[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 160 (Tuesday, October 17, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H10079-H10081]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
JOSEPH ROTBLAT, NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNER, CONDEMNS FRENCH NUCLEAR TESTS
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May
12, 1995, the gentleman from American Samoa [Mr. Faleomavaega] is
recognized during morning business for 5 minutes.
Mr. FALEOMAVAEGA. Mr. Speaker, on the first day of this month, the
Government of France exploded another nuclear bomb in the South
Pacific, its second detonation in a new series of tests. France's
nuclear bomb--involving a 110 kiloton blast--was seven times more
destructive than the bomb that we exploded in Hiroshima 50 years ago.
Mr. Speaker, as we recall the destructive nuclear fury that was first
unleashed in history against the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I
think it most appropriate to recognize Mr. Joseph Rotblat, a physicist
working on the manhattan nuclear bomb project during WW II who quit in
protest because of his convictions, and who was personally devastated
when he learned of the bomb's consequences in Japan.
Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate Mr. Rotblat, a Polish-born
scientist, who has just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize by the
Norwegian Nobel Committee. Mr. Rotblat, the world's first protester
against nuclear weapons, has devoted his entire life to ending the
madness of the nuclear arms race. He is the founding member of the
Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, as well as the
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a leading think tank
on security and disarmament issues.
Mr. Speaker, at a time France is thumbing its nose at the
international community, over 160 nations have officially protested
this madness by President Chirac and the Government of France to
continued exploding of nuclear bombs in the South Pacific, I find it
highly commendable that the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Mr.
Rotblat, one of the world's most eminent and vocal opponents of nuclear
testing.
Mr. Speaker, Mr. Rotbalt has condemned France's resumption of nuclear
testing and has written French President Chirac, urging that France
immediately cancel its tests. Mr. Rotblat says, ``There is no reason at
all in my opinion for President Chirac to resume tests. I can't see any
tactical reason at all. I can only see this as an attempt to make their
bomb a little better, or develop perhaps a new type.'' That is right,
Mr. Speaker, a bomb a little better. To kill more people.
The two bombs that we exploded in Japan, Mr. Speaker, accounted for
over 290,000 men, women, and children who died as a result of those
nuclear explosions. What madness, what madness, Mr. Speaker. We can say
that let us get rid of chemical and biological warfare, but let us
continue dropping nuclear bombs.
Mr. Speaker, again, I commend Mr. Rotblat for his life's work and the
Nobel Committee for their selection of Mr. Rotblat as a Nobel
recipient. By these actions, the Nobel Committee on behalf of the world
community has sent a strong message of protest to the French Government
and I would hope that Paris would respond by immediately canceling
their nuclear testing in the South Pacific.
What arrogance, Mr. Speaker, that President Chirac has the
unmitigated gall to do this. For over 30 years they have been exploding
nuclear bombs in the South Pacific. The American people do not know the
suffering of the some 100,000 or 200,000 people who live in those
islands, and, yes, 28 million people who live in that region. We just
have not taken a better understanding of the very real serious problem
we have there in the Pacific.
While President Chirac is drinking his sweet wine in Paris, some
200,000 people's lives are at stake if that Muroroa atoll should break
and leak, and there are already indications of leakages because of the
168 nuclear bombs that have been exploded on that atoll alone.
What arrogance, Mr. Speaker, what arrogance.
[[Page H 10080]]
Anti-Bomb Physicist Wins Peace Prize--Nobel ``Protest'' Against Atomic
Tests Shared With Arms Control Group
(By Fred Barbash)
London, October 13.--The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded
today to Joseph Rotblat, a British physicist who helped
invent atomic weapons in the 1940s, and the organization
dedicated to doing away with them that he later formed with
Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell.
This year's prize stands as a ``protest'' against French
and Chinese nuclear testing, the chairman of the Norwegian
Nobel Committee, Francis Sejersted, said in Oslo as he
announced the award to Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences on
Science and World Affairs.
Rotblat, 86, who walked out of the secret U.S. government
laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M., in 1944 after deciding the
atomic bomb being developed there was unnecessary, also used
the occasion to express his ``outrage'' at France's two
recent nuclear tests in the South Pacific.
Since 1957, the Pugwash Conferences have been assembling
select groups of scientists, including many of the brains
behind the American, Russian and British nuclear arsenals,
for private exchanges on arms control. They have opened up
lines of communication among such scientists, serving as
forums for both technical and political issues, and as back
channels to top-level policymakers. Subsequently the
conferences were broadened beyond the scientific community.
