Edward Teller Quotes

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

The Soviet Union will not produce an atomic bomb for at least another 4 years

"World War III, was the Cold War".

World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.

During the Cold War, we were interested because we were scared that Russia and the United States were going to go to war. We were scared that Russia was going to take over the world. Every country became a battleground.

We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R.

Dwight Eisenhower… supported the nuclearization of the military and the militarization of nuclear weapons as a cost saving way of deterring the Soviets. Under Eisenhower, custody or nuclear weapons shifted from the civilian Atomic Energy Commission to the military.

The point is, once they have a missile that can hit the United States, we are now back in the kind of game we used to worry about with the Soviet Union, only the Soviet Union was more mature about this whole thing than I think the North Koreans will be.

But the most important thing about that story, which is not often told, is that as a result after the Cuban missile crisis, immediate steps were taken to correct our inability to collect on the movement of nuclear material out of the Soviet Union to other places.

But the first the general public learned about the discovery was the news of the destruction of Hiroshima by the atom bomb. A splendid achievement of science and technology had turned malign. Science became identified with death and destruction.

The only use for an atomic bomb is to keep somebody else from using one.

When the States already had nuclear weapons, and the Soviet Union was only building them, we got a significant amount of information through Soviet foreign intelligence channels.

At this time I had complete confidence in Russian policy and believed that the Western Allies deliberately allowed Germany and Russia to fight each other to death.

As long as some of us choose to rely on nuclear weapons, we continue to risk that these same weapons will become increasingly attractive to others.

A total nuclear freeze is counterproductive - especially now, when technology is rapidly changing and the Soviets have some important strategic advantages.

Well, The Day the Earth Caught Fire was a story... I don't if anybody knows what it is but it was about... in the early days of testing nuclear bombs, that Russia and America happened to test a nuclear bomb at the same moment at different ends of the earth.

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.

I also was producing, working on other materials for the hydrogen bomb. They call it lithium-6 and tritium. I was working on these and the only use for lithium-6 is the hydrogen bomb.

The only thing that kept the Cold War cold was the mutual deterrence afforded by nuclear weapons.

Had we not pursued the hydrogen bomb, there is a very real threat that we would now all be speaking Russian. I have no regrets.

The AEC scientists were so narrowly focused on arming the United States for nuclear war that they failed to perceive facts - even widely known ones - that were outside their limited field of vision.

There is no direct evidence that nuclear weapons prevented a world war. Conversely, it is known that they nearly caused one.

The other countries did not share the same concern the United States had in the early '90's - that North Korea actually had an ongoing nuclear weapons program.

This is a very important relationship we have with Russia, the relationship over the nuclear arsenal that they have obviously is important. They're a very powerful country.

Japan is the only country in the world which suffered from the scourge of nuclear weapons.