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.
The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice.
A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
We are, all of us, exploring a world none of us understands...searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living...for the integrity, the courage to be whole, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences...Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it.
I believe, if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class. There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall into this vice.
Often a retrospect delights the mind.
The eye of the heart, though closed in fallen man, is able to take in a glimmering of light and this is faith. But anyway of living causes a covering like rust to accumulate over the heart so that it cannot sense the Divine origin of Allah's message.
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