Nuclear War Quotes

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

We need to be fit and ready for anything that might come our way. ~ Aaron B. Powell

There is no such thing as a survivable or local nuclear war. ~ Jill Stein

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

Except for fools and madmen, everyone knows that nuclear war would he an unprecedented human catastrophe. ~ Carl Sagan

Teller contended, not implausibly, that hydrogen bombs keep the peace, or at least prevent thermonuclear war, because the consequences of warfare between nuclear powers are now too dangerous. We haven't had a nuclear war yet, have we? But all such arguments assume that the nuclear-armed nations are and always will be, without exception, rational actors, and that bouts of anger and revenge and madness will never overtake their leaders (or military and secret police officers in charge of nuclear weapons). In the century of Hitler and Stalin, this seems ingenuous. ~ Carl Sagan

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

Because normal human activity is worse for nature than the greatest nuclear accident in history. ~ Martin Cruz Smith

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

The only thing more insane than a nuclear war is continuing to prepare ourselves to have one. ~ Koda.

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

Let them bomb Japan with that nasty missile. Their missile cannot load a nuclear warhead. ~ Shintaro Ishihara

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

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

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. ~ J.G. Ballard

There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly. ~ Noam Chomsky

China's ability to deliver nuclear warheads on American cities is expanding. ~ Lee H. Hamilton

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

When Khrushchev asked whether his brass hats would guarantee that keeping the missiles in Cuba would not bring about nuclear war, they looked at him, he later told Norman Cousins of the Saturday Review, an informal emissary between Kennedy and Khrushchev, "as though I were out of my mind or, what was worse, a traitor. So I said to myself, 'To hell with these maniacs.'"6 ~ Robert F. Kennedy

Once [your romantic leads] have kissed, you don't get any pay-off from a second kiss. In fact, you risk reducing the tension. Every step forward has to up the stakes. But if the stakes go too high too early, it becomes a tension arms race. Escalate too soon and you've got all-out nuclear war in chapter four and scorched romantic earth for the rest of the story ~ C.S. Pacat

Gambling rules doesn't work in nuclear war - everyone become looser. ~ Amit Ray

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. ~ Jonathan Lethem

We don't want to start a nuclear war unless we really have to, now do we Jack? ~ Peter Sellers

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

In nuclear war all men are cremated equal. ~ Dexter Gordon

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. ~ John Swartzwelder

There is probably no way of explaining Project Koschei, or XK-PLUTO, or MK-NIGHTMARE, or the gates, without watering them down into just another weapons system -- which they are not. Weapons may have deadly or hideous effects, but they acquire moral character from the actions of those who use them. Whereas these projects are indelibly stained by a patina of ancient evil ... ~ Charles Stross

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

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

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

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

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

Raindrops make rivers and ocean - our deep intention and positive actions will make the world free from nuclear weapons and wars. ~ Amit Ray

It's like going into a nuclear war with bows and arrows. ~ Joe Kinnear

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

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. ~ Daniel Ellsberg

Accidental nuclear war between two superpowers may or may not happen in my lifetime, but if it does, it will obviously change everything. The climate change we're currently worrying about pales in comparison with nuclear winter, where a global dust cloud blocks sunlight for years, much like when an asteroid or supervolcano caused a mass extinction in the past. The 2008 economic turmoil was of course nothing compared to the resulting global crop failures, infrastructure collapse and mass starvation, with survivors succumbing to hungry armed gangs systematically pillaging from house to house. Do I expect to see this in my lifetime? I'd give it about 30%, putting it roughly on par with my getting cancer. Yet we devote way less attention and resources to reducing the risk of nuclear disaster than we do for cancer. And whereas humanity as a whole survives even if 30% get cancer, it's less obvious to what extent our civilization would survive a nuclear Armageddon. There are concrete and straightforward steps that can be taken to slash this risk, as spelled out in numerous reports by scientific organizations, but these never become major election issues and tend to get largely ignored. ~ Max Tegmark

I remember the philosopher Bertrand Russell was asked why he spent his time protesting against nuclear war and getting arrested on demonstrations. Why didn't he continue to work on the serious philosophical and logical problems which have major intellectual significance? And his answer was pretty good. He said: "Look, if I and others like me only work on those problems, there won't be anybody around to appreciate it or be interested. ~ Chomsky Noam

Just as a human soul that faces great difficulties also faces great opportunities for spiritual growth, so a human society that faces destruction also faces the opportunity to enter a period of renaissance. I think that, barring an accident, the wish to survive will keep us from a nuclear war. ~ Peace Pilgrim

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. ~ Lee Myung-bak

The survivors (of a nuclear war) would envy the dead. ~ Nikita Khrushchev

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

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

There are those who are trying hard to do something about these threats, and others who are acting to escalate them. If you, this future historian or extraterrestrial observer, looked at who is in each group, you would see something strange indeed: those trying to mitigate or overcome these threats are the least developed societies - the indigenous populations, or the remnants of them; tribal societies; and first nations in Canada. They're not talking about nuclear war but environmental disaster, and they're really trying to do something about it. ~ Noam Chomsky

