John F. Kennedy Quotes

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, decisions made by President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev could have plunged both countries into thermonuclear war.

It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.

I know there is no present evidence, and I think there is no present likelihood that the Cubans and the Cuban Government and the Soviet Government would in combination attempt to install major offensive capability.

Cuba does not have nuclear rockets but it does have moral rockets.

The military plan is basically invasion. When we attack Cuba, we are going to have to attack with an all-out attack," he said. This is almost certain to lead to an invasion. The Soviet Union may, and I think probably will, attack the Turkish missiles. Then the United States would have to attack Soviet ships. And I would say that it is damn dangerous. Now, I'm not sure we can avoid anything like that if we attack Cuba. But I think we should make every effort to avoid it. And one way to avoid it is to defuse the Turkish missiles before we attack Cuba.

The establishment on Cuban soil of Soviet nuclear striking forces which could be used against the United States would be incompatible with Soviet policy.

I propose the immediate launching of a nuclear strike on the United States. The Cuban people are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the cause of the destruction of imperialism and the victory of world revolution.

The probability of a fatal nuclear detonation is greater now than at any time during the Cold War. As the Russian military deteriorates, and as rogue governments and terrorists seek to acquire nuclear capabilities, the threat continues to grow.

It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States.

Like the assassination of JFK, everybody alive then can remember where they were that Doomsday Week of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. That Saturday, 27 October, was, and remains, the closest the world has come to nuclear holocaust - the blackest day of a horrendous week.

Over the past years, I have lectured many times on the Cuban missile crisis, most provocatively to 200 senior officers of the former Soviet army in Moscow in 1991, among them KGB generals. There, my knowledge of Penkovsky's role was thoroughly confirmed, and so was the Soviet military men's residual sense of humiliation at Khrushchev's 'blink'.

New Zealand’s nuclear free movement is a broad-based and popular movement. Our nuclear free status is a challenge to much that is accepted as orthodox in international relations. It was formally adopted in the cold war era as a form of resistance to the dismal doctrines of nuclear deterrence. It is still a rebuke to the unprincipled exercise of economic power and military might.

During bomb drills, we students were told to crouch under our desks. Apparently the desks used in classrooms in the fifties were made of an exceptionally missile-resistant variety of wood. During the Cold War years I often wondered why it never occurred to our defense planners to protect the entire nation from nuclear attack by simply covering it, from sea to shining sea, with a huge Strategic Classroom Desk.

The truth emerging from this scattered picture of nuclear proliferation is simple: there is a stronger chance of a nuclear bomb being used now than at almost any point in the Cold War.

We have to remember that literally within months after Castro's taking office the planes from Florida were beginning to bomb Cuba. Within a year, the Eisenhower administration secretly, but formally, decided to overthrow the government. Then came the Bay of Pigs invasion. The Kennedy administration was furious about the failure of the invasion and immediately launched a major terrorist war and economic war that got harsher through the years. Under these conditions it is kind of amazing that Cuba survived.

It is no coincidence that when the thugs tried to wrest control over Grenada, there were 30 Soviet advisors and hundreds of Cuban military and paramilitary forces on the island.

As they were during the Cold War, urban population centers remain the most likely targets of a nuclear attack. Now, however, an attack may come without warning from an unknown enemy, to achieve unclear motives.

For the last 60 years, dictator Fidel Castro was America's most persistent adversary. Although Castro formally handed off to his brother, Raul, eight years ago, the communist leader was a symbolic force in Cuba and around the world.

The nightmare of the Cold War was nuclear weapons in the hands of an irrational person. I don't want to live through that nightmare.

I suppose that history will remember my term in office as the years when the Cold War began to overshadow our lives. I have hardly a day in office that has not been dominated by this all-embracing struggle. And always in the background there has been the atomic bomb. But when history says that my term of office saw the begining of the Cold War, it will also say that in those eight years we have set the course that can win it.

The nuclear arms race has no military purpose. Wars cannot be fought with nuclear weapons. Their existence only adds to our perils.

I came into politics because of a real childhood concern about the Cold War. So to me the importance of the nuclear deterrent is actually really ingrained in me.

In the past, foreign intervention was obviously a major problem. Foreign domination, or if not domination, interference. But that has ended. There is no foreign domination; there is minimal foreign interference. The Cold War has ended. The Soviet Union no longer exists. The United States is showing minimal and diminishing interest in the Muslim world. They now have to confront their own problems. The old excuses are gone. The old justifications are gone and therefore the anger of people is turning increasingly against their own rulers.

In a nuclear age, and in an age of serious environmental degradation, apocalyptic belief creates a serious second order danger. The precarious logic of self-interest that saw us through the Cold War would collapse if the leaders of one nuclear state came to welcome, or ceased to fear mass death.

The Reagan Administration has no rational plan for our military. Instead, it acts on misinformed assumptions about the strength of the Soviet military and a presumed 'window of vulnerability,' which we now know not to exist.