Pugwash, nukes and peace

The Strangest Dream

Film directed by Eric Bednarski

Produced by the National Film Board of Canada

Joseph Rotblat: A Man of Conscience in the Nuclear Age by Martin Underwood Sussex Academic Press: 2009. 144 pp. £17.95

Professor Pugwash, The Man Who Fought Nukes: The Life of Sir Joseph Rotblat by Kit Hill Ryelands: 2008. 80 pp. £8.99

After years of backsliding on nuclear-weapons proliferation by the world's superpowers, President Barack Obama has stated that he intends to "make the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element" in nuclear policy. His recently appointed chief science adviser, physicist John Holdren, spent ten years as chairman of the executive committee for the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, the peripatetic annual meeting of scientists and statesmen to discuss ways to control nuclear weapons. It is named after the Canadian village of Pugwash, Nova Scotia, where its first conference was held under the sponsorship of a wealthy Canadian philanthropist, Cyrus Eaton.

The late Joseph Rotblat would have been heartened by these recent political developments. Rotblat was the youngest signatory of the 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto against nuclear weapons, which gave rise to the first Pugwash Conference at the height of the cold war in 1957. Rotblat dedicated more than half a century to the fight to abolish nuclear weapons. In 1995, he and the Pugwash organization shared the Nobel Peace Prize.

Two edited collections on Rotblat were published soon after his death in 2005 at the age of 96. As yet there is no substantial biography, although one is being prepared by the writer Andrew Brown. Now, Rotblat is the focus of The Strangest Dream - a Canadian documentary film (http://tinyurl.com/ cnehl3) made to celebrate the centenary of his birth - which is intelligent, vivid and all...