"Every adult in the world has some sense that he or she might be obliterated at any time by these weapons that we have created"
About this Quote
There is a clinical chill in Lifton's phrasing: the terror isn’t a passing fear, it’s an ambient condition of adulthood. By choosing “every adult,” he frames nuclear anxiety as a kind of unwanted citizenship, a baseline mental weather. “Some sense” is the sly psychological pivot. It concedes denial and distraction while insisting the knowledge is lodged somewhere deeper than conversation, closer to reflex. You can ignore it, but your nervous system can’t.
The sentence also smuggles in culpability. “These weapons that we have created” refuses the comforting fiction that apocalypse is an act of nature or a villain’s plot. The subject is collective, implicating voters, taxpayers, scientists, generals, the whole ecosystem of modern states. Lifton is doing what he often does as a psychologist of mass violence: mapping how societies metabolize the unthinkable, how they normalize dread so daily life can continue. The subtext is that coping is not neutral; it can slide into moral sleepwalking.
“Obliterated” is deliberately absolute, not “killed” or “defeated.” It evokes erasure, the end of narrative, the annihilation of meaning itself. That extremity matters because it explains the strange double life of nuclear culture: long stretches of silence punctuated by spikes of panic, activism, and grim fascination. Lifton’s context - Cold War brinkmanship and the post-Hiroshima moral hangover - makes the line less prophecy than diagnosis. He’s naming a shared, half-suppressed awareness that modern power has made survival feel contingent, and adulthood a little like living under a clock you didn’t set.
The sentence also smuggles in culpability. “These weapons that we have created” refuses the comforting fiction that apocalypse is an act of nature or a villain’s plot. The subject is collective, implicating voters, taxpayers, scientists, generals, the whole ecosystem of modern states. Lifton is doing what he often does as a psychologist of mass violence: mapping how societies metabolize the unthinkable, how they normalize dread so daily life can continue. The subtext is that coping is not neutral; it can slide into moral sleepwalking.
“Obliterated” is deliberately absolute, not “killed” or “defeated.” It evokes erasure, the end of narrative, the annihilation of meaning itself. That extremity matters because it explains the strange double life of nuclear culture: long stretches of silence punctuated by spikes of panic, activism, and grim fascination. Lifton’s context - Cold War brinkmanship and the post-Hiroshima moral hangover - makes the line less prophecy than diagnosis. He’s naming a shared, half-suppressed awareness that modern power has made survival feel contingent, and adulthood a little like living under a clock you didn’t set.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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