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. ~ Nora Roberts

Could anyone in his right mind speak seriously of any limited nuclear war? It should be quite clear that the aggressor's actions will instantly and inevitably trigger a devastating counterstroke by the other side. None but completely irresponsible people could maintain that a nuclear war may be made to follow rules adopted beforehand, with nuclear missiles exploding in a "gentlemanly manner" over strictly designated targets and sparing the population. ~ Dmitriy Ustinov

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

I would eat fruitcake if there'd been a nuclear war and I'd run out of canned goods. ~ Deb Caletti

The entire world will be in nuclear war, and only the Swiss will be going, 'what's that noise?' ~ Robin Williams

That night I kept thinking about Pandora's box. I wondered why someone would put a good thing as Hope in a box with sickness and kidnapping and murder. It was fortunate that it was there, though. If not, people would have the birds of sadness nesting in their hair all the time, because of nuclear war and the greenhouse effect and bombs and stabbings and lunatics.
There must have been another box with all the good things in it, like sunshine and love and trees and all that. Who had the good fortune to open that one, and was there one bad thing down there in the bottom of the good box? Maybe it was Worry. Even when everything seems fine and good, I worry that something will go wrong and change everything. ~ Sharon Creech

There's a kind of theology at work here. The bombs are a kind of god. As his power grows, our fear naturally increases. I get as apprehensive as anyone else, maybe more so. We have too many bombs. They have too many bombs. There's a kind of theology of fear that comes out of this. We begin to capitulate to the overwhelming presence. It's so powerful. It dwarfs us so much. We say let the god have his way. He's so much more powerful than we are. Let it happen, whatever he ordains. It used to be that the gods punished men by using the forces of nature against them or by arousing them to take up their weapons and destroy each other. Now god is the force of nature itself, the fusion of tritium and deuterium. Now he's the weapon. So maybe this time we went too far in creating a being of omnipotent power. All this hardware. Fantastic stockpiles of hardware. The big danger is that we'll surrender to the sense of inevitability and start flinging mud all over the planet. ~ Don DeLillo

We must contemplate some extremely unpleasant possibilities, just because we want to avoid them and achieve something better. Nobody, however, likes to think about anything unpleasant, even to avoid it. And so the crucial problem of thermonuclear war is frequently dispatched with the label 'War is unthinkable'
which, translated freely, means we don't want to think about it. ~ Albert Wohlstetter

There are indications because of new inventions, that 10, 15, or 20 nations will have a nuclear capacity, including Red China, by the end of the Presidential office in 1964. This is extremely serious ... I think the fate not only of our own civilization, but I think the fate of world and the future of the human race, is involved in preventing a nuclear war. ~ John F. Kennedy

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

I'll bet you didn't think a handful of economists could save the world, did you? You thought the world would end with nuclear war or something? No, it's much more basic than that. It's more likely going to be from a disruption in the water supply, power, and from lack of food due to an economic collapse. Either that or a financial war. ~ Kenneth Eade

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

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

With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Science is turning into a monastery for the Order of Capitulant Friars. Logical calculus is supposed to supersede man as moralist. We submit to the blackmail of the 'superior knowledge' that has the temerity to assert that nuclear war can be, by derivation, a good thing, because this follows from simple arithmetic. ~ Stanislaw Lem

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

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

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

Nuclear weapons could bring about the Book of Revelation in a matter of hours; they could do it today. Of course, no dead will rise; nothing will be revealed (nothing meaning two things, the absence of everything and a thing called nothing). Events that we call "acts of God"
floods, earthquakes, eruptions
are flesh wounds compared to the human act of nuclear war: a million Hiroshimas. Like God, nuclear weapons are free creations of the human mind. Unlike God, nuclear weapons are real. And they are here. ~ Martin Amis

Nuclear weapons free world is not a dream but a necessity for human survival. We need stop waiting for things to happen. We need to go ahead and make things happen. ~ Amit Ray

Imagine if you will - and you will - a mushroom cloud bigger than anything that you currently see out that window. Imagine jet planes and bombers the size of apartment complexes dropping technological marvels of deconstruction upon this city, this world, all around the epicenter of a blooming death cloud. Imagine that mushroom coming to a head, knowing that it is filled with unimaginable heat and concrete, dust, papers - human faces, eyes, and brains. Gray matter filling the radioactive cloud with electricity as all that is inside us leaves us and becomes one with the mushroom. Glass will melt and connect with steel, and we will melt and connect with each other as everything that made us whole is criminally dissected and rearranged. Everything below us, from the sewer tunnels to the subway line, will be consumed into the cloud and jettisoned into the stratosphere, where it will become nothing but silken ash, hardened to a black substance, and turned back to a black dust, transfixed into a black nothing. A stinking, glowing crater all that remains of where you had your first kiss and told someone that you loved them. A mess of a world where everything you've ever done quickly becomes all that you'll ever do. ~ Michael A. Ferro

