Time & Perspective Quote by William Scranton

Trust the experts, they said; the worst-case was basically off the menu. Scranton’s sentence is a museum piece of institutional reassurance, built out of bureaucratic scaffolding: “information,” “people,” “knew something,” “not a likelihood.” It’s not persuasion by argument so much as persuasion by delegation. Responsibility gets passed around like a clipboard until it lands nowhere.

The intent is plainly defensive. Scranton isn’t describing nuclear physics; he’s describing a chain of authority meant to calm a public and, just as importantly, to justify prior decisions. Notice the careful layering: “NRC people” (regulators), “our people” (insiders), and the vague credential “knew something.” The phrase doesn’t elevate expertise; it dilutes it, turning “expert” into a social category rather than a specific claim you can audit. Then comes the key hedge: “not a likelihood to happen.” It avoids saying “impossible,” but it also avoids grappling with what low-probability, high-consequence risks actually demand.

The subtext is the politics of uncertainty. Scranton is signaling that leaders acted on the best available guidance while quietly acknowledging that guidance is always partial, mediated, and, in crises, frequently wrong. In the shadow of nuclear accidents and near-misses, “breach of the core” is the phrase that carries the dread. Yet he treats it like a forecast error: a thing that could be misestimated, not a calamity that should reshape how we communicate risk.

Context matters because nuclear governance runs on public trust. Scranton’s language shows how that trust is manufactured: by invoking institutions, smoothing probabilities, and hoping the rhetorical containment holds even if the physical containment doesn’t.