War & Peace Quote by Joseph Rotblat

Rotblat’s demand for a no-first-use treaty is the kind of moral engineering only a physicist-turned-disarmer would frame with such deceptively clean logic: change the initial condition, and the whole system’s trajectory can shift. “Recognize that this is so” carries the impatience of someone who thinks the evidence has long been in, and that what blocks action isn’t complexity but political habit and strategic ego. He’s not begging; he’s calling bluff on the idea that nuclear safety is best maintained through ambiguity and threat.

The specific intent is practical and catalytic. No-first-use isn’t pitched as a warm, symbolic gesture; it’s a lever. By removing the option of initiating nuclear war, states would have to admit that these weapons are for deterrence only, not usable tools of policy. That admission matters because it narrows doctrine, curbs escalation incentives in a crisis, and makes arms control more than a photo op. Rotblat’s “Treaty form” isn’t legal pedantry; it’s a bet on verification, reputational cost, and institutional memory outlasting any one leader’s bravado.

The subtext is sharper: nuclear states, left to their own rhetoric, treat apocalypse as a bargaining chip. Rotblat is asking them to renounce that power publicly, then use the resulting trust dividend to step down the ladder “gradual[ly], mutual[ly].” Context does the heavy lifting. Rotblat left the Manhattan Project on principle and spent the Cold War warning that technical brilliance without ethical restraint becomes self-destructive. “Down to zero” reads utopian until you remember his premise: the real fantasy is thinking first-use threats can be managed indefinitely.