Science Quote by Mordechai Vanunu

Vanunu’s power here isn’t in poetry; it’s in the flat, almost clerical specificity. “They call it lithium-6 and tritium” sounds like lab talk, but the phrasing quietly marks distance: not “we,” not “I built,” but “they call it,” as if he’s narrating someone else’s vocabulary to an outside world that was never supposed to hear it. The technical nouns do the heavy lifting. He doesn’t need to name a country or a facility; isotopes function as fingerprints, and he knows it.

The line tightens into moral accusation with a scientist’s most damning move: narrowing the variable set. “The only use for lithium-6 is the hydrogen bomb” is an attempt to foreclose plausible deniability. In nuclear politics, ambiguity is a strategy and a shield; Vanunu punctures it by insisting the material has no civilian alibi. He’s not arguing about deterrence, regional security, or national survival - the usual rhetorical fog. He’s reducing the story to supply chains and intent, where ethics becomes legible.

Context matters: Vanunu spoke as a whistleblower from inside a secretive program, and this sentence reads like evidence offered to a court of public opinion that never had jurisdiction. It also reveals the psychological pivot of an insider turned dissenter: he frames himself as “producing, working,” not commanding. Responsibility, he implies, sits above his pay grade - but knowledge makes him complicit unless he speaks. The chill comes from how normal it all sounds. That’s the point. Ordinary work, extraordinary consequence.