Science Quote by Mordechai Vanunu

Vanunu’s sentence isn’t built to persuade with elegance; it’s built to detonate. The clunky, almost courtroom phrasing ("Second point is...") signals a man organizing an argument under pressure, anticipating cross-examination from a state that insists it has nothing to cross-examine. That procedural tone is the tell: he’s not delivering a manifesto, he’s laying out evidence for an audience trained to doubt him.

The specific intent is twofold. First, to puncture the mystique of Israel’s policy of nuclear ambiguity - the carefully maintained not-confirming, not-denying posture that lets allies avert their eyes and lets the region live with a permanent question mark. Second, to shift the moral burden outward: "no one here could predict or know" is less a factual claim than an indictment of global complacency. If the public can’t know, then officials who could have known chose not to.

His mention of a "hydrogen bomb" heightens the charge, even if experts dispute whether Israel possessed a true thermonuclear weapon at the time. Technically precise or not, rhetorically it does what it needs to: it moves the story from deterrence to apocalypse, from "security doctrine" to mass death. "Kill millions" is the plainest language possible because he’s trying to keep the debate from retreating into classified euphemisms.

Context matters: Vanunu is speaking as a scientist-turned-whistleblower who paid for disclosure with imprisonment and lifelong restriction. The subtext is personal and political: a warning that secrecy isn’t just a strategy, it’s a technology of permission.