Top 100 Quotes About Nuclear War
#1. It's funny. I thought she'd live through anything."
Charlie said, "Me too. I figured even if there was a nuclear war, it would still leave radioactive cockroaches and your mum.
Neil Gaiman
#2. Look at what President Kennedy managed to achieve during the Cuban missile crisis. If Bush had been president in 1962, do you think he would have avoided a nuclear war?
Bianca Jagger
#3. One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war.
Paul Wolfowitz
#4. From a scientific perspective there is some indication that a nuclear war could deplete the earth's ozone layer or, less likely, could bring on a new Ice Age - but there is no suggestion that either the created order or mankind would be destroyed in the process.
Herman Kahn
#5. Prosperous suburbia was one of the end-states of history. Once achieved, only plague, flood, or nuclear war could threaten its grip.
J.G. Ballard
#6. If there is anything more frightening than the threat of global nuclear war, it is the certainty that humans not only stand on the verge of producing new life forms but may soon be able to tinker with them as if they were vintage convertibles or bonsai trees.
Michael Specter
#7. There has been a transition from a nuclear-annihilation scenario to an isolated-terrorist-nuclear-bomb scenario. But we're still locked into a mind-set that nuclear war would be so overwhelming that any kind of preparedness would be futile.
Irwin Redlener
#8. 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.
Carl Sagan
#9. All autumn, the chafe and jar
of nuclear war;
we have talked our extinction to death.
I swim like a minnow
behind my studio window.
Robert Lowell
#10. You read card after card until you're talking so fast that it's hard to tell whether you're giving your rebuttal or suffering from a grand mal seizure. And you claim that every case you argue will lead to some kind of apocalypse or nuclear war or worse. Because
Katie A. Nelson
#11. I suspect the soviets never did want to use those bombs. The most Stalinist of Soviet hard-liners - Stalin, for example - must have realized a nuclear war would be a hard thing to clean up after.
P. J. O'Rourke
#12. Direct aggression against Cuba would mean nuclear war. The Americans speak about such aggression as if they did not know or did not want to accept this fact. I have no doubt they would lose such a war.
Che Guevara
#13. That would be one lousy way to end the human race, locked in a nuclear war with the Block while a Drasin fleet came down on all their heads. Not that there are many good ways to end the human race, I suppose.
Evan Currie
#14. A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?
Ronald Reagan
#15. I not only saw the possibility of nuclear war, I feared it very much. If they started a military conflagration, it would automatically lead to nuclear warfare.
Stefan Heym
#16. I hear about death so often that I don't even notice anymore. Have you ever heard kids talk about death? My seventh-graders argue about it: is it scary or not? Kids used to ask: where do we come from? How are babies made? Now they're worried about what'll happen after the nuclear war.
Svetlana Alexievich
#17. [Nuclear war] ... may not be desirable.
Edwin Meese
#18. Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said that if the United States continued to kill life at its beginnings with abortion, at its mid-day with the handicapped, and at twilight with euthanasia, it would lead to the catastrophic midnight of nuclear war.
Kelly Bowring
#20. The first thing that matters: I am a child of the eighties. I grew up in a neon wonderland of talking horses, compassionate bears, hair that didn't move in a stiff wind, and the constant threat of nuclear war.
Seanan McGuire
#21. 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
#22. I shall add that only he who has decided to commit suicide can start a nuclear war in the hope of emerging a victor from it. No matter what the attacker might possess, no matter what method of unleashing nuclear war he chooses, he will not attain his aims. Retribution will inevitably ensue.
Leonid Brezhnev
#23. Trying to win a power struggle is like trying to win a nuclear war. You may achieve your goal, but not without catastrophic casualties on both sides.
Jamie Raser
#24. We know that to wage a nuclear war today, for example, would be a form of suicide; or that to pollute the air or the oceans in order to achieve some short-term benefit would be to destroy the very basis for our survival.
Dalai Lama
#25. If you asked me to name the three scariest threats facing the human race, I would give the same answer that most people would: nuclear war, global warming and Windows.
Dave Barry
#26. Some programs have been theatrical masterpieces, but all we're seeing is the negative side of nuclear war.
Barry Goldwater
#27. Short of nuclear war itself, population growth is the gravest issue the world faces. If we do not act, the problem will be solved by famine, riots, insurrection and war.
Robert McNamara
#28. Most dads had hobbies that they passed down to their sons; hunting, fishing, auto repair. Dad's hobby was nuclear war, which meant his sons knew everything about it.
S.A. Bodeen
#29. Raul, man, he's like a Twinkie. He would survive a nuclear war.
