Politics & Power Quote by Joseph Rotblat

Rotblat’s line works because it’s a trapdoor: it starts in the familiar language of “national security” and then quietly removes the floor. The first clause mirrors the official script - nuclear weapons as insurance, testing as due diligence - without caricature. That restraint is the point. He’s not arguing with a straw man; he’s quoting the priesthood of statecraft in its own liturgy. Then comes the pivot: “But this argument can be made by other countries as well.” It’s devastatingly plain, almost bureaucratic, and that’s why it cuts. If security is the justificatory solvent that dissolves moral limits for one nation, it dissolves them for all.

The subtext is a critique of exceptionalism disguised as logic. Nuclear policy often leans on an unspoken hierarchy: responsible states may possess the bomb; irresponsible ones must be prevented. Rotblat punctures that by universalizing the rationale. Once you admit the premise that existential fear authorizes extraordinary violence, you’ve granted every rival the same permission slip. Deterrence stops looking like stability and starts looking like a contagious argument.

Context sharpens the intent. Rotblat wasn’t an outside scold; he helped build the atomic project and then walked away, later shaping anti-nuclear efforts like the Pugwash Conferences and winning the Nobel Peace Prize. That biography gives the sentence its ethical torque: it’s not pacifist naivete, it’s a physicist warning that the logic of the bomb is inherently replicable. The real target is not any single arsenal, but the comforting fiction that danger can be monopolized.