Atomic War Quotes

#1. A person whose job is deep thinking about atomic war would no more call a 'megadeath' a 'million corpses' than an embalmer would refer to a 'loved one' as a 'stiff.'

Russell Baker

#2. The problem of an atomic war must not be confused by minor problems such as Communism versus capitalism. An atomic war would kill everyone, left, right, or center.

Linus Pauling

#3. By neglecting our garden, we are storing up for ourselves, in the not very distant future, a world catastrophe as bad as any atomic war, and we are doing it with all the bland complacency of an idiot child chopping up a Rembrandt with a pair of scissors.

Gerald Durrell

#4. The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.

Omar N. Bradley

#5. Armageddon. The slaughter of humanity. An atomic war no one wanted, but which no one had the wisdom to avoid.

Edward Bernds

#6. In the event of atomic war there is a tremendous biological advantage in the so-called undeveloped areas that have a high birth rate and high death rate because, man, they can plow under those mutations.

William S. Burroughs

#7. In the question of peace, people spoke up and demonstrated for peace and against the threat of war, the threat of atomic war.

Stefan Heym

#8. World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.

Stephen Ambrose

#9. I am an atheist, but as far as blowing up the world in a nuclear war goes, I tell them not to worry.

Fred Hoyle

#10. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

John Hersey

#11. How do we prevent Iran developing an atomic bomb, when, on the American side, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not recognised as a war crime?

Gunter Grass

#12. We view our atomic arsenal as proudly and as devotedly as any pioneer ever viewed his flintlock hanging over the mantel as his children slept, and dreamed.

William F. Buckley Jr.

#13. If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

#14. I think that if the atomic bomb did nothing more, it scared the people to the point where they realized that either they must do something about preventing war or there is a chance that there might be a morning when we would not wake up.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#15. The atomic bombs will surely shorten the war, and let us hope that they will effectively end war as a possibility in human affairs.

Ernest Lawrence

#16. Yesterday, we fought wars which destroyed cities. Today, we are concerned with avoiding a war which will destroy the earth. We can adapt atomic energy to produce electricity and move ships, but can we control its use in anger?

Robert Kennedy

#17. Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands.

H.G.Wells

#18. 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

#19. The use of the blockade against Germany to starve large numbers of people to death broke through the moral barrier against the mass killing of civilians. It was the precedent for the 'conventional' bombing of civilians in the Second World War and then for the use of the atomic bomb.

Jonathan Glover

#20. In no other type of warfare does the advantage lie so heavily with the aggressor.

James Franck

#21. The human race has today the means for annihilating itself
either in a fit of complete lunacy, i.e., in a big war ... or by the careless handling of atomic technology, through a slow process of poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure.

Max Born

#22. I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the earth will be killed.

Albert Einstein

#23. One effect could be that the huge atomic arsenal created in the cold war could be reduced significantly.

Gerhard Schroder

#24. If, as I have reason to believe, I have disintegrated the nucleus of the atom, this is of greater significance than the war.
[Apology to the international anti-submarine committee for being absent from several meetings during World War I.]

Ernest Rutherford

#25. The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

#26. Mankind must give up war in the Atomic Era. What is at stake is the life or death of humanity.

Albert Einstein

#27. This is Communism's view of war. War is necessary. War is an instrument for achieving a goal.

But unfortunately for Communism, this policy ran up against the American atomic bomb in 1945. Then the Communists changed their tactics and suddenly became advocates of peace at any cost.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#28. Someone once said that World War Three would be fought with atomic weapons and the next war with sticks and stones.

Robert F. Kennedy

#29. Ancient boundaries are meaningless, except for political purposes; old divisions of clan and tribe are sentimental remnants of the pre-atomic age; neither creed nor color nor place of origin is relevant to the realities of modern power to utterly seek and destroy.

Sydney J. Harris

#30. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomized at a time when the Japanese were suing desperately for peace.

David T. Dellinger

#31. Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime.

George Wald

#32. After the atomic bombs were dropped, the war ended and we went into Tokyo Bay with the rest of the fleet, the Missouri and the rest of them, while they signed the terms of surrender that ended the war.

Barney Ross

#33. In America, it was decided to attempt the production of atomic bombs with an effort that would constitute a large part of the collective American war effort. In Germany, an effort one thousandth the scale of the American was applied to the problem of producing atomic energy that would drive engines.

Werner Heisenberg

#34. The term railway was to Victorian England what atomic or aerodynamic were to be after World War II, and network and virtual are today. When it came to investments, the romantic appeal of being a party to this technological revolution often dominated profit considerations.

Richard Bookstaber

#35. Some think the worst horrors of war might be avoided by an international agreement not to use atomic bombs. This is a vain hope.

John Boyd Orr

#36. The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.

Albert Einstein

#37. After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin?

Kurt Vonnegut

#38. If surrender could have been brought about in May, 1945, or even in June or July, before the entrance of Soviet Russia into the [Pacific] war and the use of the atomic bomb, the world would have been the gainer.

Joseph Grew

#39. In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.

Wilfred Burchett

#40. People who talk of outlawing the atomic bomb are mistaken - what needs to be outlawed is war.

Leslie Groves

#41. To talk of atomic energy in terms of atomic bombs is like talking of electricity in terms of the electric chair.

Pyotr Kapitsa

#42. Japan knows the horror of war and has suffered as no other nation under the cloud of nuclear disaster. Certainly Japan can stand strong for a world of peace.

Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project

#43. A good thing? Or a strong omen ... Only time would tell what these newfangled neutrons and fission reactions would give to our ever-changing world.In all probability,this new scientific birth would change all of our lives forever and perhaps end the brutal war we were now engaged in?

Will Leamon