Life & Wisdom Quote by Timothy Garton Ash

Call it the historian’s version of a fire alarm: calm, declarative, and meant to cut through the noise. Timothy Garton Ash isn’t writing to shock; he’s writing to discipline attention. By pairing “nuclear proliferation” with the broader “proliferation of WMDs altogether,” he widens the frame from a single nightmare scenario to an ecosystem of risks: states shopping for deterrence, illicit networks moving components, and technological diffusion making yesterday’s “high bar” today’s DIY ambition. The dash does rhetorical work here. It’s a corrective, as if he anticipates the audience’s tendency to obsess over mushroom clouds while ignoring the grayer-spectrum horrors of chemical and biological weapons, or the political incentives that make them attractive.

The phrase “one of the greatest dangers of our time” is deliberately non-specific, and that’s the point. It refuses the comfort of ranking crises like a pundit’s bracket. “Our time” invokes a post-Cold War world where the old superpower duopoly no longer contains the problem, and where non-state actors, fragile regimes, and regional rivalries turn proliferation into a contagion rather than a chess match. Subtext: liberal democracies have grown complacent about existential threats, treating arms control as a niche technocratic file instead of a central civic priority.

Ash’s intent is less prophecy than agenda-setting. He’s nudging readers toward the unglamorous work of treaties, verification, diplomacy, and restraint - the infrastructure of survival that only becomes visible when it fails.