:36:57to further study the effects of radiation and cancer joseph rotblatt left liverpool for london in 1950
00:37:07he accepted a position as professor of physics at saint 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
00:37:31we felt that we should perhaps try to find other ways in which we could be a
00:37:36which our work could be of more direct use to mankind than nuclear physics turned out to be
00:37:43and i began to do the search 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 with professor joseph rotblatt in saint bartholomew's hospital
00:38:14well it was a bit strange because when you first went there all the rest of the people on the
00:38:19floor were scientists you know they were all physicists or radio biologists
00:38:24he could be quite hard he used to sometimes say things like this 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 they were very close
00:38:46she was a student of profs and therefore she worked very closely with professor rotblatt
00:38:53they were trying to find out what caused cancer and what radiation but they were using animal research
00:39:00and they were using a lot of the hiroshima and nagasaki data
00:39:11rotblatt 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
00:39:27was because of his work at los alamos
00:39:30i think the british government felt that he
00:39:33ought not to have family behind the iron curtain
00:39:36because of the you know the possibilities of blackmail and so forth but 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
00:39:57he 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 with joseph rotblatt
00:40:13you realize you're in the presence of an absolutely unique human being
00:40:18i suppose my favorite lecture was the one he did
00:40:20taking 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
00:40:35there that's simple he said
00:40:37we came out of that lecture thinking the world has changed
00:40:43he really wanted to try and transform physics into a humanitarian project
00:40:47into 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
00:40:59didn't go into too many details but i did used to
00:41:02it did used to sort of pull me down a bit
00:41:05um and i once asked professor rotblatt what would he do if they was gone
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
00:42:10even 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
00:42:32shortly 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
00:42:44in case we had a lot of weapons
00:42:50faced 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 on me and told me it was important that american will think that we have many more
00:43:20that 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
00:43:51one of the most important is the nike ajax and the nike hercules those 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
00:44:23ever more missiles with even greater range and destructive power
00:44:26inspired 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
00:44:42because of the threat to the would-be attacker of being wiped out
00:44:47with the touch of a button
00:44:52on march 1st 1954 a button was pressed in the south pacific
00:44:57it set off an explosion one thousand times more powerful than the weapon dropped on hiroshima
00:45:04and produced temperatures rivaling the 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
00:45:26and unsuspecting commercial vessels well outside of the restricted test area were contaminated
00:45:33one of these was the lucky dragon
00:45:36a 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
00:45:57especially when they hear it firsthand from mata shichi oishi
00:46:01one of the surviving crew members
00:46:10the爆発
00:46:10of the launch of the night The fire
00:46:12is still at the night but it's
00:46:14still not dark the sky is
00:46:15still in the day the sky is
00:46:19still in the night some of the
00:46:21different rays of the sun the current fire
00:46:23and the sun the sun the
00:46:24sun the
00:46:24sun the
00:46:24sun the
00:46:24fire is
00:46:25still in
00:46:27the night the sun
00:46:30There was a lot of fire, but I thought it was something that was going to happen.
00:46:38There was no noise in the sky, so I watched the sky.
00:46:45It was about 7, 8 hours.
00:46:54There was a noise in the sky.
00:46:56The sound is not just a fire.
00:47:02It's a sound from the bottom from the bottom from the bottom.
00:47:12The wind was starting to fall.
00:47:14The wind was starting to fall.
00:47:16The wind was starting to fall.
00:47:17I just feel that it was just the wind that had a lot of rain.
00:47:23In the head of the tree, the head of the tree on top of the tree was in my head,
00:47:28and the tree on top of the tree was in the head of the tree.
00:47:34However, the steam is hot or in the smell of its skin.
00:47:40It has not a taste of the skin, but it is just a bit of a taste of the skin.
00:48:08The crew members of the Lucky Dragon were plagued with radiation sickness, and within months,
00:48:14one 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, Rottblatt met Japanese scientist Professor Yasushi Nishiwaki.
00:48:36He gave Rottblatt 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,
00:48:53which affected the Japanese fisherman on 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, and he was persuaded not to publish it for some
00:49:22little time,
00:49:24because of the difficulties it would make between the 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,
00:49:37so he published it, and the whole full anger of the establishment came down on him yet again.
00:49:46Scientists have a responsibility.
00:49:50They have the duty to inform the public,
00:49:53and not just leave it to the politicians to tell or not to tell or they're often misinformed.
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,
00:50:28and through ocean currents and the 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 weapons.
00:50:47Let me start with a simplified picture of the atom of which all matter is built.
00:50:53Each atom resembles a solar system.
00:50:56In April of 1954, the BBC broadcast a program outlining the dangers arising from the development of the hydrogen bomb.
00:51:08Joseph Rotblat was asked to explain the physics of the bomb.
00:51:12And there is the electron revolving around it.
00:51:17There is therefore no exaggeration when we say that the annihilation of all life on Earth is now within the
00:51:25range of possibilities.
00:51:30Rotblat met another guest backstage, the esteemed British philosopher Lord Bertrand Russell.
00:51:38The two quickly became friends.
