Nuclear war

We're in God's hands. But He does not look kindly on Babel-builders.
—J. R. R. Tolkien

Nuclear warfare, also known as atomic warfare, is a military conflict or prepared political strategy that deploys nuclear weaponry.

Quotes

Premonitions

• Man has mounted science, and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of men. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.
  • Henry Adams, Letter to Charles Francis Adams Jr. (London, April 11, 1862); in J. C. Levenson, E. Samuels, C. Vandersee and V. Hopkins Winner (eds.), The Letters of Henry Adams: 1858-1868 (1982), vol. 1, p. 290

• In the map of nearly every country of the world three or four more red circles, a score of miles in diameter, mark the position of the dying atomic bombs, and the death areas that men have been forced to abandon around them. Within these areas perished museums, cathedrals, palaces, libraries, galleries of masterpieces, and a vast accumulation of human achievement, whose charred remains lie buried, a legacy of curious material that only future generations may hope to examine.
  • H. G. Wells, The World Set Free (1914), p. 222

1940s

• If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.
  • Harry S. Truman, White House Press Release Announcing the Bombing of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945); this announcement was based largely on a draft of 31 July, by Secretary of War Henry Stimson

• This revelation of the secrets of nature, long mercifully withheld from man, should arouse the most solemn reflections in the mind and conscience of every human being capable of comprehension. We must indeed pray that these awful agencies will be made to conduce to peace among the nations, and that instead of wreaking measureless havoc upon the entire globe, may become a perennial fountain of world prosperity.
  • Winston Churchill, Statement drafted following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Due to the change in government, the statement was released by Clement Attlee (August 6, 1945). In Victory: War Speeches by the Right Hon. Winston Churchill (1946), p. 289

• The news today about "Atomic bombs" is so horrifying one is stunned. ... Such explosives in men's hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope "this will ensure peace". But one good thing may arise out of it, I suppose, if the write-ups are not overheated: Japan ought to cave in. Well we're in God's hands. But He does not look kindly on Babel-builders.
  • J. R. R. Tolkien, from a letter to his son Christopher (August 9, 1945) in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981)

• ... the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
  • Hirohito, Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War (August 15, 1945), accepting the Potsdam Declaration

• One must expect a war between U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. which will begin with the total destruction of London. I think the war will last 30 years, and leave a world without civilised people, from which everything will have to be built afresh — a process taking (say) 500 years.
  • Bertrand Russell, Letter to Gamel Brenan (September 1, 1945). In Nicholas Griffin (ed.), Selected Letters (2002), p. 410

• What a curious picture it is to find man, homo sapiens, of divine origin, we are told, seriously considering going underground to escape the consequences of his own folly. With a little wisdom and foresight, surely it is not yet necessary to forsake life in the fresh air and in the warmth of the sunlight. What a paradox if our own cleverness in science should force us to live underground with the moles.
  • J. William Fulbright, Address to the Foreign Policy Association, New York City (October 20, 1945), in Fulbright of Arkansas: The Public Positions of a Private Thinker (1963)

• Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would not have lifted a finger.
  • Albert Einstein, discussing the letter he sent Roosevelt raising the possibility of atomic weapons, in "Atom: Einstein, the Man Who Started It All", Newsweek magazine (March 10, 1947)

• We have men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.
  • Omar Bradley, Armistice Day speech (November 11, 1948), in Collected Writings, vol. 1 (1967)

• There is a further advantage [to hydrogen bombs]: the supply of uranium in the planet is very limited, and it might be feared that it would be used up before the human race was exterminated, but now that the practically unlimited supply of hydrogen can be utilized, there is considerable reason to hope that homo sapiens may put an end to himself, to the great advantage of such less ferocious animals as may survive. But it is time to return to less cheerful topics.
  • Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), pt. 1, ch. 3

• I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
  • Albert Einstein, in an interview with Alfred Werner, Liberal Judaism, no. 16 (April–May 1949), Einstein Archive 30-1104, as reported in Alice Calaprice, The New Quotable Einstein (2005), p. 173
  • Differing versions of such a statement are attributed to conversations as early as 1948 (e.g. The Rotarian, vol. 72, no. 6 (June 1948), p. 9: "I don't know. But I can tell you what they'll use in the fourth. They'll use rocks!"). Another variant ("I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones") is attributed to an unidentified letter to Harry S. Truman in "The culture of Einstein" by Alex Johnson, MSNBC, (18 April 2005). However, prior to 1948 very similar quotes were attributed in various articles to an unnamed army lieutenant, as discussed at Quote Investigator: "The Futuristic Weapons of WW3 Are Unknown, But WW4 Will Be Fought With Stones and Spears". The earliest found was from “Quote and Unquote: Raising ‘Alarmist’ Cry Brings a Winchell Reply” by Walter Winchell, in the Wisconsin State Journal (23 September 1946), p. 6, col. 3. In this article Winchell wrote:

    Joe Laitin reports that reporters at Bikini were questioning an army lieutenant about what weapons would be used in the next war.
    "I dunno," he said, "but in the war after the next war, sure as Hell, they’ll be using spears!"

