Joshua Lederberg Quotes

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

I really believe the nexus of terrorism and nuclear weapons is the world's most ominous threat.

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.

You know, people have actually changed the way they think about nuclear weapons now, post-Cold War, post-9/11. The threat of nuclear weapons is not so much Russia attacking the United States, China. It's not a state-to-state - it's obviously terrorism; it's proliferation.

The risk of just one terrorist with just one nuclear weapon is a risk we simply cannot afford to take.

I think one country with nuclear weapons is one country too many.

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.

Nuclear proliferation - the proliferation of WMDs altogether - is one of the greatest dangers of our time.

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

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 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.

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

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?

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

Why should every country of the world not develop nuclear weapons now that America may nuke anyone at any time? … Those of us in Pakistan and India who have long fought against nuclearization of the subcontinent have been temporarily rendered speechless

Nuclear weapons exist. They probably always will. And they work, with horrible efficiency. They threaten the very future of our species. We have no choice but to manage that risk. Never again can we put the task out of our minds; nor trivialize it; nor make it routine.

Iran with a nuclear weapon or with fissile material that can be given to Hezbollah or Hamas or others has the potential of not just destabilizing the Middle East. But it could be brought here.

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 truth is, as long as nuclear weapons exist, we are not safe.

I agree that a nuclear Iran is extremely dangerous, and I believe that it must be prevented.

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.

You look at Russia's doing with their nuclear capability and the newness of their capability, and look at we're - what we're doing, and nobody wants to do that with respect to nukes because nukes are horrible. But you have countries that are going out of their way to do things that we're not doing. And we have to be very, very careful.

The most dangerous thing Iraq could have ever had was a nuclear weapon. The nuclear weapon Iraq was trying to build was not deliverable by bomb or ballistic missile. It was a large, bulky device that they hoped to bury and set off to let the world know they had a nuclear weapon. They never achieved that.

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

The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the United States reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't.