John F. Kennedy Quotes

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

One significant indication of the effectiveness of deterrence is that the Soviet Union and the United States share the belief that a nuclear war would begin only out of desperation or inadvertence. A weakening of deterrence could increase the possibility of a calculated “voluntary” war or worse.

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

We do not believe that a nuclear war should be fought and we do not believe that a nuclear war can be won.

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

When you talk about peace through strength, what you're talking about is the concept of deterrence.

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

Look at what President Kennedy managed to achieve during the Cuban missile crisis. If Bush had been president in 1962, do you think he would have avoided a nuclear war?

The only thing that kept the Cold War cold was the mutual deterrence afforded by nuclear weapons.

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.

Our strategy is one of preventing war by making it self-evident to our enemies that they're going to get their clocks cleaned if they start one.

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

I would not recommend the use of any atomic weapon, no matter how small, when both sides have the power to destroy the world.

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

Today nuclear weapons are a blunt instrument. Problems cannot be solved through bombs. They are of little use. We need logic.

In the Cuban missile crisis [1962] we had 5,000 nuclear strategic weapons and the Russians had only 300.... Even though we had a 17 to 1 advantage, we were deterred. Even if only ten percent of their missiles got through, tens of millions of Americans would have died. We could not use our nuclear superiority.

We will use nuclear weapons whenever it serves our vital interests.

Instead of planning to deter would-be [nuclear] proliferators, U. S. policy makers have developed a preference for preventative war, They now seem to feel that deterrence is too weak to deal with radical regimes, forgetting that the precise purpose of deterrence is to counter dangerous enemies, not cautious ones.

The atomic clock ticks faster and faster. We may anticipate a state of affairs in which the Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other but only at risk of his own life.

Nuclear weapons are only good for deterring. It is insane that two men, sitting on opposite ends of the world, should be able to decide to bring an end to civilization.

China, North Korea's last ally in the world has just voted agaisnt them [in the United Nations]. What would you do if you thought every country in the world was against you and you wanted to survive? You would buy insurance. And the best insurance you could get to prevent invasion would be nuclear weapons, and that is just what North Korea has done. So now, when the President [Trump] threatens them, what do they do? They go out and buymore insurance.

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.

How do we prevent Iran developing an atomic bomb, when, on the American side, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not recognised as a war crime?

And it raises a fundamental question: How long can we move the world in one direction while we move in another direction, and do we want to backslide into an era that we finally emerged from where we had a nuclear weapon for every tactical mission?

I do not believe it makes sense to say that nuclear weapons are inherently evil. In certain circumstances, they can play a positive role - as they have in the past. But clearly they have a power to do great harm.