1950s

• There is only one question: When will I be blown up?
  • William Faulkner, Speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature (December 10, 1950), regarding "a general and universal physical fear" in his generation. Quoted by James Baker, "America and the Collapse of the Soviet Empire: What Has to Be Done" (December 12, 1991), in Vital Speeches of the Day, vol. 58, no. 6 (January 1, 1992)

... if you duck and cover, like Burt, you will be much safer.

• If you are not ready, and did not know what to do, it could hurt you in different ways. It could knock you down, hard, or throw you against a tree or a wall. It is such a big explosion, it can smash in buildings and knock signboards over, and break windows all over town, but if you duck and cover, like Burt, you will be much safer.
  • Duck and Cover (1951 social guidance film), Burt the Turtle

• Anyway, I'm sort of glad they’ve got the atomic bomb invented. If there’s ever another war, I’m going to sit right the hell on top of it. I’ll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.
  • J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), p. 183 (spoken by Holden Caulfield)

• There is no evil in the atom; only in men’s souls.
  • Adlai Stevenson II, "The Atomic Future", Speech at Hartford, Connecticut (September 18, 1952), in Speeches of Adlai Stevenson (1952)

• The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated. The worst is atomic war. The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. ... Is there no other way the world may live?
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower, "The Chance for Peace", Speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors (April 16, 1953)

Suppose atomic bombs reduced the population of the world to one brother and one sister, should they let the human race die out?
—Bertrand Russell

• Suppose atomic bombs had reduced the population of the world to one brother and one sister, should they let the human race die out? I do not know the answer, but I do not think it can be in the affirmative merely on the ground that incest is wicked.
  • Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954)

• 安らかに眠って下さい 過ちは 繰返しませぬから
  • Rest In Peace. The Mistake Shall Not Be Repeated.
  • Epitaph inscribed on the cenotaph of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park (April 1, 1954). Quoted in Alan L. Mackay, The Harvest of a Quiet Eye (1977). In Robert Andrews, Famous Lines: A Columbia Dictionary of Familiar Quotations (1997), p. 340

A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower

• A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today. How could you have one if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled, the transportation systems destroyed, sanitation implements and systems all gone? That isn't preventive war; that is war.
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower, President's News Conference (August 11, 1954), reported in Elsie Gollagher (ed.) The Quotable Dwight D. Eisenhower (1967), p. 219

• The best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race. It is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death, sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration.
  • Bertrand Russell, The Russell-Einstein Manifesto (1955)

• The atom bomb was no "great decision." It was used in the war, and for your information, there were more people killed by fire bombs in Tokyo than dropping of the atomic bombs accounted for. It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness. The dropping of the bombs stopped the war, saved millions of lives.
  • Harry S. Truman, in reply to a question at a symposium, Columbia University, NYC (April 28, 1959), in Truman Speaks (1960), p. 67

1960s

• The unacceptability of the Doomsday Machine raises awkward, unpleasant, and complicated questions that must be considered by both policy maker and technician. If it is not acceptable to risk the lives of the three billion inhabitants of the earth in order to protect ourselves from surprise attack, then how many people would we be willing to risk? I believe that both the United States and NATO would reluctantly be willing to envisage the possibility of one or two hundred million people... dying from the immediate effects, even if one does not include deferred long-term effects due to radiation, if an all-out thermonuclear war results from a failure of Type I Deterrence. With somewhat more controversy, similar numbers would apply to Type II Deterrence. (For example, some experts would concede the statement for an all-out Soviet nuclear attack on Europe, but not if the Soviets restricted themselves to the use of conventional weapons.) We are willing to live with the possibility partly because we think of it as a remote possibility. We do not expect either kind of deterrence to fail, and we do not expect the results to be that cataclysmic if deterrence does fail.
  • Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (1960)