Rotblat said today that the organization's goal is, and
always has been, to convince governments that ``the genie can
be put back in the bottle.''
A French Foreign Ministry spokesman offered congratulations
to Rotblat today, the Reuter news agency reported, but Prime
Minister Alain Juppe rejected appeals that France end its
nuclear testing program and said the award would have no
effect on ``policies we have adopted for reasons of national
interest.''
While no single treaty or agreement can be traced precisely
to Pugwash discussions, according to historians of the
nuclear era as well as Rotblat, the conferences have
addressed complex problems--such as anti-ballistic missile
systems, test ban monitoring and the spread of chemical and
biological weapons--long before they reached the formal
negotiating tables of world leaders. They are considered to
have exercised at the very least a subtle influence on
virtually every major contemporary arms accord.
More broadly, the organization, which has 10 Nobel
laureates among its charter members, was among the first of
what are now many such groups designed to encourage
scientists to confront--and control--the uses of their
science.
The group was cited by the Nobel committee for its efforts
to ``diminish the part played by nuclear arms in
international politics and in the longer run to eliminate
such arms.'' It has made scientists ``take responsibility for
their inventions,'' it said.
Unlike with last year's Peace Prize--awarded jointly to
Israeli leaders Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine
Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat--names of the
recipients of this one were not leaked in advance. Indeed,
neither Rotblat nor the Pugwash Conferences, of which he is
president, was on any of the speculative ``short lists''
published in the Norwegian press.
The Pugwash Conferences, along with philosopher and antiwar
activist Bertrand Russell, were viewed with suspicion by some
fervent anti-communists during the 1950s and by ardent Cold
Warriors afterward. But the organization has been respected
for years by arms control professionals. Until today,
however, it was relatively unknown to the rest of the world,
as was Rotblat, a cheerful, intense man who says he still
``wakes up in a cold sweat'' when he hears about such events
as France's nuclear tests.
``Who would expect that a little man like myself and a
little-known movement, unknown to the general public,'' would
get the Nobel Peace Prize, Rotblat said today as he walked
briskly from the organization's grungy office near London's
Russell Square to a news conference. ``Who is he?''
bystanders asked reporters as they followed him.
Rotblat, a native of Poland, was working on a one-year atom
bomb project at the University of Liverpool in 1939 when the
British team of which he was a part joined U.S. scientists
working on the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb at
Los Alamos.
``I started to work in 1939 on the atom bomb,'' he said in
an interview today. ``I was afraid that German scientists
would build the weapon and use it to rule the world. I
thought that the only way this could be prevented was if we
built it too and threatened to retaliate--the classical
concept of nuclear deterrence.''
Two new pieces of information gained at Los Alamos
persuaded him to leave. First, he said, he learned that a
major purpose for the bomb was to threaten the Soviet Union,
which was then a World War II ally.
Then, he said, ``at the end of 1944 I learned that the
Germans had abandoned their project; the purpose of my being
on the project was gone.'' When he informed his superiors at
Los Alamos that he was leaving, he said they ``accused me of
being a spy'' who was planning to turn over atomic secrets to
the Russians. After refuting the accusation, and agreeing for
security reasons to a fabricated story about why he was
leaving, he was allowed to return to Britain, where he
switched from nuclear physics to nuclear medicine.
When he heard that the United States had dropped the bomb
on Hiroshima, he said, he was ``devastated. . . . I did not
expect it would be used as soon as it was made. I felt angry,
worried and fearful about the future of our civilization.''
``The world didn't know it, but we knew that scientists
were capable of making a bomb a thousand times more
powerful--a hydrogen bomb.''
In 1955, he and Russell decided to seek the help of
Einstein in warning the world of the danger they foresaw.
From that collaboration came the ``Russell-Einstein
Manifesto,'' which declared that ``such weapons threaten the
continued existence of mankind.'' Among the signers were 10
men who were or would become Nobel laureates, including Max
Born, Percy W. Bridgman, Einstein, Frederic Joliot-Curie,
Hermann J. Muller, Linus Pauling, Cecil F. Powell and
Rotblat.
From the manifesto emerged the Pugwash Conferences, so
named because the first one was financed by American
industrialist Cyrus Eaton and held at his retreat in the
village of Pugwash, Nova Scotia.
