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Andrew Brown wrote the first biography of Sir James Chadwick (1891-1974), Nobel laureate and discoverer of the neutron. Research for this led him to interview Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat, whose biography he is well placed to write. It is based largely on material appearing in Rotblat's Churchill College Archive, some four tonnes of papers having been removed from his house after his death in 2005.
Rotblat was born in Warsaw in 1908, in what was a prosperous household, but suffered severe poverty after the failure of the family business at the start of the First World War. He started work as a domestic electrician with a growing ambition to become a physicist. Without formal education he won a place in the physics department of the Free University of Poland, gaining an MA in 1932, and then a doctorate in physics at the University of Warsaw in 1938. During his time in Warsaw he made major discoveries, including inelastic neutron scattering and Cobalt-60, subsequently used worldwide in radiotherapy. With the discovery of nuclear fission, he repeated the experiments and showed that in the fission process more neutrons were emitted than absorbed; he was probably ahead of Joliet-Curie, who won the Nobel Prize for this discovery.
In early 1939 Rotblat envisaged that a large number of fissions could occur, and if they did so in a short enough period of time, then considerable amounts of energy could be released. The idea of an atomic bomb occurred to him around February 1939. In the same year...