• Some one may pose the question: will China win her rights over the United States of America, by possessing and dropping the bomb? No, neither China nor the Soviet Union will ever use the bomb unless they are attacked by those who have aggression and war in their very blood. If the Soviet Union did not possess the bomb, the imperialists would speak in other terms with us. We will never attack with the bomb, we are opposed to war, we are ready to destroy the bomb but we keep it for defensive purposes. "It is fear that guards the vineyard," is a saying of our people. The imperialists should be afraid of us and terribly afraid at that.
  • Enver Hoxha, "Reject the Revisionist Theses of the XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Anti-Marxist Stand of Krushchev's Group! Uphold Marxism-Leninism!", Speech Delivered as Head of the Delegation of the Party of Labor of Albania Before the Meeting of 81 Communist and Workers Parties, Moscow (November 16, 1960)

• Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander the Great, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon. In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, should it come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.
  • William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), p. xii

• Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them? ... The only conclusion we can draw is that governments acting in a crisis are guided by questions of expediency, and moral considerations are given very little weight, and that America is no different from any other nation in this respect.
  • Leó Szilárd, Interview, "President Truman Did Not Understand", U.S. News & World Report (August 15, 1960)

• But this very triumph of scientific annihilation—this very success of invention—has destroyed the possibility of war's being a medium for the practical settlement of international differences. The enormous destruction to both sides of closely matched opponents makes it impossible for even the winner to translate it into anything but his own disaster…. Global war has become a Frankenstein to destroy both sides. No longer is it a weapon of adventure—the shortcut to international power. If you lose, you are annihilated. If you win, you stand only to lose. No longer does it possess even the chance of the winner of a duel. It contains now only the germs of double suicide.
  • Douglas MacArthur, Speech to a joint session of the Congress of the Republic of the Philippines (July 5, 1961); in Representative Speeches of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur (1964), p. 98 (Senate Doc. 88–95)

The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.
—John F. Kennedy

• Every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.
  • John F. Kennedy, Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 25, 1961)

• I propose the immediate launching of a nuclear strike on the United States. The Cuban people are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the cause of the destruction of imperialism and the victory of world revolution.
  • Fidel Castro, said in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis: as quoted in "Castro Wanted a Nuclear Strike", The New York Times (October 23, 1992)

• The human race may well become extinct before the end of the century. Speaking as a mathematician, I should say the odds are about three to one against survival.
  • Bertrand Russell, Interview with Playboy magazine (March 1963). In Kenneth Rose, One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture (2004), p. 39

• But of all environments, that produced by man’s complex technology is perhaps the most unstable and rickety. In its present form, our society is not two centuries old, and a few nuclear bombs will do it in.
  To be sure, evolution works over long periods of time and two centuries is far from sufficient to breed Homo technikos....
  The destruction of our technological society in a fit of nuclear peevishness would become disastrous even if there were many millions of immediate survivors.
  The environment toward which they were fitted would be gone, and Darwin’s demon would wipe them out remorselessly and without a backward glance.
  • Isaac Asimov, View from a Height (1963), p. 164. Also in Asimov on Physics (1976), p. 151; Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations (1988), p. 181

• These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.
  • Lyndon B. Johnson, "Daisy" (September 7, 1964)

• Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops! Uh, depending on the breaks.
  • General 'Buck' Turgidson (George C. Scott) in Dr. Strangelove (1964 film), written by Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, and Peter George, based on the book Red Alert by Peter George

• If the President had his way, we’d have a nuclear war every week.
  • Henry Kissinger on Nixon, as quoted in G. J. Bass, The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (2014), ch. 19

• The living will envy the dead.
  • Attributed to Nikita Khrushchev, speaking of nuclear war. Ed Zuckerman, "Hiding from the Bomb—Again", Harper's (August 1979), p. 36, attributes "the survivors would envy the dead" to Khrushchev. This issue of Harper's was stamped in the Library of Congress on July 12, 1979. Senator Frank Church, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, also attributed this same quotation to Khrushchev in hearings held July 11, 1979, and again on July 16, 1979. See The Salt II Treaty, hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 96th Congress, 1st session, part 1, p. 333, and part 2, p. 27 (1979). An Associated Press news release, dated August 4, 1979, summarized these meetings: "In a month of hearings on the SALT II treaty, many senators have... quoted and requoted the late Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who once said that after a nuclear exchange, 'the living would envy the dead.'" The quotation has been widely used in the press since then, including in The Washington Post (March 20, 1981), p. A23, the earliest attribution appears to be by John F. Kennedy with Khrushchev's comments in reference to a potential war with Russia or China. Reported as unverified in the speeches or writings of Khrushchev in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989)

1970s

• Let us imagine how many people would die if war breaks out. There are 2.7 billion people in the world, and a third could be lost. If it is a little higher it could be half ... I say that if the worst came to the worst and one-half dies, there will still be one-half left, but imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist. After a few years there would be 2.7 billion people again.
  • Mao Zedong (d. 1976), in Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62 (Walker & Co., 2010), p. 13