00:51:44Russell shared Rotblat'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 conference of scientists to discuss
00:51:58the 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.
00:52:21When Bertrand Russell was flying from Rome to Paris, when the captain announced that he just had the news that
00:52:32Einstein had died.
00:52:33And so when Russell heard the news, he was completely shattered because he felt that without Einstein's endorsement, the whole
00:52:42project 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.
00:52:53And this is one of the last acts of Einstein's life.
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 Rotblat 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.
00:53:24And 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.
00:54:30And we have received a number of letters from people offering their support.
00:54:36One 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 Pagwash.
00:54:47Now, in the North States, the only word Pagwash known in England was that of a comic character, Captain Pagwash.
00:54:56He appears in the children's comic.
00:55:00And therefore, it 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 Pagwash does exist.
00:55:17Pagwash is a small village in Nova Scotia on the east coast of Canada.
00:55:23This 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.
00:55:48This earned him the label, capitalist with a conscience.
00:55:58He had money and that gave him independence.
00:56:03And certainly the scientists, Bertrand Russell and Joseph Rotblad 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
00:56:21from 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 Rotblad, twenty-two of the most influential scientists in the world came together from both sides of
00:57:25the ideological divide.
00:57:30Among them, Chao Bei-Won, 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
00:58:07a perversely beautiful weapon of mass destruction.
00:58:13The very first topic for discussion at the very first Pugwash conference were radiation hazards.
00:58:23And the government at that time assured us that there are no health risks whatsoever.
00:58:36And they say, we don't need to worry at all.
00:58:43And they say, we don't need to worry at all.
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 will turn very often
00:59:07into propaganda.
00:59:09One of the ways of doing this is to exclude the press from it, if our meetings are private.
00:59:15To 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.
00:59:35The organizers of the meeting have agreed for a photo-only opportunity in the room.
00:59:42No audio, though.
00:59:44And this is because it's a 50-year tradition within the Pugwash movement of something called Chatham House Rules.
00:59:51Anything 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,
01:00:03without fear of any retribution because of those 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.
01:00:25The 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,
01:01:38or 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 turn, 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, and so the arguments were often quite fierce.
01:03:12Most of the time it was resolved, but there was quite often sort of simmering things going on in the
01:03:18background.
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 that were behind these
01:03:40war machines,
01:03:41to 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.
01:04:01The 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. We fought, we 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! I 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.
01:05:00October 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
01:05:15under shipment to Cuba is being initiated.
01:05:18All ships of any kind bound to Cuba, from whatever nation or port,
01:05:24will they found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons be turned back.
01:05:28It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba
01:05:34against any nation in the 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,
01:05:47President Kennedy, Prime Minister Khrushchev, my father, were a brave person.
01:05:53They thought that they must try to prevent the war, not to start the war,
01:05:57because they didn't know these consequences.
01:06:02The Cuban Missile Crisis was emotional and psychological shock to the American society
01:06:07that now they are the same as others, because the danger was in Cuba,
01:06:1390 miles from American soil.
01:06:16And it was not such a fact in the Soviet Union,
01:06:19because the Soviets all the time lived under this pressure of the possible war.
01:06:26After the Cuban Missile Crisis,
01:06:28the 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,
01:06:42when a meeting chaired by Joseph Rottblatt discussed the idea of a ban on nuclear testing.
01:06:49We could use the fact that scientists knew each other so personally
01:06:54to use this channel of communication to try to influence events,
01:06:58for 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,
01:07:13and I knew that the new warhead will be much lighter and much more powerful.
01:07:20And when he announced this moratorium without consulting with us,
01:07:25we were ready to test it.
01:07:26And I came to him and told, why are you doing this?
01:07:29And he answered me,
01:07:31these new inventions are endless.
01:07:34You can make it more and more destructive.
01:07:36We now can destroy the world.
01:07:38We 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.
01:08:20One of their main contributions being to produce means of verifying whether the treaties were being held.
01:08:29Because 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.
01:09:03We never say it cannot be done.
01:09:05But what we are saying, we can create a system of verification.
01:09:10We 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,
01:09:26where the particular parts that are needed for nuclear weapons are strictly regulated to the extent possible.
01:09:34You 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 conflict around the globe.
01:09:56North Korea.
01:09:57The Middle East.
01:09:59Africa.
01:10:00Vietnam.
01:10:03Vietnam.
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. At 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.
01:11:10Utilizing 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.
01:11:41But speaking now from the way people told us, including the person who really, factually stopped the nuclear arms race,
01:11:49and that is Mikhail Gorbachev.
01:11:51And 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.
01:12:21We can'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?
01:13:08He said, do you want one? Why?
01:13:10He was a modest man, really.
01:13:13And I said, are you serious?
01:13:16Do you think I will ever again be present at a Nobel Prize ceremony for 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.
01:13:35But the world was then polarized by the bitter ideological struggle between East and West.
01:13:42However, after the collapse of communism, any rationale for having nuclear weapons disappeared.
01:13:50The nuclear powers still cling 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 Pagwash getting the Nobel Prize because suddenly you
01:14:43just 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 18 years in prison, 12 of them in solitary confinement.
