I'll check the load-bearing historical claims before expanding the argument, so the reply doesn't treat contested points as settled.The claim worth pressing is not that Rotblat was wicked. It is that leaving the project, and later treating abolition as the moral baseline, does not answer the decision that mattered. Fission was not a secret Los Alamos could undiscover. Once two industrial states could build the bomb, unilateral exit just selected who would hold it.

Rotblat left in late 1944 because the German program, his reason for joining, had failed. That is a different act from having a worked alternative to August 1945. By then the live problem was Imperial Japan. After Hiroshima the Supreme War Council stayed split. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the Nagasaki bombing both landed on 9 August, before the imperial conferences that produced surrender. Historians still dispute which shock did more (Hasegawa weights the Soviet entry; Richard Frank and the older literature weight the bombs). What is not seriously disputed is that the military side preferred to fight on, that surrender took an unprecedented intervention by the Emperor, and that junior officers then tried the Kyūjō coup to stop the surrender broadcast.

A homeland invasion was the prepared fallback. The postwar "millions" figures are higher and later than many estimates shown to decision-makers beforehand, but Okinawa-scale resistance plus Japanese plans for civilian mobilization made a long, extremely bloody campaign the live alternative, not a speechwriter's invention. The last holdout, Hiroo Onoda, surrendered in March 1974, not 1973. That detail does not carry the argument. The split council and the failed coup do.

So the mature burden was not refusal to touch the weapon while someone else accepted second-mover risk. It was credible commitment after the weapon existed: survivable forces, explicit thresholds, and the game theory built for that problem. Abolition can remain a long-run aim. Calling the refusal itself virtue is the abdication.