• The double horror of two Japanese city names grew for me into another kind of double horror; an estranging awareness of what the United States was capable of, the country that five years before had given me its citizenship; a nauseating terror at the direction the natural sciences were going. Never far from an apocalyptic vision of the world, I saw the end of the essence of mankind an end brought nearer, or even made, possible, by the profession to which I belonged. In my view, all natural sciences were as one; and if one science could no longer plead innocence, none could.
• In 1945, therefore, I proved a sentimental fool; and Mr. Truman could safely have classified me among the whimpering idiots he did not wish admitted to the presidential office. For I felt that no man has the right to decree so much suffering, and that science, in providing and sharpening the knife and in upholding the ram, had incurred a guilt of which it will never get rid. It was at that time that the nexus between science and murder became clear to me. For several years after the somber event, between 1947 and 1952, I tried desperately to find a position in what then appeared to me as a bucolic Switzerland,—but I had no success.
  • Erwin Chargaff, Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life before Nature (1978)

1980s

• It's now been 35 years since the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. The great majority of the world's people cannot remember a time when the nuclear shadow did not hang over the Earth. Our minds have adjusted to it, as after a time our eyes adjust to the dark. Yet the risk of a nuclear conflagration has not lessened. It has not happened yet, thank God, but that can give us little comfort, for it only has to happen once. The danger is becoming greater. As the arsenals of the superpowers grow in size and sophistication and as other governments, perhaps even in the future dozens of governments, acquire these weapons, it may only be a matter of time before madness, desperation, greed, or miscalculation lets loose this terrible force. In an all-out nuclear war, more destructive power than in all of World War II would be unleashed every second during the long afternoon it would take for all the missiles and bombs to fall. A World War II every second—more people killed in the first few hours than in all the wars of history put together. The survivors, if any, would live in despair amid the poisoned ruins of a civilization that had committed suicide.
  • Jimmy Carter, Farewell Address to the Nation (January 14, 1981)

• Imagine a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has nine thousand matches. The other has seven thousand matches. Each of them is concerned about who's ahead, who's stronger. Well that's the kind of situation we are actually in. The amount of weapons that are available to the United States and the Soviet Union are so bloated, so grossly in excess of what's needed to dissuade the other, that if it weren't so tragic, it would be laughable. What is necessary is to reduce the matches and to clean up the gasoline.
  • Carl Sagan, during a panel discussion on ABC News Viewpoint following the TV movie The Day After (November 20, 1983). Misquoted as "The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five."

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

• A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
  • WarGames (1983 film)

• My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.
  • Ronald Reagan, off-the-record joke made during the Cold War. On August 11, 1984, while preparing for a scheduled radio address from his vacation home in California, Reagan joked with those present about outlawing and bombing Russia. The joke was not broadcast live, but was recorded and later leaked to the public.

• There is no monopoly on common sense
  On either side of the political fence.
  We share the same biology, regardless of ideology.
  Believe me when I say to you,
  I hope the Russians love their children too.
  • Sting, "Russians", The Dream of the Blue Turtles (1985)

• A nuclear war does not defend a country and it does not defend a system. I've put it the same way many times; not even the most accomplished ideologue will be able to tell the difference between the ashes of capitalism and the ashes of communism.
  • John Kenneth Galbraith, "The Ashes of Capitalism and the Ashes of Communism", interview (undated) with John M. Whiteley in Quest for Peace: An Introduction (1986)

• War is just another game
  Tailor made for the insane
  But make a threat of their annihilation
  And nobody wants to play
  If that's the only thing that keeps the peace
  Then thank God for the bomb
  • Bob Daisley, Ozzy Osbourne, Jake E. Lee, "Thank God for the Bomb", from the album The Ultimate Sin (February 10, 1986)

Under the four oceans and the seven seas, American and Soviet submarines fight a near-war every day of the year. —Richard Halloran

• Under the four oceans and the seven seas, American and Soviet submarines fight a near-war every day of the year. Relentlessly, they search for one another, trailing an adversary when they can and trying to evade one when detected. They make every move of a real war, except shoot. ... Should a shooting war erupt, many experts argue, submarines would be the capital ships of the American and Soviet fleets. The battleship dominated naval operations in World War I, and the aircraft carrier brought victory at sea in World War II, but the nuclear-powered submarine would provide the edge in a future conflict.
  • Richard Halloran, "A Silent Battle Surfaces", The New York Times (December 7, 1986)

