Mikhail Gorbachev Quotes

That is potentially putting us all in the target hairs now is the reactivation of a new nuclear arms race. This arms race and this cold war is potentially hotter than it's been at any time in my lifetime.

As long as some of us choose to rely on nuclear weapons, we continue to risk that these same weapons will become increasingly attractive to others.

I say in all sincerity that the nuclear arms race has no military purpose. Wars cannot be fought with nuclear weapons; their existence only adds to our perils because of the illusions which they have generated.

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.

Perhaps the grimmest aspect of this great paradox is that the very nations that are chiefly responsible for starting and for maintaining the Disarmament Conference are also the nations that have begun a new arms race.

A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?

The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.

I think one country with nuclear weapons is one country too many.

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.

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

My feelings of revulsion and foreboding about nuclear weapons had not changed an iota since 1945, and they have never left me. Since I was 14, the overriding objective of my life has been to prevent the occurrence of nuclear war.

It is not viable for one country to demand a right to increase and upgrade its nuclear weapons capabilities while asking others to eliminate theirs.

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.

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

I worry about 10, 15, 20, 25 years down the road. Where are we going to be in this age of nuclear weapons, where there is no margin for error?

If we are to assume that North Korea becomes a nuclear-power state, of course the danger of having an all-out nuclear war, that possibility is very slim.

A nuclear weapon is not just a football that you can use at will.

There is only one thing worse than one nation having the atomic bomb -- that's two nations having it.

We can do better than condone a world in which nuclear weapons are accepted as commonplace.

Limiting nuclear war is like limiting the mission of a match thrown in a keg of gunpowder.

The way to win an atomic war is to make sure it never starts.

On our nuclear weapons we should draw a mushroom cloud and put underneath it, 'Made in America by lazy and illiterate Americans and tested in Japan.'

Nuclear weapons exist. They probably always will. And they work, with horrible efficiency. They threaten the very future of our species. We have no choice but to manage that risk. Never again can we put the task out of our minds; nor trivialize it; nor make it routine.

Disarmament has become the urgent imperative of our time. I do not say this because I equate the absence of arms to peace, or because I believe that bringing an end to the nuclear arms race automatically guarantees the peace, or because the elimination of nuclear warheads from the arsenals of the world will bring in its wake that change in attitude requisite to the peaceful settlement of disputes between nations. Disarmament is vital today, quite simply, because of the immense destructive capacity of which men dispose.