Herman Kahn Quotes

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

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.

We do not believe that a nuclear war should be fought and we do not believe that a nuclear war can be won.

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

Some people believe that the nuclear bomb should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, since it scared the major powers away from war by equating it with doomsday.

Firing off 1,000 or 500 or 2,000 nuclear warheads on a few minutes' consideration has always struck me as an absurd way to go to war.

I'm still bothered by the threat of nuclear war.

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

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.

I can't understand why anyone would want nuclear warheads. If you shoot them off, it's not like you can take over that country-all you do is kill millions of people.

Nuclear war is such an emotional subject that many people see the weapons themselves as the common enemy of humanity.

If we are to assume that North Korea becomes a nuclear-power state, of course the danger of having an all-out nuclear war, that possibility is very slim.

The way to win an atomic war is to make sure it never starts.

I would not recommend the use of any atomic weapon, no matter how small, when both sides have the power to destroy the world.

A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.

You probably don't need more weapons than what's required to destroy every city on earth. There's only 2,300 cities. So, the United States, by that criteria, only needs 2,300 nuclear weapons - well, we've got more than 25,000!

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

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

Even with the best intentions, you can have a nuclear war, a nuclear holocaust, through miscalculation, through accidents.

So long as nuclear weapons continue to exist, so will the temptation to threaten others with overwhelming military force.

Nuclear weapons are infinitely less important in our foreign policy than they were in the days of the Cold War. I don't think we need nuclear weapons any longer.

It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives.

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

My guess is that nuclear weapons will be used sometime in the next hundred years, but that their use is much more likely to be small and limited than widespread and unconstrained.