Science & Tech Quote by John Sununu

The line works like a trapdoor: it starts with inevitability and ends with dread. “Technology that will not go away” is a quiet concession of permanence, a way of shutting down any fantasy of rollback or moral purification. Sununu isn’t arguing that the tech is good; he’s arguing that it’s here, and that reality forces a choice. That framing is classic risk-management politics: don’t debate the existence of the tool, debate who gets to control it.

Then comes the lever that moves the audience: “terrorist group like al Qaeda.” The phrasing is doing double duty. It pins the threat to a name that, in the post-9/11 American imagination, functions as shorthand for catastrophe, while leaving the category open-ended (“or to other focused enemies”), so the fear stays flexible and evergreen. You can swap in new villains as the news cycle evolves. The sentence also subtly recasts restriction or delay as a form of negligence: to “risk it moving” implies passivity, as if the only responsible posture is active containment or expansion of state capacity.

Context matters: Sununu, a Republican strategist and former New Hampshire governor, speaks from a political tradition that often treats national security as the ultimate trump card in technology policy. The real subtext is about legitimizing surveillance, control of sensitive research, or aggressive counterproliferation measures without naming the civil-liberties costs. “Tragic consequences” is intentionally nonspecific; it invites the listener to supply their own worst-case scenario, which is always more persuasive than any concrete example.