Politics & Power Quote by Joseph Rotblat

Rotblat’s sentence is engineered to sound like a calm briefing, not a sermon, and that’s the point: he borrows the authority of “studies” and “senior military and political personalities” to smuggle in a radical claim. Nuclear weapons, he implies, aren’t just immoral; they’re operationally unnecessary for almost everything governments actually fight about. The parenthetical carve-out - “except for disputes between the present nuclear states” - is a scalpel. It concedes the one scenario nuclear advocates obsess over (peer war), then frames it as the exception that proves the rule: if nukes are only “needed” to manage other nuclear states, their utility is largely self-created.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of deterrence logic. Nuclear arsenals don’t solve the conflicts that dominate modern history - civil wars, insurgencies, border clashes, coercive diplomacy - because those conflicts are politically messy and militarily ambiguous. A city-eraser is a blunt instrument in a world of limited aims. By emphasizing conventional capability, Rotblat also undercuts the prestige economy of nuclear status: the bomb as shorthand for seriousness, modernity, membership in the club.

Context matters. Rotblat was the physicist who walked away from the Manhattan Project on moral grounds and later helped build the Pugwash movement. He isn’t naïve about power; he’s strategically narrowing the debate. If most threats can be handled without nuclear weapons, then nukes are revealed less as “security” than as a permanent hostage situation nations stage for one another - a dangerous equilibrium maintained by habit, pride, and institutional self-interest.