The meetings, which were by invitation only, tended to be
small--groups of 25--and moved from country to country.
While participants often read from prepared papers, they
could be and were challenged in open give-and-take sessions,
according to accounts of meetings by historians.
Invitees have included not only scientists committed to
arms control--such as Rotblat--but top-level government
scientists guiding the rapid Cold War nuclear arms buildup.
Soviet physicists Andrei Sakharov and Igor Tamm and Princeton
scientist Frank von Hippel were among the participants.
Rotblat said today he has never been able to say with any
precision how much the Pugwash discussions influenced the
Soviet position on arms limitations.
At the very least, he said, they opened channels of
communication among scientists on both sides of the arms
race.
He said he is certain that Pugwash discussions influenced
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's thinking on nuclear issues
through the participation of Yevgeny Velikhov, one of the
former Soviet leader's key science advisers, who helped
persuade Gorbachev not to try to match President Ronald
Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.
Experts said today that the Pugwash meetings also have
contributed significantly to the nuclear testing moratorium
observed by the United States and the Soviet Union; to
resolving complex issues involving testing verification and
monitoring; to the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty
of 1987; and to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968,
designed to stop the spread of nuclear weapons to countries
that do not already possess them.
Indeed, the idea for the treaty was first discussed at a
Pugwash meeting in 1958, according to the organization's
official history.
The peace prize, which will be formally awarded in Oslo in
December, carries an award of $1 million. Asked what would be
done with the money, Rotblat gestured toward his cramped and
cluttered office.
``I haven't really thought about it,'' he said. ``But look
around you.''
____
Rotblat, First Nuclear Protester, Wins Peace Prize
London, October 13.--Polish-born Joseph Rotblat may have
been the world's first protester against nuclear weapons,
quitting the Manhattan project to build America's atom bomb
in 1945 because of his convictions.
The physicist, who was awarded the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize
on Friday, went on to become one of the world's most vocal
and effective opponents of the nuclear arms race.
The 86-year-old, who lost his wife in the Holocaust, won
the Prize jointly with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and
World Affairs, of which he was a founder member and is now
chairman.
He is also a founding member of the Stockholm International
Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), a leading ``think-tank'' on
security and disarmament issues.
Rotblat lives in London where he was professor of physics
at the University of London. He has been a British subject
since 1946.
He was a refugee from Hitler's Europe who was working at
Liverpool University in northern England when World War Two
broke out.
He began research on the potential of atomic power in
Britain in 1940.
He became a member of a group of British-based scientists
who worked on the secret Manhattan Project. But he left the
project as Germany headed for defeat, making him possibly the
world's first anti-nuclear arms protester.
Rotblat was the only scientist to leave the Manhattan
project base at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the atomic bomb
was developed that later devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
His departure was officially said to have been because he
wanted to return to Europe to search for his wife.
After the end of World War Two, he founded the Atomic
Scientists Association, the forerunner to the Pugwash
organisation. He later became president of the organisation,
which was dedicated to arms control.
Although Rotblat had always been conscious of the
disastrous consequences that
[[Page H 10081]]
the development of nuclear weapons could entail, he had felt compelled
to work on the Manhattan project to develop the atomic bomb
before Germany could do so.
When it became clear that Germany had given up working on
the atomic bomb, he pulled out of the project and did not
know the bomb had been completed until it was dropped on
Hiroshima.
He was said to have been ``devastated'' by the consequences
of its use on Japan in the dying days of the Pacific war and
dedicated his life to campaigning against the nuclear arms
race, urging other scientists to do so.
____
France Uneasily Congratulates Rotblat on Nobel
(By Alistar Doyle)
Paris, October 13.--France uneasily congratulated ban-the-
bomb scientist Joseph Rotblat on winning the Nobel Peace
Prize on Friday, dodging the laureate's condemnation of
French nuclear tests in the South Pacific.
``We congratulate the Nobel Peace Prize laureate,'' Foreign
Ministry spokesman Jacques Rummelhardt told reporters.
``France wants disarmament, including nuclear disarmament, in
security.''
``Security will permit disarmament,'' he told the
ministry's regular daily press briefing, adding: ``French
policy aims to establish security.''
Despite Paris's official congratulations, the award to the
veteran nuclear physicist-turned-peace campaigner seemed set
to make the French government squirm.
