Sylvia Plath Quotes

Although September 11 was horrible, it didn't threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear weapons do.

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.

The dangers of atomic war are overrated. It would be hard on little, concentrated countries like England. In the United States we have lots of space.

The human and environmental devastation caused by nuclear weapons - whether by testing, mistake or malice - is the very reason we need to eliminate them altogether.

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.

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

I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare.

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

My feelings of revulsion and foreboding about nuclear weapons had not changed an iota since 1945, and they have never left me. Since I was 14, the overriding objective of my life has been to prevent the occurrence of nuclear war.

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.

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

In nuclear war all men are cremated equal.

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.

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

This means that the only function of nuclear weapons, while they exist, is to deter a nuclear attack.

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?

Growing up during the Cold War, I remember the seemingly imminent threat of nuclear war. In primary school we were taught to 'duck-and-cover' for protection. But even as children hiding under wooden desks, we recognized the inadequacies of this strategy.

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

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.

Nut With A Nuke

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

The decision to use any kind of nuclear weapon, even the tactical ones, presents such a risk of it getting out of control so quickly …

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

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

The human race has today the means for annihilating itself—either in a fit of complete lunacy ... or by a careless handling of atomic technology, through the slow poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure.