John F. Kennedy Quotes

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

There are two groups of people in the world, the Anglo Saxons and the Soviets who have been stockpiling nuclear weapons. France will not accept a position of permanent and massive inferiority.

China, North Korea's last ally in the world has just voted agaisnt them [in the United Nations]. What would you do if you thought every country in the world was against you and you wanted to survive? You would buy insurance. And the best insurance you could get to prevent invasion would be nuclear weapons, and that is just what North Korea has done. So now, when the President [Trump] threatens them, what do they do? They go out and buymore insurance.

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 need to make it very clear to the Iranians, the same way we made it clear to the Soviet Union and China, that their first use of nuclear weapons would result in the devastation of their nation.

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

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

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.

We will use nuclear weapons whenever it serves our vital interests.

The Soviet Union will not produce an atomic bomb for at least another 4 years

Most of our thinking about nuclear weapons is a hangover from different era …. Much about war, peace and global security changed after Hiroshima and changed again … with the end of the Cold war. It is high time our thinking changed as well.

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.

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.

The real abhorrent consequence of the invention of atomic bombs is the fact that we still have them and they're spreading.

We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon.

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?

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!'

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.

This is a very important relationship we have with Russia, the relationship over the nuclear arsenal that they have obviously is important. They're a very powerful country.

No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.

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.

Nuclear weapons kill Americans - they don't kill Republicans or Democrats - they kill Americans.

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

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