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International Response: Former Nuclear Weapons Designer Wins Award for Nonproliferation Efforts By Jim Wurst Global Security Newswire GENEVA — The annual Linus Pauling Centennial Award for Science, Peace or Health was awarded today at the United Nations to 1995 Nobel Peace Prize winner Joseph Rotblat, a nuclear physicist who worked on atomic bomb development during World War II before devoting himself to campaigning against nuclear weapons. In accepting the award, Rotblat sharply criticized the United States, saying that while everyone can rejoice in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, “the price we paid for this is far too high.” The launching of a pre-emptive war is “a severe setback for those ... who believe morality and adherence to rules of law should be our guiding principles,” he added. “The danger of this policy can hardly be over-emphasized.” “Somehow I do not see the American people accepting the role assigned to them by the clich‚ that has hijacked the administration,” he continued. “Public opinion is bound to turn when the dangers associated with the current policies become apparent ... above all, in the nuclear doctrines pursued by the Bush administration.” “The Bush administration [strategic doctrines] make nuclear weapons a tool with which to keep peace in the world,” as opposed to holding them as a last resort, Rotblat said. “The new Nuclear Posture Review spells out a strategy which incorporates nuclear capability in conventional war strategy,” he said. “Nuclear weapons have now become a standard part of military strategy to be used in a conflict just like any other high explosive. This is a dangerous shift in the whole rationale for nuclear weapons.” The people of the world “should call on the United States to abandon its unilateralist policies and for the Security Council of the United Nations to be recognized as the sole authority in initiating military operations for the resolution of conflicts,” he said. “The main goal [is] the creation of [a] nuclear weapon-free world,” he added. Rotblat, a Pole, is an emeritus physics professor at the University of London and the emeritus president of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which he helped found and which shared his Nobel Prize. During World War II, he worked on atomic bomb development at the University of Liverpool and at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States, but when it became clear that Germany was not working on an atom bomb, he became the only scientist to resign from the project before the bomb was tested. The award is named after double Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling. The presentation took place at a seminar of the Geneva Forum, a joint initiative of the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research, the Quaker U.N. office in Geneva and the Graduate Institute of International Studies’ Program for Strategic and International Security Studies.
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