Daily Inspiration Quote by E. P. Thompson

Calling “nuclear balance” metaphysical is Thompson’s way of puncturing a whole Cold War vocabulary that tried to make annihilation sound like accountancy. “Balance” is the soothing metaphor: two equal weights, stable scales, rational actors. Thompson hears the sleight of hand. In nuclear strategy, the “real” object being balanced isn’t territory or even conventional force; it’s the capacity to end civilization in an afternoon. Labeling that equilibrium “metaphysical” isn’t just an academic jab. It’s an accusation that the concept floats above human consequence, converting fear into an abstraction you can brief in a Pentagon slide deck.

The specific intent is political demystification. Thompson, a historian steeped in material conditions and social movements, refuses to treat deterrence theory as a natural law. He’s pointing at the way technocratic language launders moral panic: if the “balance” holds, we can pretend the system is stable, and if it doesn’t, the remedy becomes more warheads, more “credibility,” more readiness. The subtext: “balance” is a story elites tell themselves to domesticate an ungovernable danger, and to discipline publics into accepting permanent emergency.

Context matters. Thompson was a major voice in Britain’s nuclear disarmament movement, especially during the early 1980s Euromissile crisis, when NATO deployments and Soviet counterparts were sold as restoring strategic equilibrium. His line reads like a historian’s refusal to grant inevitability to policy. He’s reminding you that the “nuclear balance” is not a feature of the world; it’s a doctrine, a decision, and therefore something that can be unmade.