This is the reality of nuclear weapons: they may trigger a world war; a war which, unlike previous ones, destroys all of civilization.
Interpretation
Nuclear weapons represent a grave threat to civilization, as they could lead to destruction on an unprecedented scale.
Joseph Rotblat highlights the existential danger posed by nuclear weapons, emphasizing that their deployment could spark a global conflict resulting in the total annihilation of human civilization. Unlike past wars, which while devastating, left some remnants of society intact, a nuclear war threatens to obliterate all aspects of civilization, urging a deep reflection on the moral and ethical implications of such destructive capabilities.
In practice
In discussions about global security and disarmament, this quote emphasizes the dire consequences of nuclear warfare.
But the first the general public learned about the discovery was the news of the destruction of Hiroshima by the atom bomb. A splendid achievement of science and technology had turned malign. Science became identified with death and destruction.
If the militarily most powerful and least threatened states need nuclear weapons for their security, how can one deny such security to countries that are truly insecure? The present nuclear policy is a recipe for proliferation. It is a policy for disaster.
The quest for a war-free world has a basic purpose: survival. But if in the process we learn how to achieve it by love rather than by fear, by kindness rather than by compulsion; if in the process we learn to combine the essential with the enjoyable, the expedient with the benevolent, the practical with the beautiful, this will be an extra incentive to embark on this great task.
Indeed, the whole human species is endangered, by nuclear weapons or by other means of wholesale destruction which further advances in science are likely to produce.
Technology is driving us together. In many ways we are becoming like one family. With the global threats resulting from science and technology, the whole of humankind now needs protection. We have to extend our loyalty to the whole of the human race.
Truth is a tyrant-the only tyrant to whom we can give our allegiance. The service of truth is a matter of heroism.
Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.
The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.
Memory depends mainly upon myth. Some even occurs in our minds, in actuality or in fantasy; we form it in memory, molding it like clay day after day - and soon we have made out of that event a myth. We then keep the myth in memory as a guide to future similar situations.
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