Ban Ki-moon Quotes

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

Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.

There is only one thing worse than one nation having the atomic bomb -- that's two nations having it.

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.

Disarmament has become the urgent imperative of our time. I do not say this because I equate the absence of arms to peace, or because I believe that bringing an end to the nuclear arms race automatically guarantees the peace, or because the elimination of nuclear warheads from the arsenals of the world will bring in its wake that change in attitude requisite to the peaceful settlement of disputes between nations. Disarmament is vital today, quite simply, because of the immense destructive capacity of which men dispose.

I don't like the fact that North Korea is testing nuclear weapons, and I don't like the fact that they're testing missiles and shooting them out in the sea in kind of an antagonistic fashion.

I remember some of the limited debate I did back in high school in the late '70s, early '80s: nuclear proliferation was always the big topic, and it's bad. We don't want to see it.

That is potentially putting us all in the target hairs now is the reactivation of a new nuclear arms race. This arms race and this cold war is potentially hotter than it's been at any time in my lifetime.

The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery is a threat to both the Nato allies and Russia.

We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon.

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 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.

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.

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

If we had made it clear from the very beginning that we were not going to tolerate another nuclear power on the face of the earth, and had done it in Korea, where we could have accomplished it militarily, if necessary, I would put a stop to it and would have put a stop to it there.

The present basic philosophy is nuclear deterrence.

But the nuclear powers still cling tenaciously to their weapons.

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.

A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us.

The Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons would be infinitely more costly than any scenario you can imagine to stop it.

China, in the future, is going to have even more nuclear capability than it has had in the past. I don't believe that they have anything to fear from the United States, and I frankly don't believe they do fear the United States.

For while the threat of nuclear holocaust has been significantly reduced, the world remains a very unsettled and dangerous place.

We can do better than condone a world in which nuclear weapons are accepted as commonplace.

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