Melvin Van Peebles Quotes

The real abhorrent consequence of the invention of atomic bombs is the fact that we still have them and they're spreading.

Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize that they'd been kept in the dark by the United States government as to what atomic bombs can do.

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.

Nuclear proliferation has never entirely been brought under control, and the arsenals of nuclear powers contain bombs far more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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

There is no secret; and there is no defense. Within some few years Russia and many smaller countries can have their installations ready to make atom bombs by the hundreds, just like America, Atom bombs are the cheapest means of town-destruction …. Russia has numbers of devoted agents in every country--they can easily be smuggled in and hidden, to destroy everything for miles around at the fixed moment. An immense army of security officers and spies will be needed, continually to inspect every box or case in any house.

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

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.

We are still at the stumbling stage in atomic weapons.

On our nuclear weapons we should draw a mushroom cloud and put underneath it, 'Made in America by lazy and illiterate Americans and tested in Japan.'

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.

The lethal possibility of such atomic action in the future is frightening, and while we are the first to have it in our possession, there is a certainty that it will in the future be developed by potential enemies and that it will probably be used against us.

The Soviet Union prepared to test [nuclear weapons] while we were at the table negotiating with them. If they fooled us once it is their fault; if they fool us twice, it is our fault.

The Communist campaign, finely attuned to prevailing fears, almost imperceptibly shifted the primary concern away from Soviet aggression—the real security problem—to the immorality of the use of nuclear weapons, which happened to be the most effective way of resisting it.

Russia will likely have the atomic bomb by mid-1953.

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

In Los Alamos we were motivated by the desire to develop the atomic bomb before the Germans could do it. That was our main motivation …. The Germans surrendered before the bomb was ready and so it was obvious to use it against our remaining enemy [Japan].

In the past, scientists could disclaim direct responsibility for the use to which mankind had put their disinterested discoveries. We cannot take the same attitude now because the success which we have achieved in the development of nuclear power is fraught with infinitely greater dangers than were all the inventions of the past.

The Physicist was the darling of the cold war …atomic energy was responsible for so much of the politics of the Cold War.

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

The lesson of history is when a war starts every nation will ultimately use whatever weapon it has available. ... Therefore, we must expect that if another war — a serious war — breaks out, we will use nuclear energy in some form.

In the Cuban missile crisis [1962] we had 5,000 nuclear strategic weapons and the Russians had only 300.... Even though we had a 17 to 1 advantage, we were deterred. Even if only ten percent of their missiles got through, tens of millions of Americans would have died. We could not use our nuclear superiority.

We will use nuclear weapons whenever it serves our vital interests.

In my school as a young girl, they taught us that we would be protected from the atomic bomb if we got under the desk.