01:15:28For years, Rotblatt praised Venunu's courage and campaigned for his release.
01:15:33Rotblatt, 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 important speech at Halifax in 2003, Pagwash, when he thought that the dangers of nuclear proliferation
01:16:10were 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.
01:16:24The difficulty is that the mood in Russia has changed in relation to nuclear weapons.
01:16:34And now, the general mood 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, and he knew what the administration of George Bush
01:17:25would 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.
01:17:38But we love our freedoms.
01:17:41Our biggest job is to make sure the American homeland is secure.
01:17:49Anywhere 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,
01:18:05when you 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.
01:18:35Today 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, and just see how it's set American foreign policy
01:18:54and domestic policy for the next, well, right now.
01:18:59What sort of an impact it's having on the world today, you know, and the view of the world towards
01:19:03us as being the only people to have detonated not one but two bombs.
01:19:10For me, it puts it into perspective why the world looks upon us with such a fearful eye.
01:19:16We were the only ones to use this extraordinarily destructive weapon.
01:19:26I have very mixed feelings about commemorating it.
01:19:57The whole house filled up with his papers, not just the garage, not just the loft, but his, well, it
01:20:04started like this.
01:20:05He filled up his study with tottering piles of papers.
01:20:09Then, having filled up his study, he had nowhere to work, so he moved into the dining room next door.
01:20:15He worked at the dining room table.
01:20:18Pretty soon, that too was covered with tottering piles of papers.
01:20:23Also the floor all around, the piano, and every other inch of space.
01:20:31I would sit down and chat to my uncle, and we discussed the news, we discussed all sorts of things.
01:20:38For instance, I asked him if he was an atheist, and he said, not an atheist, but an agnostic.
01:20:43I said, why? Because I call myself an atheist.
01:20:47And he said, as 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 ask
01:20:59about children.
01:21:01He kept a supply of children's books in his house, so that if any kids came around, that he would
01:21:05have a gift for them.
01:21:07He was just a very, very generous and very sweet man.
01:21:12When you work on these big issues of nuclear weapons, it can get very discouraging.
01:21:17And one time I asked Joseph Rotblatt, I said, how is it possible, with everything that you have seen in
01:21:23the course of your life,
01:21:24how is it possible that you remain optimistic?
01:21:27And he looked at me with this wonderful contemplative look for a little while, and he just said, well, what's
01:21:33the alternative?
01:21:35Joseph Rotblatt, whose life spanned nearly a full century, experienced the most murderous period in all of human history.
01:21:45Somehow, he remained optimistic.
01:21:49Europe, nuclear history, full generations were slaughtered in wars.
01:21:59It's no longer conceivable for the countries which fought each other, mortal enemies, in both world wars.
01:22:07And now you've got the European Union.
01:22:10And this is a very important step, which occurred in our lifetime.
01:22:14And this gives me great hope.
01:22:19If you want peace, prepare for peace.
01:22:21And I want to change their mindset to go along these lines.
01:22:26And 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,
01:22:41the other was the elimination of war itself.
01:22:48Wherever one views us and them, and looks at the world in these terms, conflict comes about.
01:22:58That kind of hatred, which is then put into children, results in people being at war against each other.
01:23:07And when peoples go to war against each other, then it's much worse than states.
01:23:15That's what we have to avoid.
01:23:19Important not to put hatred in them.
01:23:25We don't have a Eurocentric fear anymore.
01:23:31What we have is a world full of imploding nations.
01:23:36We have extremism that is interpreting itself into a rage that is articulated through terrorism.
01:23:47As we saw the reaction in the United States and the Western world to the two towers coming down.
01:23:54We have seen nothing until the first dirty bomb is blown by some terrorist and wipes out a good part
01:24:04of 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.
01:24:21Then we'll turn into police states and God knows what other paranoia, panic reaction that we created.
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,
01:24:40even though you didn't agree with it, was there, doesn't exist anymore.
01:24:45You'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.
01:25:02I 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 men.
01:25:38Last night I had the strangest dream 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.
01:26:10Among his favorite selections was the 60s peace anthem,
01:26:14Last 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,
01:26:34but whose continuous existence can no longer be guaranteed.
01:26:44The joy of life, the beauty, continuation of life,
01:26:51the beauty in the world,
01:26:55To detain it, to preserve it, not to let it disappear.
01:27:08I dreamed I saw a mighty room
01:27:14Filled with women and men
01:27:18And the papers they were signing said
01:27:23They'd never fight again
01:27:30And when the papers all were signed
01:27:36A million copies made
01:27:41They 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
01:28:03And guns and swords and uniforms
01:28:08Were scattered on the ground
01:28:16Last night
01:28:18Last night I had the strangest dream
01:28:22I'd never dreamed before
01:28:27I dreamed the world had all agreed
01:28:34To put an end to war
01:28:56It was the most wonderful thing
01:28:56If I could let it happen
01:28:56And that's always the same
01:28:56To put an end to war
01:28:56And that's always the same
01:28:56And that was always the same
01:28:56In that space
01:28:57And I thought it was a miracle
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