Jeff Bridges Quotes

The only thing that kept the Cold War cold was the mutual deterrence afforded by nuclear weapons.

The present basic philosophy is nuclear deterrence.

Mutually assured destruction.

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

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.

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.

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

the deterrent ratio might well shift to the Soviets so heavily, during the years of the [missile] gap, as to open to them a shortcut to world domination... Their missile power will be the shield from behind which they will slowly, but surely, advance...

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.

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 atomic clock ticks faster and faster. We may anticipate a state of affairs in which the Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other but only at risk of his own life.

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.

Nuclear weapons present us with a paradox: We spend billions of dollars building and maintaining them in the hope that we never have to use them.

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

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

Some people believe that the nuclear bomb should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, since it scared the major powers away from war by equating it with doomsday.

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.

Nuclear deterrence doesn't work outside of the Russian - U.S. context; Saddam Hussein showed that.

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.

In a world which is armed to its teeth with nuclear weapons, every quarrel or difference of opinion may lead to violence of a kind quite different from what is possible today.

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.

The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.

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

The Soviet Union is making missiles like sausages.

The Cold War was like two heavily armed men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each tends to ascribe to the other a consistency, foresight, and coherence that his own experience belies.