Time & Perspective Quote by Joseph Rotblat

Rotblat’s sentence lands like a quiet indictment disguised as a historical observation. The “iron curtain” is doing double duty: it’s the familiar Cold War metaphor, but it also frames science itself as a supposedly borderless enterprise that, in practice, became partitioned into rival pipelines of funding, secrecy, and prestige. By stressing “both sides,” he refuses the moral comfort of blaming only the other camp. The target isn’t just statesmen and generals; it’s the lab bench.

The phrase “played a very significant role” is deliberately restrained, almost clinical, which makes the accusation sharper. Rotblat isn’t ranting about evil scientists; he’s pointing to a systemic collaboration between scientific ambition and national security logic. “Maintaining the momentum” suggests something more insidious than a series of discrete decisions: once set in motion, the arms race becomes self-propelling, with researchers supplying the innovations that justify the next budget, the next test, the next escalation. Momentum is what you get when responsibility is dispersed.

Context matters because Rotblat isn’t an armchair critic. He worked on the Manhattan Project and famously left when it became clear Germany wasn’t building a bomb; later he became a leading advocate for nuclear restraint and co-founded the Pugwash Conferences. That biography charges the quote with lived regret and credibility. Subtext: scientists like to imagine themselves as neutral problem-solvers, but in the Cold War they were also political actors, whether they admitted it or not.