Nuclear War Quotes

1. "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?"
Author: Arundhati Roy

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?"
Author: Bianca Jagger

3. "While maintaining our nuclear potential at the proper level, we need to devote more attention to developing the entire range of means of information warfare."
Author: Boris Yeltsin

4. "Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it.Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse"
Author: Carl Sagan

5. "Would we argue that ten thousand target nuclear warheads are likely to enhance the prospect for our survival? What account would we give of our stewardship of the planet Earth? We have heard the rationales offered by the nuclear superpowers. We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth?"
Author: Carl Sagan

6. "The committee discloses that even after the U.S. government learned of the diversion of U.S. designs for nuclear warheads in late 1995, the Clinton Administration failed to take steps immediately to improve security."
Author: Charles Bass

7. "I think of everything and I'm pretty sure if I could use my organizational skills for something else, like wildlife survival kits or preparing people for nuclear warfare, I'd be a millionaire. Or at the very least actually a useful human being."
Author: Corey Ann Haydu

8. "My feelings of revulsion and foreboding about nuclear weapons had not changed an iota since 1945, and they have never left me. Since I was 14, the overriding objective of my life has been to prevent the occurrence of nuclear war."
Author: Daniel Ellsberg

9. "Nixon did have a secret plan, and I knew that it involved making threats of nuclear war to North Vietnam."
Author: Daniel Ellsberg

10. "After the nuclear war, kids like them'll rule what's left. It'll be hell."
Author: David Mitchell

11. "You don't have any communication between the Israelis and the Iranians. You have all sorts of local triggers for conflict. Having countries act on a hair trigger - where they can't afford to be second to strike - the potential for a miscalculation or a nuclear war through inadvertence is simply too high."
Author: Dennis Ross

12. "In nuclear war all men are cremated equal."
Author: Dexter Gordon

13. "It is most gratifying," it said, "that your enthusiasm for our planet continues unabated, and so we would like to assure you that the guided missiles currently converging with your ship are part of a special service we extend to all of our most enthusiastic clients, and the fully armed nuclear warheads are of course merely a courtesy detail. We look forward to your custom in future lives ... thank you."
Author: Douglas Adams

14. "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."
Author: Douglas Coupland

15. "It will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a hopeless battle. this is true. unless a way is found to stabilize the nation's population, the parks can not be saved. or anything else worth a damn. wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will be forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded environment. for my own part i would rather take my chances in a thermonuclear war than live in such a world."
Author: Edward Abbey

16. "Pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners, only survivors."
Author: Frank Gifford

17. "I am an atheist, but as far as blowing up the world in a nuclear war goes, I tell them not to worry."
Author: Fred Hoyle

18. "Negotiations with Iran, especially, will not be easy under any circumstances, but I suspect that they might be somewhat less difficult if the nuclear-weapon states could show that their requests are part of a broader effort to lead the world, including themselves, toward nuclear disarmament. Preventing further proliferation is essential, but it is not a recipe for success to preach to the rest of the world to stay away from the very weapons that nuclear states claim are indispensable to their own security."
Author: Hans Blix

19. "I looked for it [heavy hydrogen, deuterium] because I thought it should exist. I didn't know it would have industrial applications or be the basic for the most powerful weapon ever known [the nuclear bomb] ... I thought maybe my discovery might have the practical value of, say, neon in neon signs. [He was awarded the 1931 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering deuterium.]"
Author: Harold Urey

20. "Nuclear war is such an emotional subject that many people see the weapons themselves as the common enemy of humanity."
Author: Herman Kahn

21. "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."
Author: Herman Kahn

22. "In 1960 I published a book that attempted to direct attention to the possibility of a thermonuclear war, to ways of reducing the likelihood of such a war, and to methods for coping with the consequences should war occur despite our efforts to avoid it."
Author: Herman Kahn

23. "Isn't it sad that you can tell people that the ozone layer is being depleted, the forests are being cut down, the deserts are advancing steadily, that the greenhouse effect will raise the sea level 200 feet, that overpopulation is choking us, that pollution is killing us, that nuclear war may destroy us - and they yawn and settle back for a comfortable nap. But tell them that the Martians are landing, and they scream and run."
Author: Isaac Asimov

24. "The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai."
Author: J. G. Ballard

25. "I remember fear and I remember the potential of nuclear war."
Author: Jack Scalia

26. "Mort drove one of those little hybrid cars that, when not running on gasoline, was fueled by idealism. It was made out of crepe paper and duct tape and boasted a computer system that looked like it could have run the NYSE and NORAD, with enough attention left over to play tic-tac-toe. Or possibly Global Thermonuclear War."
Author: Jim Butcher

27. "I would not reconsider the nuclear cuts. The appropriations committee did due process in looking at where there was the ability to cut some spending and that's what we did and now it's time to look forward to fiscal year '12."
Author: Joe Heck

