Carl Sagan Quotes

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

I have a little hope that the nuclear holocaust doesn't happen.

In nuclear war all men are cremated equal.

I'm still bothered by the threat of nuclear war.

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

You just activated a nuclear warhead, my friend.

Limiting nuclear war is like limiting the mission of a match thrown in a keg of gunpowder.

I don't know why people are always afraid of a nuclear blast.

The situation is extraordinary. It is militarism run stark mad. Unless someone acting for you can bring about a different understanding there is some day to be an awful cataclysm.

A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.

Yesterday, we fought wars which destroyed cities. Today, we are concerned with avoiding a war which will destroy the earth. We can adapt atomic energy to produce electricity and move ships, but can we control its use in anger?

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.

Long before the terrifying potential of the arms race was recognized, there was a widespread instinctive abhorrence of nuclear weapons, and a strong desire to get rid of them.

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

I remember fear and I remember the potential of nuclear war.

If the Russian nuclear arsenal was fired at the United States and other targets, and we fired back at them with thousands of nuclear weapons, it would be the end of life on earth.

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

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

In the real world of real political leaders a decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one's own country would be recognized as a catastrophic blunder.

The papers are full of the atomic bomb [Hiroshima] which is going to revolutionize everything and blow us all to buggery. Not a bad idea.

In a nuclear age, each of us is threatened when peace is not secured everywhere.

The notion of Armageddon has created a self-defeating prophecy: the more frightened decision makers are, the more careful they become and the less likely they are to initiate any action that might bring about the dreaded escalation to nuclear use. Armageddon is averted to the degree it is feared. As a result, nuclear deterrence has not only worked remarkably well in peacetime and served to limit the scope and intensity of conventional warfare, but it is likely to work surprisingly well in a large U.S.-Soviet conventional, and even a limited nuclear, war.

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.

It is most regrettable that nuclear energy is being harnessed for making nuclear weapons.