• If none of us believe in war
  Then can you tell me, what the weapons for?
  Listen to me everyone
  If the button is pushed, there'll be nowhere to run, oh.
  Giants sleeping, giants winning
  Wars within their dreams
  Till they wake when it's too late
  And in God's name blaspheme.
  • Bob Daisley, Ozzy Osbourne, Jake E. Lee, "Killer of Giants", from the album The Ultimate Sin (February 10, 1986)

• What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening the use of nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves.
• The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.
  • Martin Amis, Einstein's Monsters (1987), introduction

1990s

• We had many contingency plans for responding to a nuclear attack. But everything would happen so fast that I wondered how much planning or reason could be applied in such a crisis. The Russians sometimes kept submarines off our East Coast with nuclear missiles that could turn the White House into a pile of radioactive rubble within six or eight minutes. Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to unleash Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that? There were some people in the Pentagon who thought in terms of fighting and winning a nuclear war. To me it was simple common sense: A nuclear war couldn't be won by either side. It must never be fought.
  • Ronald Reagan, An American Life (1990)

• The prediction of nuclear winter is drawn not, of course, from any direct experience with the consequences of global nuclear war, but rather from an investigation of the governing physics. (The problem does not lend itself to full experimental verification—at least not more than once.)
  • Carl Sagan and Richard P. Turco, A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race (1990), p. 26

• Galileo's head was on the block
  The crime was looking up for truth...
  And then you had to bring up reincarnation...
  How long 'til my soul gets it right...
  Can any human being ever reach that kind of light...
  I call on the resting soul of Galileo
  King of night vision, king of insight...
  I'm not making a joke, you know me
  I take everything so seriously
  If we wait for the time 'til all souls get it right
  Then at least I know there'll be no nuclear annihilation
  In my lifetime, I'm still not right...
  • Indigo Girls, "Galileo", lead single of their fourth album Genius (May 12, 1992)

• War. War never changes.
  • Fallout (1997 video game), opening narration by Ron Perlman

2000s

• For the love of God, for the love of your children and of the civilization to which you belong, cease this madness. You are mortal men. You are capable of error. You have no right to hold in your hands—there is no one wise enough and strong enough to hold in his hands—destructive power sufficient to put an end to civilized life on a great portion of our planet.
  • George F. Kennan, cited in his obituary, "George Kennan dies at 101; devised Cold War policy", The Boston Globe (March 18, 2005); also in James Carroll, House of War (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006), "Upstream", p. 581, note 140. ISBN 0618187804.

2010s

• ... right at the Russian border, there are very extreme tensions, that could blow up anytime and lead to what would in fact be a terminal nuclear war, terminal for the species and life on Earth. We’re very close to that... First of all, we should do things to ameliorate it. Secondly, we should ask why. Well, it’s because NATO expanded after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in violation of verbal promises to Mikhail Gorbachev, mostly under Clinton, partly under first Bush, then Clinton expanded right to the Russian border, expanded further under Obama... The fate of... organized human society, even of the survival of the species, depends on this. How much attention is given to these things as compared with, you know, whether Trump lied about something?
  • Noam Chomsky, "Noam Chomsky on Mass Media Obsession with Russia & the Stories Not Being Covered in the Trump Era", Democracy Now (July 27, 2018)

2020s

• Nuclear weapons are like a rifle hanging on the wall in a play. We did not write the play, we are not staging it and we do not know what the author intends. Anyone could take the rifle from the wall at any time.
  • Mikhail Gorbachev, What Is At Stake Now (2020), translated from the Russian by Jessica Spengler

• One U.S. Trident submarine, now being replaced by even more lethal ones — one U.S. submarine can destroy almost 200 cities anywhere in the world with its nuclear weapons. China in the South China Sea has four old noisy submarines which can’t even get out because they’re contained by superior U.S. and Allied Force...
  In the face of this, the United States is sending a fleet of nuclear submarines to Australia. That’s the AUKUS deal—the Australia, U.K., United States—which have no strategic purpose whatsoever.
  They will not even be in operation for 15 years, but they do incite China almost certainly to build up its lagging military forces, increasing the level of confrontation. There are problems in the South China Sea that can be met with diplomacy and negotiations, the regional powers taking the lead, could go into the details.
  But the right measure is not increasing provocation, increasing the threat of an accidental development which could lead to devastating, even Earthly-terminal nuclear war. But that is the direction the Biden administration is following, expansion of the Trump programs. That is the core of their foreign policy programs.
  • Noam Chomsky, "Is China Really a Threat?", Democracy Now! (November 23, 2021)

See also

• Nuclear weapons

External links

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has an article about:

Nuclear war