Anonymous Quotes

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.

Containment, as everyone will recall, was a rough plan for stopping the Communists any time they crossed a certain line dividing our half of the world from theirs.

If the [present] deterrent is the mutual annihilation of each other ..., what else do we need and why?

In another war the bombs will be plentiful and they will be comparatively cheap. Unless there is a determination not to use them that is stronger than can be noted today among American political and military leaders, and on the part of the public itself, atomic warfare will be hard to avoid....

We have to risk a nuclear war in order to escape capitulation to Communism. For all I know, we may stumble into this terrible war.

So, we need to delegitimize the nuclear weapon, and by de-legitimizing... meaning trying to develop a different system of security that does not depend on nuclear deterrence.

Anticommunism in its modern form was invented by liberals like Harry Truman, the architect of the national security state. The proportion of the voting population that was not anticommunist in 1961 was miniscule.

Had we not pursued the hydrogen bomb, there is a very real threat that we would now all be speaking Russian. I have no regrets.

The present basic philosophy is nuclear deterrence.

As history since Hiroshima shows, the best, perhaps the only, way to curb war is to deter it with such overwhelming force as to turn it from a struggle into suicide.

The Pentagon talks about our power to 'overkill' Russia ten times, twenty times, perhaps forty-eight times. For my tax money, it is sufficient to overkill them once.

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.

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

We must halt the arms race before it halts humanity.

We know only too well that Communist desire for domination will not stop at either ocean. We urge firmness now.

People are very much wrought up about the Communist bugaboo.

Disarmament has become the urgent imperative of our time. I do not say this because I equate the absence of arms to peace, or because I believe that bringing an end to the nuclear arms race automatically guarantees the peace, or because the elimination of nuclear warheads from the arsenals of the world will bring in its wake that change in attitude requisite to the peaceful settlement of disputes between nations. Disarmament is vital today, quite simply, because of the immense destructive capacity of which men dispose.

The prospect of a nuclear war is not a bad thing because defeating capitalism would be worth losing up to two-thirds of the world’s population.

One significant indication of the effectiveness of deterrence is that the Soviet Union and the United States share the belief that a nuclear war would begin only out of desperation or inadvertence. A weakening of deterrence could increase the possibility of a calculated “voluntary” war or worse.

And, gentlemen, they have not yet done so, and it is quite clear that no Americans, no people in the world probably, are going to war with the Soviet Union.

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

The talk about balance, nuclear balance, seems to me to be metaphysical and doesn't seem to be real at all.

We are told that the possession of nuclear weapons - in some cases even the testing of these weapons - is essential for national security. But this argument can be made by other countries as well.

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