William Godwin Quotes

The terror created by weaponry has never stopped men from employing them.

Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD, works only as long as it works; it does not know what to do if deterrence fails, for it envisions no defensive capabilities. A deterrent works until it is needed; then one needs defenses.

We have to risk a nuclear war in order to escape capitulation to Communism. For all I know, we may stumble into this terrible war.

The politicians in this world... have at their command weapons of mass destruction far more complex than their own thinking processes.

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

I thought this must be obvious to everyone else, as it seemed obvious to me; and that, if once it became apparent that we were on the edge, all the Great Powers would call a halt and recoil from the abyss.

The lesson of the Cold War is that against nuclear weapons, only nuclear weapons can hold the peace.

What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.

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 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.

Science has produced such powerful weapons that in a war between great powers there would be neither victor nor vanquished. Both would be overwhelmed in destruction.

The lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is plain: Strength prevents war; weakness invites it. We need a commander-in-chief who understands that - and who won't leave us facing a foe who thinks he doesn't.

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

That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it.

And I have lived since - as you have - in a period of cold war, during which we have ensured by our achievements in the science and technology of destruction that a third act in this tragedy of war will result in the peace of extinction.

The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.

This means that the only function of nuclear weapons, while they exist, is to deter a nuclear attack.

I know that military alliances and armament have been the reliance for peace for centuries, but they do not produce peace; and when war comes, as it inevitably does under such conditions, these armaments and alliances but intensify and broaden the conflict.

As history since Hiroshima shows, the best, perhaps the only, way to curb war is to deter it with such overwhelming force as to turn it from a struggle into suicide.

For every security measure, there is a counter measure that breeds further insecurity. The acquisition by Pakistan or Iran of a nuclear capability neutralizes the security achieved by Israel’s own nuclear capability. Non-governmental terrorism neutralizes governmental military superiority. Chemical weapons neutralize the security of cement walls.

Better red than dead.

If the [present] deterrent is the mutual annihilation of each other ..., what else do we need and why?

Blow them [the Russians] off the face of the earth, quick, before they do the same to us. We haven't much time.

Every nation prepares, through its government, to equip itself with the power to hurl death upon its fellow-nations. No people seeks that power; it is governments that seek it.

All the time one keeps on thinking of this bomb, and what it may make the future look like. A perpetual menace over everything but may be as salutary as hell fire was in its time.