James Lovelock Quotes

There isn’t going to be any learning curve for nuclear weapons. An administration makes one mistake and the result can destroy entire nations.

We must eliminate all nuclear weapons in order to eliminate the grave risk they pose to our world. This will require persistent efforts by all countries and peoples. A nuclear war would affect everyone, and all have a stake in preventing this nightmare.

There has been a transition from a nuclear-annihilation scenario to an isolated-terrorist-nuclear-bomb scenario. But we're still locked into a mind-set that nuclear war would be so overwhelming that any kind of preparedness would be futile.

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.

As long as nuclear weapons exist, the chances of survival of the human species are quite slight.

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.

One nuclear war is going to be the last nuclear - the last war, frankly, if it really gets out of hand. And I just don't think we ought to be prepared to accept that sort of thing.

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

The atomic bomb means the end of world war.

Nuclear weapons are inherently threatening to all of civilization. If that had been a nuclear weapon at the World Trade Center, even the most primitive kind of the Hiroshima, Nagasaki, you wouldn't have a Manhattan. There wouldn't be a democracy of any kind in America.

I think that once the nuclear alternative happens, it's over. At the same time, we have to be prepared.

The bombs held in current nuclear arsenals are seventy times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. If we don't begin opposing the drift towards more and more of them, we will live in the shadow of the mushroom cloud for the rest of our lives - and millions may die there.

We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

For the first time in the history of mankind, one generation literally has the power to destroy the past, the present and the future, the power to bring time to an end.

You know, people have actually changed the way they think about nuclear weapons now, post-Cold War, post-9/11. The threat of nuclear weapons is not so much Russia attacking the United States, China. It's not a state-to-state - it's obviously terrorism; it's proliferation.

Responsible statesmen have only one choice - to do everything possible to prevent a nuclear catastrophe. Any other position is short-sighted; more so, it is suicidal.

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

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

The crucial thing is to arouse the awareness that as a matter of human conscience we can never permit the people of any country to fall victim to nuclear weapons, and for each individual to express their refusal to continue living in the shadow of the threat they pose.

The world should be very clear about making sure that Iran does not get nuclear weapons, period.

We are the generation that brought the bomb in. We have got to be the generation that should take it out.

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.

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.

When I was in the White House, I was confronted with the challenge of the Cold War. Both the Soviet Union and I had 30,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy the entire earth and I had to maintain the peace.

The lesson of the Cold War is that against nuclear weapons, only nuclear weapons can hold the peace.