Ray Hudson
#30. The only good thing about nuclear war is that it is the single most egalitarian idea that man has ever had. On the day of reckoning, you will not be asked to present your credentials. The devastation will be indiscriminate.
Arundhati Roy
#31. An arguing couple spiraling into negativity and teetering on the brink of divorce is actually mathematically equivalent to the beginning of a nuclear war.
Hannah Fry
#34. Any fool can start a war, and once he's done so, even the wisest of men are helpless to stop it - especially if it's a nuclear war.
Nikita Khrushchev
#35. Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.
Stephen Hawking
#36. One nuclear war is going to be the last nuclear - the last war, frankly, if it really gets out of hand. And I just don't think we ought to be prepared to accept that sort of thing.
Lawrence Eagleburger
#37. Russians, hear this: A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to ensure they will never be used.
Brad Magnarella
#38. An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.
Elon Musk
#39. There is no such thing as a survivable or local nuclear war.
Jill Stein
#40. Some of the American military obviously were thinking in terms of fighting a nuclear war. I was opposed to that.
Helmut Schmidt
#41. We don't want to start a nuclear war unless we really have to, now do we Jack?
Peter Sellers
#42. Can we render ourselves extinct? Possibly. Perhaps total nuclear war, 1980s style, would do it, although even a horrible nuclear winter might simply mean that New Zealanders inherit the globe.
Frank Landis
#43. Our moral imperative is to work with all our powers for that day when the children of the world grow up without the fear of nuclear war.
Ronald Reagan
#44. There is nothing worth having that can be obtained by nuclear war - nothing material or ideological - no tradition that it can defend. It is utterly self-defeating.
George Wald
#45. With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears.
Henry A. Kissinger
#46. Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it.
Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse
Carl Sagan
#47. If there is a solar flare or a nuclear war, a thousand cans of pickled turnips aren't going to save you.
Sarah Lotz
#48. Nuclear war would really set back cable.
Ted Turner
#50. After the nuclear war, kids like them'll rule what's left. It'll be hell.
David Mitchell
#51. If by the expression "not practical" you mean "not easy," you are right. Definitely it is not easy. Yet it should be tried. You may say it is risky trying it. Surely it cannot be more risky than trying a nuclear war.
Walpola Rahula
#53. Violent ground-acquisition games such as football are in fact a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war.
Robert Downey Jr.
#54. Both we and the Soviets face the common threat of nuclear destruction and there is no likelihood that either capitalism or communism will survive a nuclear war.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#55. In a nuclear war, even if one side were to come out ahead by systems analytical standards, both sides would be so weakened, that it would - they would be in the position of Europe after the two World Wars.
Henry A. Kissinger
#56. The leaders of the world face no greater task than that of avoiding nuclear war. While preserving the cause of freedom, we must seek abolition of war through programs of general and complete disarmament. The Test-Ban Treaty of 1963 represents a significant beginning in this immense undertaking.
Robert Kennedy
#57. Sleep democratizes fear. The terror of a lost shoe or a missed train are as great here as those of guerrilla attack or nuclear war.
Julian Barnes
#58. I will never betray my Goon Dock friends, We will stick together until the whole world ends, Through heaven and hell and nuclear war, Good pals like us will stick like tar, In the city, or the country, or the forest, or the boonies I am proudly declared a fellow Goony. - The Goony Oath
James Kahn
#59. Nuclear war is inevitable, says the pessimists; Nuclear war is impossible, says the optimists; Nuclear war is inevitable unless we make it impossible, says the realists.
Sydney J. Harris
#60. another billion deaths in the months that followed from mass starvation - from a mere 1.5-megaton regional nuclear war.
Richard Rhodes
#61. I firmly believe that nuclear war is absolutely impossible. I don't think anyone in the world wants a nuclear war - not even the Russians.
Frank Sinatra
#62. Growing up during the Cold War, I remember the seemingly imminent threat of nuclear war. In primary school we were taught to 'duck-and-cover' for protection. But even as children hiding under wooden desks, we recognized the inadequacies of this strategy.
Mike Quigley
#63. Sometimes people ask me why I began perestroika. Were the causes basically domestic or foreign? The domestic reasons were undoubtedly the main ones, but the danger of nuclear war was so serious that it was a no less significant factor.
Mikhail Gorbachev
#65. Nixon did have a secret plan, and I knew that it involved making threats of nuclear war to North Vietnam.
Daniel Ellsberg
#66. I'd learned a little about nuclear war from duck-and-cover air-raid drills at school, but most of what I knew about the Russians came from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show on TV.
Todd Strasser
#67. I remember fear and I remember the potential of nuclear war.
