Gore Vidal Quotes

This is the reality of nuclear weapons: they may trigger a world war; a war which, unlike previous ones, destroys all of civilization.

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

The atomic bomb means the end of world war.

What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.

Thank God for the bomb. Nuke ya, nuke ya.

If we are to be destroyed we will do it ourselves by warfare with thermonuclear weaponry.

If the Third World War is fought with nuclear weapons, the fourth will be fought with bows and arrows.

The lesson of history is when a war starts every nation will ultimately use whatever weapon it has available. ... Therefore, we must expect that if another war — a serious war — breaks out, we will use nuclear energy in some form.

The atomic bomb was the turn of the screw. It has made the prospect of future war unendurable.

I feel worried, deeply worried, only about one thing - the possibility that we fall... that we cannot avoid an atomic war.

We had been frightened of atomic weapons since 1945. In those days I became convinced - and remain convinced now - that, after Hitler, Truman was the greatest murderer in the world.

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.

Although September 11 was horrible, it didn't threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear weapons do.

Nuclear holocaust might eliminate the Internet.

World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.

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.

The consequence of a world full of nuclear powers to me is so incomprehensible in terms of the dangers that that implies.

Well, The Day the Earth Caught Fire was a story... I don't if anybody knows what it is but it was about... in the early days of testing nuclear bombs, that Russia and America happened to test a nuclear bomb at the same moment at different ends of the earth.

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.

I can't understand why anyone would want nuclear warheads. If you shoot them off, it's not like you can take over that country-all you do is kill millions of people.

There is no direct evidence that nuclear weapons prevented a world war. Conversely, it is known that they nearly caused one.

My guess is that nuclear weapons will be used sometime in the next hundred years, but that their use is much more likely to be small and limited than widespread and unconstrained.

You just activated a nuclear warhead, my friend.

All mankind is now learning that these nuclear weapons can only serve to destroy, never become beneficial.

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