Top 100 Quotes About Nuclear War
#1. So I ask the nuclear powers to abandon the out-of-date thinking of the Cold War period and take a fresh look. Above all, I appeal to them to bear in mind the long-term threat that nuclear weapons pose to humankind and to begin action towards their elimination.
Joseph Rotblat
#2. The cold war was the longest war in United States history. Because of the nuclear capabilities of our enemy it was the most dangerous conflict our country ever faced. Those that won this war did so in obscurity. Those that gave their lives in the cold war have never been properly honored.
Harry Reid
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Mammoth organizations, these ponderous processes. Many people don't realize that the nuclear capability that this country [USA] amassed and maintained over the period of the Cold War cost $6 trillion .
George Lee Butler
#8. 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
#9. We need to be fit and ready for anything that might come our way.
Aaron B. Powell
#10. The massive quantities of radiation that would be released in a war fought with nuclear weapons might, over time, cause such great changes in the human gene pool that following generations might not be recognizable as human beings.
Helen Caldicott
#11. There is no direct evidence that nuclear weapons prevented a world war. Conversely, it is known that they nearly caused one.
Joseph Rotblat
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?
Arundhati Roy
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. The white flashed back into a red ball in the southeast. They all knew what it was. It was Orlando, or McCoy Base, or both. It was the power supply for Timucuan County.
Thus the lights went out, and in that moment civilization in Fort Repose retreated a hundred years.
So ended The Day.
Pat Frank
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Harry Truman, after all, in conjunction with Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, radically cut back American arms following the end of the Second World War. Johnson himself wished to dismantle the Marine Corps and felt nuclear weapons had made all such conventional arms unnecessary.
Victor Davis Hanson
#24. 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
#25. I came into politics because of a real childhood concern about the Cold War. So to me the importance of the nuclear deterrent is actually really ingrained in me.
Andrea Leadsom
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Believe me, after the destruction of Chinese nuclear sites by our missiles, there won't be much time for the Americans to choose between the defense of their Chinese allies and peaceful co-existence with us.
Leonid Brezhnev
#29. [Nuclear war] ... may not be desirable.
Edwin Meese
#30. 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
#31. The Iraqi regime ... possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas.
George W. Bush
#33. The truth emerging from this scattered picture of nuclear proliferation is simple: there is a stronger chance of a nuclear bomb being used now than at almost any point in the Cold War.
Johann Hari
#35. The only place you and I disagree is with regard to the bombing. You're so goddamned concerned about the civilians, and I (in contrast) don't give a damn. I don't care." ... "I'd rather use the nuclear bomb ... Does that bother you? I just want you to think big.
Richard M. Nixon
#36. 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
#37. The nuclear weapons on board just one of our Trident submarines contain eight times the firepower expended in all of World War II.
John Allen Paulos
#38. No country can hope to beat the Yanks off with conventional weapons - they've got air, sea and land completely covered. The only recourse is chemical, biological and nuclear weapons (the Yanks used them in Vietnam, and have not ruled out using them in this war).
Margo Kingston
#39. 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
#40. My short-term vision is the abolition of nuclear weapons. My long-term vision is the abolition of war.
Joseph Rotblat
#41. To defeat ISIS and let Iran get nuclear weapons would be to win the battle and lose the war,
Benjamin Netanyahu
#42. 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
#43. When we succeeded in winning the Cold War, escaping a nuclear Armageddon that could have killed us all, the U.S. inevitably had a serious problem about an encore: what now for our place in the world?
Graham T. Allison
#44. They could take the money from building enough nukes to kill all the Russians in the world and give it to libraries. What good does an independent nuclear deterrent do Britain, compared to the good of libraries?
Jo Walton
#45. Three-hundred times as many people died in Hamburg during the ten-day blitz as died in Coventry during the entire course of the war. Not even Hiroshima and Nagasaki, suffering the smashing blows of nuclear explosions, could match the utter hell of Hamburg.
Martin Caidin
#46. 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
#47. We may yet work up to some serious shooting war, or maybe some acts of urban genocide committed with rogue nuclear weapons. But if that were the case, why would we call that '9/11'? If Washington disappeared in a mushroom cloud, we'd give that huge event a different name.
Bruce Sterling
#48. The Nuclear Industry is conducting a war against humanity.
Dr. John
#49. We believe US threats of an approaching World War III and their use of Iran's nuclear issue as an excuse is another form of American insanity.
Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah
#50. For some twenty years the window that opened at the end of the Cold War has been allowed to hang flapping in the wind. It is high time that the five nuclear-weapon states take seriously their commitment to negotiate toward nuclear disarmament.
Hans Blix
#51. 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
#52. The president can't tell you what we got. I'll tell you what the world got. The world has a burgeoning nuclear power that didn't, as the Soviets, say "we might defend ourselves in a war."
Mike Huckabee
#53. When I was in the White House, I was confronted with the challenge of the Cold War. Both the Soviet Union and I had 30,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy the entire earth and I had to maintain the peace.
Jimmy Carter
#54. Nuclear weapons are infinitely less important in our foreign policy than they were in the days of the Cold War. I don't think we need nuclear weapons any longer.
