Science Quote by Otto Hahn

Hahn delivers the line with the cool arithmetic of a lab report, and that chill is the point. He frames a moral rupture - ignoring the Hague Convention's limits on chemical warfare - as an initial public-relations problem ("the English were very surprised"), then pivots to an exculpation-by-equivalence: once Britain also used poison gas, the original breach becomes, in his telling, a wash. It's a move from legality to reciprocity, from norms to scorekeeping.

The subtext is defensive, and distinctly postwar. Hahn isn't just recalling military history; he's laundering responsibility through comparison. The phrasing "at least as much" is lawyerly: unverifiable enough to be useful, precise enough to sound factual. It invites the reader to downgrade outrage into a cynical shrug. If everyone is guilty, no one has to be.

Context matters: Hahn was a chemist who served in Germany's World War I chemical warfare apparatus (working with Fritz Haber) and later became central to nuclear fission science. That biography sharpens the line's ethical resonance. It's a scientist's rhetoric applied to politics - measurement standing in for judgment. The sentence also captures how quickly "civilized" constraints can be reframed once total war takes hold. The Hague rules are treated less as a moral line than a shared fiction sustained only until someone finds tactical advantage in breaking it.

What makes the quote work is its refusal to sound dramatic. The understatement reads like moral anesthesia: a record of how atrocities become normal once they can be tabulated.