Naomi Mitchison Quotes

Nuclear weapons are only good for deterring. It is insane that two men, sitting on opposite ends of the world, should be able to decide to bring an end to civilization.

The weapons were conceived and created by a small band of physicists and chemists; they remain a cataclysmic threat to the whole of human society and the natural environment.

Science has produced such powerful weapons that in a war between great powers there would be neither victor nor vanquished. Both would be overwhelmed in destruction.

And I have lived since - as you have - in a period of cold war, during which we have ensured by our achievements in the science and technology of destruction that a third act in this tragedy of war will result in the peace of extinction.

Nuclear weapons are what make us a great power.

A nuclear weapon is not just a football that you can use at will.

I would not recommend the use of any atomic weapon, no matter how small, when both sides have the power to destroy the world.

Find it quite impossible to get excited about the atomic bomb as such, can’t see that it really alters anything.

Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, miscalculation or madness.

… that bloody invention… they could wipe out the whole world

The atomic clock ticks faster and faster. We may anticipate a state of affairs in which the Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other but only at risk of his own life.

If we made atomic bombs, we would bring about a terrible change in the world. Who knows what would happen from this?

Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.

I have to bring to your notice a terrifying reality: with the development of nuclear weapons Man has acquired, for the first time in history, the technical means to destroy the whole of civilization in a single act.

The only use for an atomic bomb is to keep somebody else from using one.

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.

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.

In a world which is armed to its teeth with nuclear weapons, every quarrel or difference of opinion may lead to violence of a kind quite different from what is possible today.

The chief task was to stop the arms race before it brought utter disaster. However, after the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, any rationale for having nuclear weapons disappeared.

We have a moral imperative to keep up the search for something better than mutual assured destruction.

I could not conceive of any President engaging in all-out nuclear war unless we were in danger of all-out devastation ourselves.

There is only one thing worse than one nation having the atomic bomb -- that's two nations having it.

The danger today resides in the Disaster Lobby—those crepe-hangers who, for personal gain or out of sheer ignorance, are undermining the American system and threatening the lives and fortunes of the American people. Some people have let the gloom-mongers scare them beyond rational response with talk about atomic annihilation. ... Since World War II over one billion human beings who worried about A- bombs and H-bombs died of other causes. They worried for nothing

There is no secret; and there is no defense. Within some few years Russia and many smaller countries can have their installations ready to make atom bombs by the hundreds, just like America, Atom bombs are the cheapest means of town-destruction …. Russia has numbers of devoted agents in every country--they can easily be smuggled in and hidden, to destroy everything for miles around at the fixed moment. An immense army of security officers and spies will be needed, continually to inspect every box or case in any house.

The way to win an atomic war is to make sure it never starts.