"The missiles come first, and the justifications come second"
About this Quote
Power doesn’t argue its way into action; it acts, then hires a story. E. P. Thompson’s line has the snap of a historian sick of official theater: the missiles arrive on schedule, and only after the fact do the speeches, white papers, and moral alibis show up to make it sound inevitable. The phrasing is a small masterpiece of demystification. “First” and “second” reduce grand strategy to a crude sequence, puncturing the fantasy that war-making begins in deliberation or ethical anguish. The order of operations is the indictment.
Thompson wrote as a leading critic of Cold War militarism, especially nuclear policy and the technocratic language that insulated it from democratic scrutiny. Read against that backdrop, “missiles” aren’t just weapons; they’re the physical infrastructure of commitment. Once deployed, they create their own logic: deterrence, credibility, alliance management, “stability.” The justifications are less causes than maintenance work, keeping the public acclimated to a posture that has already been decided.
The subtext is also about class and expertise. “Justifications” suggests a professional caste of strategists, politicians, and compliant commentators who translate brute force into a vocabulary of necessity and responsibility. Thompson’s intent is to reverse the usual moral timeline. Instead of believing we are persuaded into violence, he wants us to notice how persuasion is often retrofitted to violence, a narrative prosthetic designed to protect the decision-makers from accountability and the rest of us from the horror of recognizing what’s been done in our name.
Thompson wrote as a leading critic of Cold War militarism, especially nuclear policy and the technocratic language that insulated it from democratic scrutiny. Read against that backdrop, “missiles” aren’t just weapons; they’re the physical infrastructure of commitment. Once deployed, they create their own logic: deterrence, credibility, alliance management, “stability.” The justifications are less causes than maintenance work, keeping the public acclimated to a posture that has already been decided.
The subtext is also about class and expertise. “Justifications” suggests a professional caste of strategists, politicians, and compliant commentators who translate brute force into a vocabulary of necessity and responsibility. Thompson’s intent is to reverse the usual moral timeline. Instead of believing we are persuaded into violence, he wants us to notice how persuasion is often retrofitted to violence, a narrative prosthetic designed to protect the decision-makers from accountability and the rest of us from the horror of recognizing what’s been done in our name.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|
More Quotes by P. Thompson
Add to List
