Education is one of the most important factors in a person’s life - it shapes your friends as a child, your future career, and has tangible effects on a person’s earning potential, health, and more. The state government has the responsibility, and privilege, to provide every child with a K-12 education through a system of public schools as directed by the Arizona Constitution. The Arizona State Legislature expanded the public school system to include charter schools to facilitate more choices for students and parents in the delivery of education. In the late 1990s and throughout the last two decades, Arizona would form, fund, and begin to prioritize a parallel publicly-funded private education system. Through the creation of the School Tuition Organization income tax credits, vouchers, and the Empowerment Scholarship Account program the Arizona State Legislature has systematically diverted funds from public schools to private education institutions. A report by the Center for the Future of Arizona, The Arizona We Want: The Decade Ahead, identified a range of issues, including education, that a majority of Arizonans find consensus on. Arizonans agree that a quality K-12 public education system is one of the most important issues to improving Arizona’s future and 73% agree that more money should be spent on K-12 education. Arizona leaders have shown a concerning willingness to ignore expressed public values in relation to education - these policy decisions have left our state public schools, which 88% of Arizona children attend, critically underfunded. Now is the time for all Arizonans to support the future we want by pushing for a strong, well-funded K-12 public education system.

Joseph Rotblat (1908-2005) was the only physicist to leave the Manhattan Project for moral reasons before its completion. He would spend the rest of his life advocating for nuclear disarmament. His activities for disarmament resulted in the formation, in 1957, of the Pugwash conferences, which emerged as the leading global forum to advance limits on nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Rotblat's efforts, and the activities of Pugwash, resulted in both being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. Rotblat is a central figure in the global history of resistance to the spread of nuclear weapons. He also was an important figure in the emergence, after World War II, of a counter-movement to introduce new social justifications for scientific research and new models for ethics and professionalism among scientists. Rotblat embodies the power of the individual scientist to say "no" and thus, at least individually, put limits of conscience on his or her scientific activity. This paper explores the political and ethical choices scientists make as part of their effort to behave responsibly and to influence the outcomes of their work. By analyzing three phases of Rotblat's life, I demonstrate how he pursued his ideal of beneficial science, or science that appears to benefit humanity. The three phases are: (1) his decision to leave the Manhattan Project in 1944, (2) his role in the creation of Pugwash in 1957 and his role in the rise of the organization into international prominence and (3) his winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. These three phases of Rotblat's life provide a singular window of the history of nuclear weapons and the international movement for scientific responsibility in the 50 years since the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. While this paper does not provide a complete picture of Rotblat's life and times, I argue that his experiences shed important light on the difficult question of the individual responsibility of scientists.

In September 1945, after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States possessed only one nuclear weapon. Thirteen years later, in September 1958, the nation possessed a significant stockpile of nuclear weapons, including the very powerful hydrogen bomb. The United States was able to build its stockpile of nuclear weapons because the Los Alamos Laboratory, once a secret wartime facility, was able to convert the forces of nature – fission and fusion – into weapons of war. The United States also was successful because of the sacrifice made by a tiny Pacific Ocean nation, The Marshall Islands, and the people of Bikini, Enewetak, and Rongelap Atolls. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States tested sixty-six nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands. Nuclear testing contaminated these three atolls and, in one instance, injured the people of Rongelap. As a result of this testing many of these people cannot return to their ancestral homes. This dissertation examines the many conditions that led to the creation of the Los Alamos Laboratory, its testing of nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, and the long term, perhaps, permanent, displacement of the people of Bikini, Enewetak, and Rongelap.