Russell Baker Quotes

Thank God for the bomb. Nuke ya, nuke ya.

In the future, if nuclear weapons are unleashed there will be no front and no rear.

In nuclear war all men are cremated equal.

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

The atom bomb fueled the entire world that came after it. It showed that indiscriminate killing and indiscriminate homicide on a mass level was possible ... whereas if you look at warfare up until that point, you had to see somebody to shoot them or maim them, you had to look at them. You don't have to do that anymore.

I think that once the nuclear alternative happens, it's over. At the same time, we have to be prepared.

I don't like the word nuclear exchange, it's like an exchange of wheat and so on. It's a horrible term and I always cross it out when I see it somewhere.

There is no morality in the mushroom cloud. The black rain of nuclear ashes will fall alike on the just and the unjust. And then it will be too late to wish that we had done the real work of this atomic age, which is to seek a world that is neither red nor dead.

Even with the best intentions, you can have a nuclear war, a nuclear holocaust, through miscalculation, through accidents.

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.

Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize that they'd been kept in the dark by the United States government as to what atomic bombs can do.

You just activated a nuclear warhead, my friend.

Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological nation plans for it.

The lesson of history is when a war starts every nation will ultimately use whatever weapon it has available. ... Therefore, we must expect that if another war — a serious war — breaks out, we will use nuclear energy in some form.

Survival Under Atomic Attack

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.

The world has been close to war before - but now man, who has survived all previous threats to his existence, has taken into his mortal hands the power to exterminate the entire species some seven times over.

America was good enough to make a small compact lighter weight nuclear weapon. The Russians still had these big clunky heavy ones, so they had to build the big boosters in the arm's war, so now all of the sudden Russia could take off the shelf and put into orbit much heavier things than we could, so that's why they had the original leadership.

That's our nuclear weapons strategy [going to frighten people], as of the early post-Cold War years. And I think this is a real failure of the intellectual community, including scholarship and the media. It's not like you had headlines all over the place. And it's not secret, the documents are there. And I think that's probably the right picture.

We make weapons now that, if we ever used them, would kill ourselves. How do you explode a weapon with so much radiation in it that it will wipe out an entire city and think that it's not going to blow over your own cities? We all breathe the same air. It's madness.

I think Pakistan was not a factor in terms of decision India to obtain nuclear weapon. Because there was no talk of Pakistan having any capability. The main factor was China. And the international prestige that China was getting as a consequence of having its own nuclear weapons.

Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it. Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse

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.

We're very powerful nuclear country. I've been briefed, I can tell you one thing about briefing that we're allowed to say, anybody that read the most basic book can say it, nuclear holocaust would be like no other.

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.