Jack Scalia
#68. Except for fools and madmen, everyone knows that nuclear war would he an unprecedented human catastrophe.
Carl Sagan
#69. Nuclear war is such an emotional subject that many people see the weapons themselves as the common enemy of humanity.
Herman Kahn
#70. It is madness for any country to build its policy with an eye to nuclear war.
Leonid Brezhnev
#71. The entire world will be in nuclear war, and only the Swiss will be going, 'what's that noise?'
Robin Williams
#72. Environmental scientists also show us clearly that from the environmental and ecological points of view that nuclear war is not preventable. The only way to get rid of this danger is to abolish all nuclear weapons
Tadatoshi Akiba
#73. One of these days they'll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end.
Haruki Murakami
#74. The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.
Nigel Calder
#75. Kennedy said that if we had nuclear war we'd kill 300 million people in the first hour. McNamara, who is a good businessman and likes to save, says it would be only 200 million.
Norman Thomas
#76. We still live with this unbelievable threat over our heads of nuclear war. I mean, are we stupid? Do we think that the nuclear threat has gone, that the nuclear destruction of the planet is not imminent? It's a delusion to think it's gone away.
Kevin Costner
#77. Bobby Tom told me he's not afraid of the Chargers' defense."
"Bobby Tom'll tell you he's not afraid of nuclear war, so I wouldn't put too much stock in his opinion.
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
#78. Most of my nightmares that jolt me awake either involve the cosmos or something completely out of human control. In reality, I worry more about nuclear war, or war in general.
Lorene Scafaria
#79. There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.
Noam Chomsky
#80. Nuclear threats and nuclear weapons are the last argument of weak, stressed and irresponsible politicians. People must act very quicky to stop the movement to nuclear war.
Alla Yaroshinskaya
#81. John F. Kennedy:] Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring down an adversary to the choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.
Elie Abel
#82. There will never be a nuclear war; there's too much real estate involved.
Frank Zappa
#83. Don't say you're easy on me. You're about as easy as a nuclear war.
Duran Duran
#84. This programme to stop nuclear by 2020 is just crazy. If there were a nuclear war, and humanity were wiped out, the Earth would breathe a sigh of relief.
James Lovelock
#85. The politicians always told us that the Cold War stand-off could only change by way of nuclear war. None of them believed that such systemic change was possible.
Lech Walesa
#86. Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.
Douglas Coupland
#87. The crisis isn't over. The prospect of nuclear war has never been greater. The United States is so close to invading Cuba that one bad joke in the nonstop series of ExComm meetings is that Bobby Kennedy will soon be mayor of Havana.
Bill O'Reilly
#88. We must eliminate all nuclear weapons in order to eliminate the grave risk they pose to our world. This will require persistent efforts by all countries and peoples. A nuclear war would affect everyone, and all have a stake in preventing this nightmare.
Ban Ki-moon
#89. Very few people in the USA realize that a nuclear war was waged with nature in the southwest by their own military.
Steven Magee
#90. She looks like she's holding in a dictionary of bad words or a nuclear war.
Jandy Nelson
#91. It shouldn't be too much of a surprise that the Internet has evolved into a force strong enough to reflect the greatest hopes and fears of those who use it. After all, it was designed to withstand nuclear war, not just the puny huffs and puffs of politicians and religious fanatics.
Denise Caruso
#92. This whole notion that the robot has to declare nuclear war is one part of the discussion, but it may not be reality. Reality is, maybe it can empathize to a far greater degree than we can and experience a way wider range of emotions. So, why not have a robot that can do that?
Neill Blomkamp
#93. In many places around the world, all over the U.S. and Europe there are active nuclear power plants. And for many years during the Cold War the threat of nuclear war was a permanent fear. There's always the concern that human kind is biting off more than they can chew in harnessing nuclear power.
Oren Peli
#94. Without perestroika, the cold war simply would not have ended. But the world could not continue developing as it had, with the stark menace of nuclear war ever present.
Mikhail Gorbachev
#95. I would eat fruitcake if there'd been a nuclear war and I'd run out of canned goods.
Deb Caletti
#96. No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway's postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.
J.G. Ballard
#97. Even with the best intentions, you can have a nuclear war, a nuclear holocaust, through miscalculation, through accidents.
Mohamed ElBaradei
#98. We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of a worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth - but neither shall we shrink from that risk any time it must be faced.
John F. Kennedy
#99. It's a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.
Noam Chomsky
#100. The AEC scientists were so narrowly focused on arming the United States for nuclear war that they failed to perceive facts - even widely known ones - that were outside their limited field of vision.
Barry Commoner
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
