Noam Chomsky Quotes

I have said publicly no option should be off the table, but I would certainly take nuclear weapons off the table.

It is madness for any country to build its policy with an eye to nuclear war.

Look, Israel doesn't intend to introduce nuclear weapons, but if people are afraid that we have them, why not? It's a deterrent.

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

American forces there could probably be cut by at least one-third if NATO commanders had the power to use nuclear weapons on their own initiative in an emergency.

Dwight Eisenhower… supported the nuclearization of the military and the militarization of nuclear weapons as a cost saving way of deterring the Soviets. Under Eisenhower, custody or nuclear weapons shifted from the civilian Atomic Energy Commission to the military.

Our republic is a responsible nuclear state that, as we made clear before, will not use nuclear weapons first unless aggressive hostile forces use nuclear weapons to invade on our sovereignty.

You look at Russia's doing with their nuclear capability and the newness of their capability, and look at we're - what we're doing, and nobody wants to do that with respect to nukes because nukes are horrible. But you have countries that are going out of their way to do things that we're not doing. And we have to be very, very careful.

The Cold War philosophy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which prevented the former Soviet Union and the United States from using the nuclear weapons they had targeted at each other, would not apply to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran. For him (Ahmadinejad), Mutual Assured Destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement.

Teller contended, not implausibly, that hydrogen bombs keep the peace, or at least prevent thermonuclear war, because the consequences of warfare between nuclear powers are now too dangerous. We haven't had a nuclear war yet, have we? But all such arguments assume that the nuclear-armed nations are and always will be, without exception, rational actors, and that bouts of anger and revenge and madness will never overtake their leaders (or military and secret police officers in charge of nuclear weapons). In the century of Hitler and Stalin, this seems ingenuous.

We are not afraid of nuclear weapons. The point is that if we had in fact wanted to build a nuclear bomb, we are brave enough to say that we want it. But we never do that.

Our nuclear weapons are meant purely as a deterrent against nuclear adventure by an adversary.

We keep our nuclear policy somewhat ambiguous because of national security.

Let me be crystal clear: There is no such thing as 'limited use' nuclear weapons, and for a Pentagon advisory board to promote their development is absolutely unacceptable.

Donald Trump believes that the world will be safer if more nations have nuclear weapons. And he's said Saudi Arabia should get them, Japan should get them, Korea should get them. And when he was confronted with this, and told, wait a minute, terrorists could get those, proliferation could lead to nuclear war, here's what Donald Trump said, and I quote: "Go ahead, folks, enjoy yourselves."

I can't believe that this world can go on beyond our generation and on down to succeeding generations with this kind of weapon on both sides poised at each other without someday some fool or some maniac or some accident triggering the kind of war that is the end of the line for all of us. And I just think of what a sigh of relief would go up from everyone on this earth if someday-and this is what I have-my hope, way in the back of my head-is that if we start down the road to reduction, maybe one day in doing that, somebody will say, 'Why not all the way? Let's get rid of all these things'.

That's our nuclear weapons strategy [going to frighten people], as of the early post-Cold War years. And I think this is a real failure of the intellectual community, including scholarship and the media. It's not like you had headlines all over the place. And it's not secret, the documents are there. And I think that's probably the right picture.

We assess that there is no significant threat to the UK from nuclear weapons at present, but developments continue to be monitored closely. We remain committed to limiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons through our international treaty obligations, and national programmes.

The nightmare of the Cold War was nuclear weapons in the hands of an irrational person. I don't want to live through that nightmare.

Donald Trump is a person who has been very cavalier, even casual about the use of nuclear weapons.

In fact, [Donald's Trump] cavalier attitude about nuclear weapons is so deeply troubling.

There's a very simple reason for focusing on the nuclear issue. Many, many issues are of supreme importance in one way or another, but if we blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons, no other issue is really going to matter. Quite possibly there would be no other human beings left to be concerned about anything else.

If in the words which the Secretary of State has just used, the use of a nuclear weapon is to be avoided 'at all costs'. what is the point of having one?

[Nuclear war]... may not be desirable.

The cavalier casual way that Donald Trump talks about nuclear weapons is not only frightening but it goes counter to more than 70 years of bipartisan, presidential leadership of Republicans and Democrats who believed that we have to prevent other countries from getting nuclear weapons and we have to do what we can to decrease the number of nuclear weapons in the world.