Pierre Lellouche, a member of parliament and former
strategic affairs adviser to President Jacques Chirac, said
he was ``perfectly scandalised'' and accused the group
Rotblat heads of being a former tool of Soviet propaganda.
Both Rotblat and the Norwegian Nobel Committee wasted no
time in urging France to cancel nuclear tests. Paris broke a
three-year moratorium last month by detonating an underground
nuclear device in French Polynesia.
Rotblat, 86, said he hoped the prize ``is a message not
only to the French but to the Chinese as well.'' China and
France are the only official nuclear powers still testing.
Rotblat wrote to President Jacques Chirac last month
protesting against the French tests. ``I think it's very
bad,'' he told Reuters in London on Friday.
``There is no reason at all in my opinion for President
Chirac to resume tests. I can't see any tactical reason at
all. I can only see this as an attempt maybe to make their
bomb a little better, or develop perhaps a new type.''
Nobel Committee chairman Francis Sejersted told Reuters
Television: ``The specific message to the French is a protest
against the nuclear tests, as it is a protest against nuclear
tests in general and nuclear armaments in general.''
France has staged two tests since early September despite
howls of outrage abroad. Chirac says tests are vital to check
France's nuclear arsenal and plans as many as six more before
banning testing for ever.
France's La Chaine Info television commented that the
impact of the Nobel decision on French diplomacy would hardly
have been worse had environmental group Greenpeace won.
Rotblat, who helped develop the first atom bomb in the
United States in hopes it would never be used, shared the
million-dollar prize with the Pugwash Conferences on Science
and World Affairs which he chairs.
Lellouche said: ``I am personally--and as a specialist in
these matters--perfectly scandalised by the fact that an
organisation which one knows was openly manipulated by the
Soviets should be honoured in this way at a time when
everyone knows the controversy about the French tests.''
The Pugwash conferences played a backroom role in the Cold
War, bringing together scientists, scholars and public
figures from East and West to discuss nuclear and other
security issues.
____
Australia Lauds Prize for Anti-Nuclear Campaigner
Sydney, October 14.--Australia, a fierce opponent of French
nuclear testing in the South Pacific, welcomed on Saturday
the award of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize to anti-nuclear
campaigner Joseph Rotblat.
A Foreign Ministry spokesman said Australia applauded
Rotblat's remark that he hoped the prize would send ``a
message not only to the French but to the Chinese as well.''
``We certainly welcome those remarks from someone as
eminent as a Nobel Peace Prize winner and it reinforces the
wide range of interests against the nuclear testing
programmes,'' the spokesman told Reuters.
``It basically reinforces the need for a comprehensive test
ban treaty, which Australia has been consistently working
towards over so many years.''
Rotblat, a nuclear physicist who devoted his life to trying
to ban the bomb he helped create, won the Nobel Peace Prize
on Friday and seized the opportunity to spread his anti-
nuclear message.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awarded the prize to
the 86-year-old peace campaigner and the Pugwash organisation
he founded, also made clear it was intended as a protest
against French nuclear tests.
France, which is carrying out a series of tests in the
South Pacific, and China are the only nuclear powers still
carrying out tests.
Australia has said French and Chinese nuclear tests
threaten to undermine negotiations for a Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty due for completion next year by encouraging more
non-nuclear powers to develop atomic weapons.
Canberra is especially critical of French testing, arguing
Paris should, like Beijing, test on their home soil. Having
failed to prevent the resumption of tests in French
Polynesia, Australia is now trying to embarrass France in
world forums.
Australia will seek condemnation of nuclear testing at next
month's Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in New
Zealand.
It is also lobbying with Japan and New Zealand for an anti-
testing resolution within the United Nations.
____
OAS Hits French Tests
French nuclear tests are detrimental to peace and
international security, the Mexican ambassador to the OAS
said as she assumed the rotating presidency of the
organization's permanent council.
Ambassador Carmen Moreno de Del Cueto restated the
Organization of American States' call for France to end its
tests in the South Pacific.
``I deeply regret that the French government has ignored
[our] call . . . to suspend the nuclear tests,'' she said.
``I reiterate our call . . . and urge the French government
to finally suspend their nuclear tests, which do not
contribute to either peace or international security.''
Mrs. Moreno de Del Cueto thanked the OAS for its gradual
reforms.
``Little by little the OAS has moved forward in pluralism
and tolerance and has begun to eliminate the radical bad
habits of the Cold War,'' she said last week.
____________________