It's very difficult to convince other countries that they shouldn't pursue nuclear weapons programs if we ourselves are actively developing a component of a strategic defense system.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the hypocrisy of promoting disarmament while maintaining aggressive defense strategies.
In this quote, Steven Weinberg emphasizes the challenges of advocating against nuclear proliferation when oneβs own country is engaged in developing advanced military technologies. The statement illustrates the complexities of international relations and moral integrity, suggesting that a nation must first exemplify the values it promotes to others, particularly in sensitive issues like nuclear weapons.
In practice
A speech at a disarmament conference arguing for global nuclear disarmament.
It was one time when people thought the value of the fine structure constant was important. Now of course it's still important, of course, as a practical matter,but we now know that the value it has is a function, that in any fundamental theory you derive the fine structure constant as a function of all sorts of mass ratios and so on and it's not really that fundamental.
Americans swept away the instruments of English hereditary inequality - entails and titles of nobility - even before we had a constitution.
[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
I'm offended by the kind of smarmy religiosity that's all around us, perhaps more in America than in Europe, and not really that harmful because it's not really that intense or even that serious, but just... you know after a while you get tired of hearing clergymen giving the invocation at various public celebrations and you feel, haven't we outgrown all this? Do we have to listen to this?
How strange it would be if the final theory were to be discovered in our lifetimes! The discovery of the final laws of nature will mark a discontinuity in human intellectual history, the sharpest that has occurred since the beginning of modern science in the seventeenth century. Can we now imagine what that would be like?
There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting... But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.
People who think you could wave a magic wand and the legacy of the past will be over are blind.
To have a faith, therefore, or a trust in anything, where God hath not promised, is plain idolatry, and a worshipping of thine own imagination instead of God.
And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin is pride that apes humility.
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