Science Quote by Joseph Rotblat

Rotblat’s line is a quiet rebuke to the tidy story we tell about nuclear history: that only spreadsheets of megadeaths and game-theory logic finally taught humanity to fear the Bomb. He insists the dread came first. “Long before” positions moral intuition as earlier, and in some sense wiser, than strategic expertise. The real target isn’t just nukes; it’s the technocratic habit of treating ethical revulsion as an immature reaction that must wait for “recognized” risk to legitimize it.

The phrasing does sly work. “Terrifying potential” is almost clinical, as if he’s mimicking the language of defense analysts. Then he undercuts it with “instinctive abhorrence,” a phrase that rehabilitates emotion as evidence. Rotblat is saying: people didn’t need the arms race to get scary for the weapon to be obscene. They already felt it in their bodies.

Context sharpens the intent. Rotblat was a Manhattan Project physicist who walked away when Germany’s bomb program collapsed, then spent decades pushing scientists to own the consequences of what they build (and to resist becoming mere contractors for state power). From that vantage, “widespread” matters: he’s locating anti-nuclear desire not as fringe idealism but as a suppressed majority sentiment, routinely overridden by Cold War momentum and bureaucratic self-justification.

The subtext is accusatory but restrained: if the abhorrence was there all along, what failed wasn’t imagination. It was political will, and the moral courage to treat a gut-level “no” as policy-worthy knowledge.