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

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. ~ Isaac Asimov

But if Saddam had been in a position credibly to threaten America or any of its allies - or the coalition's forces - with attack by missiles with nuclear warheads, would we have gone to the Gulf at all? ~ Margaret Thatcher

Nuclear war can ruin your whole compile. ~ Karl Lehenbauer

A Pentagon official once said the people who would actually push the button probably have never seen a person die. He said the only hope -and it's a strange thought - is if they put the button to launch the nuclear war behind a man's heart. The President, then, with a rusty knife, would have to cut out the man's heart, kill the man, to get to the button. ~ Robin Williams

Forgive me,' said Abbot Zerchi. 'I wasn't getting ready to argue moral theology with you. I was speaking only of this spectacle of mass euthanasia in terms of human motivation. the very existence of the Radiation Disaster Act, and like laws in other countries, is the plainest possible evidence that governments were fully aware of the consequences of another war, but instead of trying to make the crime impossible, they tried to provide in advance for the consequences of the crime. Are the implications of that fact meaningless to you, Doctor? ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

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

I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth ... How far from here was 34th street? ... All those buildings, all smashed - and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless.
But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead. ~ Richard Feynman

She looks like she's holding in a dictionary of bad words or a nuclear war. ~ Jandy Nelson

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

We do not believe that a nuclear war should be fought and we do not believe that a nuclear war can be won. ~ Atal Bihari Vajpayee

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

Among all the methods, non-violence is most successful, and I strongly believe that only non-violence can set the true mood of peace and harmony among the nuclear nations. Our experiments with non-violence should be more wide, more engaging and more humble. ~ Amit Ray

There will never be a nuclear war; there's too much real estate involved. ~ Frank Zappa

In some ways more painful is the fact that their experience appears to be fading from the collective memory of humankind. Having never experienced an atomic bombing, the vast majority around the world can only vaguely imagine such horror, and these days, John Hersey's Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth are all but forgotten. As predicted by the saying, 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,' the probability that nuclear weapons will be used and the danger of nuclear war are increasing. ~ Tadatoshi Akiba

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

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

It is madness for any country to build its policy with an eye to nuclear war. ~ Leonid Brezhnev

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

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

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

I don't wanna die in a nuclear war, I want to sail away to a distant shore, and make like an apeman. ~ Ray Davies

And there are other dangers potentially more dangerous than even nuclear war. There is AIDS. There is terrorism. There are drugs and more to the point the darkness of our time that makes people seek escape in drugs. There is the slow poisoning of what we call "the environment" of all things as if with that absurdly antiseptic phrase we can conceal from ourselves that what we are really poisoning is home, is here, is us. ~ Frederick Buechner

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

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

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

My generation was obsessed with scoliosis. Judy Blume dedicated an entire novel to it. At least once a month we would line up in the gym, lift our shirts, and bend over, while some creepy old doctor ran his finger up and down our spines. Nuclear war was a high-concept threat, two words that often rang out in political speeches or on the six o-clock news. Our spines. Lice. Nuclear war. The Big Three. ~ Amy Poehler

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

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

Americans need to continue to develop broad-based movements that reject the established political parties and rethink the social formations necessary to bring about a radical democracy. We see this in the Black Lives Matter movement as well as in a range of other movements that are resisting corporate money in politics, the widespread destruction of the environment, nuclear war and the mass incarceration state. ~ Henry A. Giroux

The worst lie ever told is that it is easier to destroy than to create. This lie makes people apathetic about a number of imminently avoidable horrors, particularly the nuclear ones. But Oppenheimer didn't just go outside one day and trip over an atomic bomb. Nuclear development required trillions of dollars and a massive sustained effort by America's top politicians, military advisors, and scientific geniuses. Not one damn bit of it was easy. It was certainly harder that sitting down with Stalin or Khrushchev and having a talk . . .
America had options. The path of destruction was a choice. It has always been America's choice, and we citizens have always shrugged, assuming it's too late to turn back the doomsday clock, although we're the ones who wound it in the first place. ~ Israel Morrow

The selection of issues that should rank high on the agenda of concern for human welfare and rights is, naturally, a subjective matter. But there are a few choices that seems unavoidable, because they bear so directly on the prospects for decent survival. Among them are at least these three: nuclear war, environmental disaster, and the fact that the government of the world's leading power is acting in ways that increase the likelihood of these catastrophes. ~ Noam Chomsky

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

Whether it is an accident, terrorism or irresponsible push of a nuke button, we all know, the result is devastating. How to prevent nuclear explosions on earth? This is the most crucial political, moral, social, technical and spiritual question of our time. ~ Amit Ray

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