This is a cute story about a person I didn't know about... still I notice a twinge of doubt within myself. It seems implicit in this post that Joseph Rotblat is a heroic figure.

It is not at all clear to me that Joseph Rotblat was on the right side of history. I think at the very minimum we should be very skeptical of this narrative.

A more realistic perspective is that pacifism (even "realistic") is a form of deontological cowardice that abdicates the moral burden of making difficult tradeoffs to more mature actors. Ignoring game theory does not make virtue. It is the opposite of virtue.

There is no plausible world in which nuclear weapons would not be built. A group of scientists realized the terrifying power of atomic energy, warned their democratically elected government won the race of the labs again Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The newly inaugurated president Truman was faced with a terrible decision: to release a 'rain of ruin the likes of which this earth has never seen before' on tens of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians to force Imperial Japan to surrender. We know from internal documents that despite a string of defeats and the overwhelming force of the US forces, the Japanese Cabinet was prepared to sacrifice millions of Japanese and American lives to fight to the very end. Even after the news of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the concurrent invasion of the Soviet Union the Cabinet was stalemated with half of leadership determined to keep fighting. It was only the intervention of the Emperor himself, an unprecedented move, that the Japanese government was finally compelled to surrender.

But even this was barely enough - the fervor of the Japanese fighting spirit was so great that even after the Cabinet had decided to surrender, they faced a military coup that was barely thwarted. The last Japanese soldier surrended in 1973 (!).

That same group of scientists understood and warned about the grave danger of what was unlocked. As the Soviet Union and the West became locked into an inevitable arms race that group of scientists and their intellectual descendants [as well as wise politicians & army officiers] developped game theory, commitment mechanisms, and plans that have kept the world save from atomic holocaust (so far). They did this with a full understanding of the inherent moral dilemmas that war in general and nuclear war in particular pose. They did so without running away or denying these moral dilemmas but facing them head-on, accepting the karmic burden of consequentialist heroism.

@Grok 4.7

Please expand and detail the above argument