Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,62

course, but I wouldn’t have minded being able to say I’d dodged them.

When I’d taken up drinking with the locals on Saturday nights, my Sunday runs gave way to entire days of Radio 4 and the quicksands of rumination in bed. It wasn’t so much that I was hungover—although I did drink too much, and, one morning, having awoken to the surreal cadences of the Shipping Forecast, thought for a moment I’d done irreversible damage to my brain. It was more that my new Saturday nights, quintessentially British and brimming with camaraderie, felt like whatever I’d been running to, which no longer needed to be found. The first Desert Island Discs castaway I ever heard was Joseph Rotblat, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who’d helped to invent the atomic bomb and then spent much of the rest of his life trying to undo the consequences. In his nineties now, he spoke urgently, with a Polish accent and the ragged rasp of age, and he described for the interviewer how, after Hiroshima, he’d vowed to change his life in two major ways. One was to redirect his research from nuclear reactions to medical operations. The other was to raise awareness of the potential dangers of science and make its practitioners more responsible for their work. His musical selections—the eight records he’d take with him if banished to a desert island—strayed little from these ideals: Kol Nidrei, Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, A Rill Will Be A Stream, A Stream Will Be A Flood, performed by the Swedish Physicians in Concert for the Prevention of Nuclear War . . .

Your ambition, said Sue Lawley, when the Swedish Physicians had faded out, goes beyond a nuclear-weapons-free world. You want to see a world free of war. Do you believe that it will happen, or do you simply dream that it might?

It must happen. I’ve got two objectives in my life, what’s still left of it. The short-term objective and a long-term objective. The short-term objective is the elimination of nuclear weapons, and the long-term objective is the elimination of war. And the reason why I felt that one is important is because even if we eliminate nuclear weapons, we cannot disinvent them. Should there be a serious conflict in the future between great powers, they could be reintroduced. Moreover, and this comes back to the responsibility of scientists: certain other fields of science, particularly genetic engineering, could result in the development of another weapon of mass destruction, maybe more readily available than nuclear weapons. And therefore the only way is to prevent war. So there would be no need at all. Any type of war. We have got to remove war as a recognized social institution. We have got to learn to sort out disputes without military confrontation.

And do you believe there is a real chance of that happening?

I believe we are already moving towards it! In my lifetime, I have seen the changes that have occurred in society. I’ve lived through two world wars. In both of these wars, France and Germany, for example, were mortal enemies. They killed each other off. Now, the idea of war between these two countries is quite inconceivable. And this applies to other nations in the European Union. This is an enormous revolution. People don’t realize how big a change has occurred. We have to educate ourselves to the culture of peace, rather than the culture of violence in which we live now. . . . In the words of Friedrich von Schiller: Alle Menschen werden Brüder. All men will be brothers. This, I hope, will be achieved.

Before the interview concluded and the theme music with squawking seagulls resumed, Rotblat also recounted how, in 1939, having accepted an invitation to study physics in Liverpool, he’d left his wife alone in Poland because his stipend was not sufficient to support them both. The following summer, after receiving a small raise, he returned to Warsaw to collect her, but Tola had come down with appendicitis and was unable to travel. So Rotblat went back to England alone, expecting her to follow as soon as she was well, but two days after he arrived in England Germany invaded Poland, and all means of contact between him and his wife were suspended. Only after several months did he manage to reach her with the assistance of the Red Cross and make plans to get her out through a friend in Denmark. Then