"The end of the cold war brought one unexpected result," says Rotblat. "The general public began to believe this also meant an end to the nuclear threat. People are no longer worried about nuclear weapons, and this has been taken advantage of by a group of hardliners in the United States. For all the years of the Cold War we thought of nuclear weapons as weapons of last resort. One year ago this changed completely. The Bush administration came out with a new nuclear policy, which stated that nuclear weapons should be treated like any other weapon in the military armoury. In other words you can now use nuclear weapons as you would any conventional weapon.
"People don't realise how dramatic a change this is. And moreover, following this policy the Americans are building new weapons. And if they build new weapons they have to be tested. We had a moratorium on testing which the Americans signed but never ratified and now they are going to break this moratorium. China will follow if it feels threatened � then India, then Pakistan. We are definitely going to have a new nuclear arms race. This is why I feel the present situation is far more dangerous than what we had through the entire period of the Cold War."
at Radio Netherlands, Joseph Rotblat, the only scientist to resign, due to moral objections, from the first atomic bomb project in Los Alamos.
Head of an organization called "Pugwash"
In 1995 he and the organisation were awarded the Nobel peace prize.