28. "At 13:57 local time, a low yield nuclear warhead exploded in the city of Chongjin, North Korea.A long standing military target. Chongjin is home to some 532,000 men, women, and children.This city has survived a number of wars. It will not survive this.But her people will.As 13:57 and .00001 microseconds, half a million Koreans seemed to materialize on a hilltop 35 miles away from the blast.They were carried there . . . One at a time, sometimes two . . .At a hair's breadth short of the speed of light . . . By one man . . .The Flash. The Fastest Man Alive."
Author: Joe Kelly

29. "We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of preeminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war."
Author: John F. Kennedy

30. "Unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle disputes. It can no longer be of concern to great powers alone. For a nuclear disaster, spread by winds and waters and fear, could well engulf the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the committed and the uncommitted alike. Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind."
Author: John F. Kennedy

31. "From 1957 through 1961, Khrushchev openly, repeatedly, and bloodcurdlingly threatened the West with nuclear annihilation. Soviet missile capabilities were so far superior to those of the United States, he insisted, that he could wipe out any American or European city. He would even specify how many missiles and warheads each target might require."
Author: John Lewis Gaddis

32. "He told me the crooks used this place for more than just a dumping ground for undesirables. He said they also had a lot of food stored here in case there was ever a nuclear war. That way they could insure that in the future there would still be criminals."
Author: John Swartzwelder

33. "You just activated a nuclear warhead, my friend."
Author: John Travolta

34. "Every room I've lived in since I was given my own room at eleven was lined with, and usually overfull of, books. My employment in bookstores was always continuous with my private hours: shelving and alphabetizing, building shelves, and browsing-- in my collection and others-- in order to understand a small amount about the widest possible number of books. Such numbers of books are constantly acquired that constant culling is necessary; if I slouch in this discipline, the books erupt. I've also bricked myself in with music--vinyl records, then compact discs. My homes have been improbably information-dense, like capsules for survival of a nuclear war, or models of the interior of my own skull. That comparison--room as brain-- is one I've often reached for in describing the rooms of others, but it began with the suspicion that I'd externalized my own brain, for anyone who cared to look."
Author: Jonathan Lethem

35. "There is no direct evidence that nuclear weapons prevented a world war. Conversely, it is known that they nearly caused one."
Author: Joseph Rotblat

36. "This is the reality of nuclear weapons: they may trigger a world war; a war which, unlike previous ones, destroys all of civilization."
Author: Joseph Rotblat

37. "How do you turn catastrophe into art? Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We'll have a play on the London stage within a year. A President is assissinated? You can have the book or the film or the filmed book or booked film. War? Send in the novelists. A series of gruesome murders? Listen for the tramp of the poets. We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it, so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify it and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally. Why did it happen, this mad act of Nature, this crazed human moment? Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that's what catastrophe is for."
Author: Julian Barnes

38. "The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it."
Author: Larry Niven

39. "If we are to assume that North Korea becomes a nuclear-power state, of course the danger of having an all-out nuclear war, that possibility is very slim."
Author: Lee Myung Bak

40. "Even with the best intentions, you can have a nuclear war, a nuclear holocaust, through miscalculation, through accidents."
Author: Mohamed ElBaradei

41. "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."
Author: Neil Gaiman

42. "He looked around when he heard a window-rattling roar. "Earthquake? Volcano? Nuclear war?""Beaver," Peter told him."I don't care if it is Alaska, you don't have beavers big enough to sound like that."
Author: Nora Roberts

43. "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."
Author: Norman Thomas

44. "Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living."
Author: Omar N. Bradley

45. "Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward' that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy's mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state's mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous."
Author: Robert Higgs

46. "A nuclear bomb is a man's way of saying, 'I'm gonna fuck up the earth.' A woman would never make a nuclear bomb. They would never make a weapon that kills. They'd make a weapon that makes you feel bad for a while... That's why there should be a woman president, there would never be any wars. You know this, it's the truth. There would never be a war; just every twenty-eight days: some severe negotiations."
Author: Robin Williams

47. "They preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth. They are the focus of evil in the modern world.... So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil."
Author: Ronald Reagan

48. "In terms of weapons, the best disarmament tool so far is nuclear energy. We have been taking down the Russian warheads, turning it into electricity. 10 percent of American electricity comes from decommissioned warheads."
Author: Stewart Brand

49. "The widespread willingness to rely on thermonuclear bombs as the ultimate weapon displays a cavalier attitude toward death that has always puzzled me. My impression is that...most of the defenders of these weapons are not suitably horrified at the possibility of a war in which hundreds of millions of people would be killed...I suspect that an important factor may be belief in an afterlife, and that the proporttion of those who think that death is not the end is much higher among the partisans of the bomb than among its opponents."
Author: Thomas Nagel

50. "Firing off 1,000 or 500 or 2,000 nuclear warheads on a few minutes' consideration has always struck me as an absurd way to go to war."
Author: William Odom

Nuclear War Quotes Pictures