Jack Reed Quotes

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

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

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.

The way to win an atomic war is to make sure it never starts.

We do not believe that a nuclear war should be fought and we do not believe that a nuclear war can be won.

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

You probably don't need more weapons than what's required to destroy every city on earth. There's only 2,300 cities. So, the United States, by that criteria, only needs 2,300 nuclear weapons - well, we've got more than 25,000!

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

The talk about balance, nuclear balance, seems to me to be metaphysical and doesn't seem to be real at all.

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.

A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us.

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.

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

We don't want to start a nuclear war unless we really have to, now do we Jack?

In another war the bombs will be plentiful and they will be comparatively cheap. Unless there is a determination not to use them that is stronger than can be noted today among American political and military leaders, and on the part of the public itself, atomic warfare will be hard to avoid....

I built a nuclear option to get peace, not to have bombs. Our enemies learned that they could not destroy us.

One significant indication of the effectiveness of deterrence is that the Soviet Union and the United States share the belief that a nuclear war would begin only out of desperation or inadvertence. A weakening of deterrence could increase the possibility of a calculated “voluntary” war or worse.

It is impossible to work out a reduction in nuclear threat as long as one side is going all out to demonize the other.

If that's the only thing that's stopping war then thank God for the bomb.

Long before the terrifying potential of the arms race was recognized, there was a widespread instinctive abhorrence of nuclear weapons, and a strong desire to get rid of them.

We are told that the possession of nuclear weapons - in some cases even the testing of these weapons - is essential for national security. But this argument can be made by other countries as well.

I'm not an expert on the arms race.

And it raises a fundamental question: How long can we move the world in one direction while we move in another direction, and do we want to backslide into an era that we finally emerged from where we had a nuclear weapon for every tactical mission?

Even with the best intentions, you can have a nuclear war, a nuclear holocaust, through miscalculation, through accidents.

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.