Henry L. Stimson Quotes

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

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

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.

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

I would like to see invented a substance or a machine with such terrible power of mass destruction that war would thereby be made impossible forever.

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

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 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.

The world has placed chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in a separate category because their use constitutes a crime against all humanity.

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.

Where is the indignation about the fact that the US and USSR have thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?

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.

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

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

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.

There are two groups of people in the world, the Anglo Saxons and the Soviets who have been stockpiling nuclear weapons. France will not accept a position of permanent and massive inferiority.

I say in all sincerity that the nuclear arms race has no military purpose. Wars cannot be fought with nuclear weapons; their existence only adds to our perils because of the illusions which they have generated.

The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children. We were the first to have this weapon in our possession, and the first to use it. There is a practical certainty that potential enemies will have it in the future and that atomic bombs will sometime be used against us.

A stable world may be one in which the United States can act to secure peace without fear of a nuclear attack.

The nuclear threat is a direct product of the cult of force that has dominated the world for centuries.

The moral high ground in taking the first hit before attacking has been made obsolete by weapons of mass destruction….You cannot wait for a catastrophic event.

I think we have to get rid of nuclear weapons. The idea that somehow by having nuclear weapons you make the world a safer place is essentially insane.

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

Most of our thinking about nuclear weapons is a hangover from different era …. Much about war, peace and global security changed after Hiroshima and changed again … with the end of the Cold war. It is high time our thinking changed as well.

The atomic bomb is shit.... It will make a big bang—a very big bang—but it is not weapon which is useful in war.