The Strangest Dream

 

Jeffrey St. Clair 

 

+ Forget going to see Christopher Nolan’s bloated exercise in sanitized nuclear hagiography and instead watch The Strangest Dream, Eric Bednarski’s compelling 2008 documentary on Joseph Rotblat, the Polish physicist, who resigned from the Manhattan Project in protest after it became clear that Nazi Germany had ended its nuclear weapons research program. Rotblat was a driving force behind the 1955 Albert Einstein-Bertrand Russell Manifesto, which called for nuclear disarmament and a negotiated end to the escalating Cold War. Rotblat went on to co-found the anti-nuclear Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, with whom he shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 “for efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international affairs and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms.” Rotblat, along with Leo Szilard and Joseph Franck, was a consistent voice of sanity amid a throng of mad scientists. The film can be viewed here online courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada.