Tom Lehrer Quotes

Duck and Cover

If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things -- praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts -- not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They might break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

In my school as a young girl, they taught us that we would be protected from the atomic bomb if we got under the desk.

I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare.

If Obama commits thermonuclear war, I won't have to worry about November and neither will you.

We who grew up with 'drop and cover' drills know all too well what wonders science can bring us, and we like to see the guy in the white lab coat suffer a little. Or a lot.

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.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

I think all of you know there is no adequate defense against massive nuclear attack.

In nuclear war all men are cremated equal.

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

In 1957, with the arms race in full swing, the Department of Defense had decided it was just a matter of time before an airplane transporting an atomic bomb would crash on American soil, unleashing a radioactive disaster the likes of which the world had never seen.

As far as I know, the most conservative estimates of the number of Americans who would be killed in a major nuclear attack, with everything working as well as can be hoped and all foreseeable precautions taken, run to about fifty million.

Growing up during the Cold War, I remember the seemingly imminent threat of nuclear war. In primary school we were taught to 'duck-and-cover' for protection. But even as children hiding under wooden desks, we recognized the inadequacies of this strategy.

Nut With A Nuke

The first use of the nuclear weapon gives a great advantage to the user.

If the race of nuclear armaments is allowed to develop, the only apparent way in which our country could be protected from the paralyzing effects of a sudden attack is by dispersal of industries which are essential for our war effort and dispersal of the population of our major metropolitan cities.

We ought to nuke North Korea right about now just to give the world a warning.

The danger today resides in the Disaster Lobby—those crepe-hangers who, for personal gain or out of sheer ignorance, are undermining the American system and threatening the lives and fortunes of the American people. Some people have let the gloom-mongers scare them beyond rational response with talk about atomic annihilation. ... Since World War II over one billion human beings who worried about A- bombs and H-bombs died of other causes. They worried for nothing

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

Massive [nuclear] retaliation: The policy under which, if "they" began the war, you could take satisfaction, in the instant of being vaporized or cooked, in the knowledge that "our" planes and guided missiles are going to do the same thing to "them" in a few minutes. If "we" started the war, massive retaliation would be what was vaporizing or cooking you.

The dangers of atomic war are overrated. It would be hard on little, concentrated countries like England. In the United States we have lots of space.

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 lethal possibility of such atomic action in the future is frightening, and while we are the first to have it in our possession, there is a certainty that it will in the future be developed by potential enemies and that it will probably be used against us.

The papers are full of the atomic bomb [Hiroshima] which is going to revolutionize everything and blow us all to buggery. Not a bad idea.