Politics & Power Quote by Joseph Rotblat

Rotblat’s sentence is a quiet act of moral jujitsu: it yanks nuclear history away from the myth of scientific inevitability and pins it on a far more mundane culprit - government choice dressed up as necessity. The phrasing is clinical, almost bureaucratic, and that’s the point. “Decision” and “perceptions” demote the atom bomb from a fateful breakthrough to a policy option, selected under pressure, uncertainty, and ambition. The deadliest technology in modern history is framed not as destiny, but as a set of arguments that happened to win.

The subtext lands hardest in the word “perceptions.” Rotblat isn’t conceding that leaders acted on hard, immutable facts; he’s suggesting they acted on interpretations - threat inflation, prestige calculations, interservice rivalry, and the desire to end a war on terms that would shape the postwar order. In one clause, he links Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the Cold War’s stockpiling logic: once a government normalizes mass civilian killing as a strategic instrument, “buildup” follows as bureaucratic momentum, not just deterrence theory.

Context sharpens the intent. Rotblat left the Manhattan Project after it became clear Germany wouldn’t get the bomb first, then spent decades warning that scientists can’t launder responsibility by calling themselves mere technicians. This line is his indictment of the “we just built it” alibi. Nuclear weapons weren’t born in a lab alone; they were legitimated in cabinet rooms, then perpetuated by the political incentives of fear, secrecy, and power.