John F. Kennedy Quotes

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

The conflict that exists today is no more than an old-style struggle for power, once again presented to mankind in semireligious trappings. The difference is that, this time, the development of atomic power has imbued the struggle with a ghostly character; for both parties know and admit that, should the quarrel deteriorate into actual war, mankind is doomed.

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

We still live with this unbelievable threat over our heads of nuclear war. I mean, are we stupid? Do we think that the nuclear threat has gone, that the nuclear destruction of the planet is not imminent? It's a delusion to think it's gone away.

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

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

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

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.

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

The overarching problem is one of the survival of humanity in the face of the growing nuclear menace. If those bombs go off, nothing else would matter.

For me, one of the big things I really worried about a lot was nuclear war growing up.

Generation after generation can't just be loaded with more and more nuclear weapons and not ultimately dance to that music.

Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it. Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse

When we get to the point, as we one day will, that both sides know that in any outbreak of general hostilities, regardless of the element of surprise, destruction will be both reciprocal and complete, possibly we will have sense enough to meet at the conference table with the understanding that the era of armaments has ended and the human race must conform its actions to this truth or die.

In my humble opinion, in the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself.

The number of nuclear bombs on the planet today - the sheer quantity of weapons of mass destruction in the possession of people and governments throughout the world - along with the fact that the use of brute force and militarism is an almost knee-jerk way of problem-solving on the planet today, makes the eradication of war the great moral issue of this generation.

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.

Nuclear weapons continue to occupy a unique place in global security affairs. No other weapons, in my opinion, anyway, match their potential for prompt and long-term damage and their strategic impact.

Every adult in the world has some sense that he or she might be obliterated at any time by these weapons that we have created.

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

Firing off 1,000 or 500 or 2,000 nuclear warheads on a few minutes' consideration has always struck me as an absurd way to go to war.

If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.

Nuclear war is such an emotional subject that many people see the weapons themselves as the common enemy of humanity.

In nuclear war all men are cremated equal.

It's a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.