Harry S. Truman Quotes

The Soviet Union will not produce an atomic bomb for at least another 4 years

The atomic issue was a natural path into political issues.

There is no secret; and there is no defense. Within some few years Russia and many smaller countries can have their installations ready to make atom bombs by the hundreds, just like America, Atom bombs are the cheapest means of town-destruction …. Russia has numbers of devoted agents in every country--they can easily be smuggled in and hidden, to destroy everything for miles around at the fixed moment. An immense army of security officers and spies will be needed, continually to inspect every box or case in any house.

Russia will likely have the atomic bomb by mid-1953.

But the first the general public learned about the discovery was the news of the destruction of Hiroshima by the atom bomb. A splendid achievement of science and technology had turned malign. Science became identified with death and destruction.

The only use for an atomic bomb is to keep somebody else from using one.

Well, The Day the Earth Caught Fire was a story... I don't if anybody knows what it is but it was about... in the early days of testing nuclear bombs, that Russia and America happened to test a nuclear bomb at the same moment at different ends of the earth.

No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.

We still need to be conscious of the fact that Russia has intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The H-Bomb Secret: How We Got It, Why We’re Telling It

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

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.

There are two groups of people in the world, the Anglo Saxons and the Soviets who have been stockpiling nuclear weapons. France will not accept a position of permanent and massive inferiority.

Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, miscalculation or madness.

Don’t you realize that the Federal Government has the atomic bomb.

The Physicist was the darling of the cold war …atomic energy was responsible for so much of the politics of the Cold War.

The aggressor too should know that the preemptive use of nuclear weapons would not insure victory. With modern detection systems and the combat readiness of the Soviet Union's strategic nuclear forces, the United States would not be able to deal a crippling blow to the socialist countries. The aggressor will not be able to evade an all-crushing retaliatory strike

Dwight Eisenhower… supported the nuclearization of the military and the militarization of nuclear weapons as a cost saving way of deterring the Soviets. Under Eisenhower, custody or nuclear weapons shifted from the civilian Atomic Energy Commission to the military.

If not for me, the H-bomb would have been developed in Russia first. In the U.S., we'd now be speaking Russian.

The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery is a threat to both the Nato allies and Russia.

Long before the terrifying potential of the arms race was recognized, there was a widespread instinctive abhorrence of nuclear weapons, and a strong desire to get rid of them.

But the most important thing about that story, which is not often told, is that as a result after the Cuban missile crisis, immediate steps were taken to correct our inability to collect on the movement of nuclear material out of the Soviet Union to other places.

There's an amazing documentary, 'The Day After Trinity,' which is crazy good.

I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare.

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.