ALTHOUGH Joseph Rotblat had a distinguished career in physics he will be remembered more for 60-odd years of his life which he spent working for nuclear disarmament.
He was the chief organiser of the Pugwash conferences on science and world affairs. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — by the atomic bombs which he helped to develop on the Manhattan Project — convinced him that nuclear weapons should be abolished, and he worked tirelessly for this end.
He also made considerable contributions to nuclear and medical physics. But he received the high recognition he so richly deserved for his scientific research and for his work for disarmament only in his later years, when he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Nobel laureate.