Robert Jay Lifton Quotes

There's an amazing documentary, 'The Day After Trinity,' which is crazy good.

I don't know why people are always afraid of a nuclear blast.

Reports in Washington show that our reasoning was just like that of your physicists. With all this information available, at least to privileged persons, I cannot understand why it is generally held in the United States that we completely missed the basic principle of the bomb until after Hiroshima.

Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet.

I will have nothing to do with a bomb! [Response to being invited (1943) to work with Otto Robert Frisch and some British scientists at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb.]

It was because of my deep concerns about nuclear weapons that I went to Hiroshima. And then I was astounded in Hiroshima to find that nobody had really studied it.

The mystique associated with the bomb, the role that scientists played in it, and its general importance could not fail to impress even a six-year old.

How do we prevent Iran developing an atomic bomb, when, on the American side, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not recognised as a war crime?

The Atomic Age is here to stay - but are we?

I wonder if those people shown protesting the deployment of nuclear weapons to western Europe during the Reagan era are feeling appropriately stupid today. 'Please don't take away our precious Soviet Union! - We demand the annihilation of all life on Earth!'

During my participation in the Manhattan Project and subsequent research at Los Alamos, encompassing a period of fifteen years, I worked in the company of perhaps the greatest collection of scientific talent the world has ever known.

Second point is no one here could predict or know that Israel was involved or started producing the hydrogen bomb - the most advanced and powerful atomic bomb that can kill millions of people.

I also was producing, working on other materials for the hydrogen bomb. They call it lithium-6 and tritium. I was working on these and the only use for lithium-6 is the hydrogen bomb.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

The Pacific had great hope that when the former President Mitered decided to halt nuclear testing, we had put behind us the issue of nuclear states testing their weapons in our Pacific region.

My piece in One World or None was the description of the effect of a single atomic bomb on New York City.

In the first weeks after Hiroshima, extravagant statements by President Truman and other official spokesmen for the U.S. government transformed the inception of the atomic age into the most mythologized event in American history.

Japan is the only country in the world which suffered from the scourge of nuclear weapons.

Unlike uranium, plutonium was created in an American lab in 1940, but scientists soon realized that it could produce even wilder chain reactions and even bigger explosions. In fact, fearing another country would create it, too, the American government went to great lengths to keep even the existence of plutonium a secret.

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.

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

On our nuclear weapons we should draw a mushroom cloud and put underneath it, 'Made in America by lazy and illiterate Americans and tested in Japan.'

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.

Russia will likely have the atomic bomb by mid-1953.