Science Quote by Mordechai Vanunu

A single sentence, drained of adjectives, that lands like a confession and an indictment at once. Vanunu frames his role as “my job,” the most ordinary phrase in modern life, then bolts it to “plutonium” and “atomic bomb,” two nouns that instantly enlarge the moral stakes. The tension is the point: mass destruction described in the language of payroll and procedure. He’s showing how catastrophe is built - not by comic-book villains, but by people clocking in, specializing, and following orders.

The passive construction matters, too: “was used.” It distances him from the final act while still admitting complicity in the supply chain. That half-step back is the subtext of a whistleblower who knows the ethical trap of technical work inside a secrecy state: you can be both a cog and a catalyst. Vanunu isn’t boasting about proximity to power; he’s stripping it of glamour.

Context sharpens the line into something political. Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear technician, became internationally known after revealing details of Israel’s nuclear program to the British press in the 1980s, after which he was abducted, tried, and imprisoned. Read against that history, the sentence doubles as a challenge to the taboo around nuclear opacity: if the state insists the program is unspeakable, he insists on speaking it plainly. The intent isn’t just to inform; it’s to puncture the protective abstraction that lets democracies outsource their conscience to classified labs.