Stephen Hawking Quotes

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.

If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.

We still live with this unbelievable threat over our heads of nuclear war. I mean, are we stupid? Do we think that the nuclear threat has gone, that the nuclear destruction of the planet is not imminent? It's a delusion to think it's gone away.

To me, nuclear weapons are the secret crisis of our time. Frankly, everyone needs to reread John Hersey's 'Hiroshima.'

The overarching problem is one of the survival of humanity in the face of the growing nuclear menace. If those bombs go off, nothing else would matter.

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

The real abhorrent consequence of the invention of atomic bombs is the fact that we still have them and they're spreading.

The consequence of a world full of nuclear powers to me is so incomprehensible in terms of the dangers that that implies.

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.

There are nuclear weapons in China, Iran, Korea and Pakistan. It wouldn't take much to send a couple of warheads off on this planet somewhere that would cause a lot of environmental damage, then if you have got someone who wants to retaliate you have real problems.

I can't understand why anyone would want nuclear warheads. If you shoot them off, it's not like you can take over that country-all you do is kill millions of people.

It's a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.

I worry about 10, 15, 20, 25 years down the road. Where are we going to be in this age of nuclear weapons, where there is no margin for error?

All mankind is now learning that these nuclear weapons can only serve to destroy, never become beneficial.

The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.

This diffusion of nuclear weapons is terrible…terrible. Imagine a world with a large number of states with nuclear bombs.

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.

Nuclear weapons exist. They probably always will. And they work, with horrible efficiency. They threaten the very future of our species. We have no choice but to manage that risk. Never again can we put the task out of our minds; nor trivialize it; nor make it routine.

The combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons can destroy nations.

The atomic bomb was the turn of the screw. It has made the prospect of future war unendurable.

The truth is, as long as nuclear weapons exist, we are not safe.

If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima.

For me, one of the big things I really worried about a lot was nuclear war growing up.

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