Des Browne
#55. 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. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.
Omar Nelson Bradley
#56. Nowhere have women been more excluded from decision-making than in the military and foreign affairs. When it comes to the military and questions of nuclear disarmament, the gender gap becomes the gender gulf.
Eleanor Smeal
#57. 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
#58. It doesn't matter, whether it is an x, y or z country, every penny spends for nuclear weapons strengthen the hands of the evil force.
Amit Ray
#59. I happened to read recently a remark by the American nuclear physicist W. Davidson, who noted that the explosion of one hydrogen bomb releases a greater amount of energy than all the explosions set off by all countries in all wars known in the entire history of mankind. And he, apparently, is right.
Nikita Khrushchev
#60. 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
#61. Some programs have been theatrical masterpieces, but all we're seeing is the negative side of nuclear war.
Barry Goldwater
#62. In some ways, the challenges are even more daunting than they were at the peak of the cold war. Not only do we continue to face grave nuclear threats, but those threats are being compounded by new weapons developments, new violence within States and new challenges to the rule of law.
Kofi Annan
#63. The South Africans decided that they would like to prove to the world they did not have any nuclear weapons and their decision was not doubted because it was the end of the Cold War, it was also the end of apartheid.
Hans Blix
#64. If you took every nuclear weapon ever built at the height of the Cold War, lumped them together and blew them up at the same time, that would be one one-millionth of the energy released at that moment.
Phil Plait
#65. The biggest budget is the military budget. For what? We're fighting two wars in very small countries that have no nuclear weapons, that have no capabilities to destroy anything. They probably couldn't even get to America.
Lupe Fiasco
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.
Carl Sagan
#69. Extending social and economic development throughout the world and eliminating nuclear weapons from military arsenals are two fundamental prerequisites to replacing the culture of war with a culture of peace, and building true security for all the world's people.
Douglas Roche
#70. I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.
Justin Cronin
#71. Raul, man, he's like a Twinkie. He would survive a nuclear war.
Ray Hudson
#72. 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
#73. Women don't go to war to kill other women. Wars and armies and nuclear weapons are essentially heterosexual hobbies.
Morrissey
#74. 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
#75. For my generation, coming of age at the height of the Cold War, fear of nuclear winter seemed the leading existential threat on the horizon. But the danger posed by war to all humanity-and to our planet-is at least matched by climate change.
Ban Ki-moon
#76. If the militarily most powerful and least threatened states need nuclear weapons for their security, how can one deny such security to countries that are truly insecure? The present nuclear policy is a recipe for proliferation. It is a policy for disaster.
Joseph Rotblat
#77. Even a fool could see that one didn't need a war, nuclear or otherwise, to destroy oneself; the rising cost of weaponry could do that quite nicely.
Stanislaw Lem
#78. We've achieved this historic progress through diplomacy, without resorting to another war in the Middle East. I want to also point out that by working with Iran on this nuclear deal, we were better able to address other issues.
Barack Obama
#79. Have you noticed," said John, "how countries call theirs 'sovereign nuclear deterrents,' but call the other countries' ones 'weapons of mass destruction'?
David Mitchell
#80. I don't think that the contradictions between capitalism and socialism can be resolved by war. This is no longer the age of the bow and arrow. It's the nuclear age, and war can annihilate us all. The only way to achieve solutions seems to be for the different social systems to coexist.
Fidel Castro
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. You know, people have actually changed the way they think about nuclear weapons now, post-Cold War, post-9/11. The threat of nuclear weapons is not so much Russia attacking the United States, China. It's not a state-to-state - it's obviously terrorism; it's proliferation.
Lawrence Bender
#86. 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
#87. It is absolutely right that President Reagan considers SDI and thank goodness people considered nuclear research before the last war.
Margaret Thatcher
#88. The only thing that kept the Cold War cold was the mutual deterrence afforded by nuclear weapons.
Chung Mong-joon
#89. Since the end of the Cold War two main nuclear powers have begun to make big reductions in their nuclear arsenals. Each of them is dismantling about 2,000 nuclear warheads a year.
Joseph Rotblat
#90. Before the eyes shut
this knife shines snow-
bright once more through the inner organs
as using a nuclear bomb to light a cigar
sends lung cancer across the earth
to parting lovers
Xiaobo Liu
#91. The Cern laboratory in Geneva was set up in 1955 to bring together European scientists who wished to pursue research into the nuclear and sub-nuclear world. Physicists then had greater clout than other scientists because the memory of their role in the Second World War was fresh in people's minds.
Martin Rees
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. The lesson of the Cold War is that against nuclear weapons, only nuclear weapons can hold the peace.
Chung Mong-joon
#95. There is no such thing as a survivable or local nuclear war.
Jill Stein
#96. Some of the American military obviously were thinking in terms of fighting a nuclear war. I was opposed to that.
Helmut Schmidt
#97. We don't want to start a nuclear war unless we really have to, now do we Jack?
Peter Sellers
#98. 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
#99. If they don't close these [nuclear] reactors down, we'll have civil war in five years.
Ralph Nader
#100. 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