J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes

Nuclear weapons are only good for deterring. It is insane that two men, sitting on opposite ends of the world, should be able to decide to bring an end to civilization.

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.

We have a moral imperative to keep up the search for something better than mutual assured destruction.

A nuclear weapon is not just a football that you can use at will.

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

I would like to see invented a substance or a machine with such terrible power of mass destruction that war would thereby be made impossible forever.

I would not recommend the use of any atomic weapon, no matter how small, when both sides have the power to destroy the world.

For decades, we and the Soviets have lived under the threat of mutual assured destruction; if either resorted to the use of nuclear weapons, the other could retaliate and destroy the one who had started it. Is there either logic or morality in believing that if one side threatens to kill tens of millions of our people, our only recourse is to threaten killing tens of millions of theirs?

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

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 chief task was to stop the arms race before it brought utter disaster. However, after the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, any rationale for having nuclear weapons disappeared.

I do not regard the atomic bomb as a new weapon merely, but as a revolutionary change in the relations of man in the universe.

Limiting nuclear war is like limiting the mission of a match thrown in a keg of gunpowder.

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

The notion that our only strategic choice is MAD (mutually assured destruction)—which means nothing less than an unstable pact to commit instant and total mutual suicide in the event of war—is irrational, immoral and unnecessary.

In the real world of real political leaders a decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one's own country would be recognized as a catastrophic blunder.

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.

The nuclear threat is a direct product of the cult of force that has dominated the world for centuries.

The moral high ground in taking the first hit before attacking has been made obsolete by weapons of mass destruction….You cannot wait for a catastrophic event.

Nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary a choice of either a humiliating defeat or a nuclear war.

Mutually assured destruction.

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

I have to bring to your notice a terrifying reality: with the development of nuclear weapons Man has acquired, for the first time in history, the technical means to destroy the whole of civilization in a single act.

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.

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.