David Seltzer Quotes

My own judgment of how the world is gonna end is that there will be a country led by a madman that will build a nuclear bomb with so much force, so much power, that it will be dropped somewhere on the face of this earth and that the earth will lose its place.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.

The Atomic Age is here to stay - but are we?

I can't visualize the situation in which we nuke ourselves into extinction.

Every adult in the world has some sense that he or she might be obliterated at any time by these weapons that we have created.

It's interesting - in 'Fail Safe,' as well, they didn't back off. We were raised with kind of this spectrum of that Armageddon and lived under it, so those were probably the films. 'Fail Safe' sort of haunted me.

Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, miscalculation or madness.

Ever since the invention of gunpowder.. I continually tremble lest men should, in the end, uncover some secret which would provide a short way of abolishing mankind, of annihilating peoples and nations in their entirety.

Human beings have got a lot of good, noble impulses inside them, and most people want to be good and do more good than they do evil. Hell, we've had nuclear weapons now for thirty or thirty-five years and nothing's happened yet. That in itself seems to be a miracle. If Reagan pushes the button or somebody pushes the button in Russia or somebody pushes it in Costa Rica, they can put a big tombstone in outer space that says, "We gave it a good try." Because we have.

For the first time in the history of mankind, one generation literally has the power to destroy the past, the present and the future, the power to bring time to an end.

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

Nuclear holocaust might eliminate the Internet.

This programme to stop nuclear by 2020 is just crazy. If there were a nuclear war, and humanity were wiped out, the Earth would breathe a sigh of relief.

Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.

There has been a transition from a nuclear-annihilation scenario to an isolated-terrorist-nuclear-bomb scenario. But we're still locked into a mind-set that nuclear war would be so overwhelming that any kind of preparedness would be futile.

I've been obsessed with doomsday for a long time - the idea that different cultures respond to it differently, and religions will change people's outlook on 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.

If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.

Nut With A Nuke

We can’t blow up the world because of it.

If Iran gets nuclear weapons we are near to the apocalypse.

There isn’t going to be any learning curve for nuclear weapons. An administration makes one mistake and the result can destroy entire nations.

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.

I remember very vividly, as a child growing up in England, living through the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a few days, the entire biosphere seemed to be on the verge of destruction. And the same weapons are still here, and they're still armed. If we avoid that trap, others are waiting for us.

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.