Science Quote by George Wald

The line lands like a cold memo disguised as candor: not a rallying cry, not a policy tweak, but a refusal of the comforting premise that technology can always rescue us. When George Wald says, "I think all of you know", he’s not being polite. He’s cornering the listener into shared complicity, calling out the public theater where officials pretend “defense” is a solvable engineering problem rather than a political and moral one. The phrase "adequate defense" does the real work: it concedes that you can buy time, build shelters, harden command systems, intercept a few warheads maybe. Adequate? No. Not against "massive" attack, the word that collapses every technical workaround into absurdity.

Coming from a scientist, the intent is corrective. Wald isn’t trading in patriotism or apocalyptic poetry; he’s asserting a boundary condition, the way a physicist states a limit. It’s a critique of the Cold War logic that sold the public on safety through escalation: bigger arsenals, smarter missiles, cleaner deterrence. The subtext is that “defense” becomes a psychological product - reassurance for voters, a revenue stream for contractors, a rhetorical shield for leaders unwilling to say the only real protection is preventing war in the first place.

Context matters: mid-20th-century faith in scientific progress had already built the bomb; Wald’s warning turns that faith back on itself. If the same ingenuity that split the atom can’t meaningfully shield civilians from what it unleashed, then the fantasy of survivable nuclear war isn’t just wrong. It’s dangerous propaganda.