War & Peace Quote by Joseph Rotblat

Declaring the Cold War “over” is the easy part; diagnosing its afterlife is the harder, more accusatory move. Rotblat’s line works because it treats history less like a calendar event than a mental habit. The phrase “Cold War thinking” compresses an entire operating system: zero-sum logic, threat inflation, security as permanent emergency, and a reflex to sort the world into camps. By pairing a neat geopolitical endpoint with a messy psychological persistence, he exposes the comforting myth that institutions and instincts reset when treaties are signed.

The subtext is pointed coming from a physicist who watched modern warfare become an engineering problem. Rotblat helped launch the atomic age and then spent decades trying to contain its implications, leaving the Manhattan Project when it became clear Germany wasn’t building a bomb and later co-founding the Pugwash Conferences. So the sentence isn’t abstract wisdom; it’s a warning from someone who learned firsthand how quickly “defense” turns into an arms race justified by imagined inevitabilities.

Context matters: post-1989 triumphalism promised a “peace dividend” and a new world order, yet nuclear stockpiles, alliance politics, and proxy instincts lingered. Rotblat is pushing back against the idea that the enemy’s disappearance automatically produces prudence. His intent is moral and strategic at once: if your imagination is still organized around apocalyptic rivalry, you will keep manufacturing rivals, budgets, and worst-case scenarios to match. The danger isn’t nostalgia; it’s inertia with warheads.