J. William Fulbright Quotes

The decision to withdraw our missile defense sites from Poland put us in greater jeopardy, in my view.

The talk about balance, nuclear balance, seems to me to be metaphysical and doesn't seem to be real at all.

We live in a dangerous world where rogue nations are developing longer range missiles. We have to make a strong effort at developing defenses against this threat.

The best reduction, the most final reduction, is to destroy the warheads.

If the [present] deterrent is the mutual annihilation of each other ..., what else do we need and why?

How is it possible for free institutions to flourish, or even maintain themselves, in a situation where defenses, civil and military, must be ceaselessly poised to meet an attack that might incinerate fifty million Americans—not in the space of an evening, but in the space of moments.

Nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary a choice of either a humiliating defeat or a nuclear war.

I built a nuclear option to get peace, not to have bombs. Our enemies learned that they could not destroy us.

We are told that the possession of nuclear weapons - in some cases even the testing of these weapons - is essential for national security. But this argument can be made by other countries as well.

During the cold war, it was easy for the Pentagon to justify its budget, as the Soviets essentially sized our forces for us. We simply counted up their stuff and either bought more of the same or upgraded our technology.

Really, of all the important mission responsibilities assigned to United States Strategic Command by the president, none is more important than our responsibility to deter a strategic attack on the United States and our allies and partners.

The thing that makes countries want to pursue some kind of nuclear deterrent is precisely the fact that they feel threatened.

There are some people that will be deterred by the fact that we have nuclear weapons... But those people are the folks we can deal with anyway.

We will always apply the same principles of collective security, prudent caution, and superior weaponry that enabled us to peacefully prevail in the long cold war against the Soviet Union.

National Missile Defense is of a nature to retrigger a proliferation of weapons, notably nuclear missiles. Everything that goes in the direction of proliferation is a bad direction.

I'm not concerned about weapons of mass destruction.

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

For every security measure, there is a counter measure that breeds further insecurity. The acquisition by Pakistan or Iran of a nuclear capability neutralizes the security achieved by Israel’s own nuclear capability. Non-governmental terrorism neutralizes governmental military superiority. Chemical weapons neutralize the security of cement walls.

I could not conceive of any President engaging in all-out nuclear war unless we were in danger of all-out devastation ourselves.

The presence of these large, long-range, and clearly offensive weapons of sudden mass-destruction—constitutes an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas...

The notion that our only strategic choice is MAD (mutually assured destruction)—which means nothing less than an unstable pact to commit instant and total mutual suicide in the event of war—is irrational, immoral and unnecessary.

Local defenses must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power.

No nation, no matter how destitute, likes to be told how much military "security" to buy.

A defenseless country cannot be secure.

The Communist campaign, finely attuned to prevailing fears, almost imperceptibly shifted the primary concern away from Soviet aggression—the real security problem—to the immorality of the use of nuclear weapons, which happened to be the most effective way of resisting it.