Science Quote by Mordechai Vanunu

Sleep deprivation is a blunt instrument dressed up as “psychology,” and Vanunu knows exactly why naming it that way lands. “I couldn’t sleep for two years” isn’t just a report of suffering; it’s an accusation about method. It frames the state not as a keeper of secrets but as an engineer of collapse, turning the body’s most basic need into a lever for compliance. The grammar is spare, almost documentary, which makes the claim feel colder and more credible: no ornament, no theatrics, just duration and intent.

The line “they tried to break my nerves” is doing cultural work. It translates institutional coercion into a bodily language anyone can understand: nerves as the last thin wire between self-control and panic. It also implies that the target wasn’t simply information but personhood. Breaking “nerves” means breaking the capacity to resist, to narrate yourself coherently, to trust your own perceptions.

Then comes the rhetorical pivot: “They used a lot of psychology to brainwash.” Vanunu isn’t describing a single dramatic tactic; he’s indicting a modern form of power that prefers soft science to overt brutality. “Psychology” becomes a euphemism for manipulation, isolation, and control of stimuli - techniques that can be bureaucratized, justified, and denied. In context, as the Israeli nuclear technician who exposed details of Israel’s nuclear program and then faced kidnapping, secret trial, and long isolation, the quote reads like a warning label on the machinery of secrecy: states don’t only punish leaks; they attempt to rewrite the leaker.