Vladimir Putin Quotes

We are told that the possession of nuclear weapons - in some cases even the testing of these weapons - is essential for national security. But this argument can be made by other countries as well.

Nobody should have any illusion about the possibility of gaining military superiority over Russia. We will never allow this to happen.

During the cold war, it was easy for the Pentagon to justify its budget, as the Soviets essentially sized our forces for us. We simply counted up their stuff and either bought more of the same or upgraded our technology.

The trick in nuclear strategy is to maintain stability by balancing potentials and thus to discourage events from converting the hypothetical to the actual.

No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.

I could not conceive of any President engaging in all-out nuclear war unless we were in danger of all-out devastation ourselves.

If an SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) system were to keep out ninety percent of incoming nuclear missiles, it would be a ninety percent success and most Americans would be dead.

It’s inherent in [the] government’s right, if necessary, to lie to save itself when it’s going up into a nuclear war. This seems to me basic.

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

National missile defense has become a question of theology, not policy.

Local defenses must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power.

The basic reason Russia has not attacked us is that we can outproduce her.

How is it possible for free institutions to flourish, or even maintain themselves, in a situation where defenses, civil and military, must be ceaselessly poised to meet an attack that might incinerate fifty million Americans—not in the space of an evening, but in the space of moments.

The military capabilities of the United States need to be kept comfortably superior to those of present and potential enemies. But they should be measured relatively, against those enemies’ capabilities, and not against the limit of what is technologically possible or based on some vague urge to have more.

We are ready to cooperate with other nations to approximate disarmament, but merest prudence forbids that we disarm alone.

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

If U.S. air, naval, missile, and ground forces were not in and around Korea, and if we were not treaty-bound to fight alongside South Korea, there would be no reason for Kim to build rockets to threaten a distant superpower that could reduce his hermit kingdom to ashes.

Leadership is absolutely vital if there are comparable countries which can affect the security of the world you live in. Between Lincoln and Roosevelt's time, America was protected by huge oceans and, in practice, by the British navy. Today, it's different, and the obsession of the Obama administration has been for retrenchment.

The Army I grew up in was focused on high-intensity conflict against a peer competitor called the Soviet Union.

If you look ahead 10 years, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the people of Russia had become fans of missile defence.

Why would I strike America and invite a retaliatory counterstrike that would put an end to my regime? Keep in mind, the whole point of this - my entire strategy, all our efforts and the hardships we have borne - is to ensure that my regime and I survive. Why would I risk that? I believe in assassination, not suicide.

I feel that the whole Western World will benefit by the resurrection of the neutron bomb project.

The Reagan Administration has no rational plan for our military. Instead, it acts on misinformed assumptions about the strength of the Soviet military and a presumed 'window of vulnerability,' which we now know not to exist.

Isn't a policy of conventional weapons, with the terrible bombs raining down, with the missiles, with the aircraft, with the submarines, with the torpedoes, with the tanks, with chemical weapons - isn't that based on the possibility of threat?

When war is waged, it is for the purpose of safeguarding or increasing one's capacity to make war. International politics are wholly involved in this vicious cycle. What is called national prestige consists in behaving always in such a way as to demoralize other nations by giving them the impression that, if it comes to war, one would certainly defeat them. What is called national security is an imaginary state of affairs in which one would retain the capacity to make war while depriving all other countries of it.