William Odom Quotes

We still live in a world where if you have nuclear weapons, you are buying power; you are buying insurance against attack.

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

The North Koreas of the world are trying very hard to acquire the material they need to acquire nuclear weapons, as is the case with Iran.

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

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.

Some day, somebody is going to have to start talking about what happens to us all a decade from now if we let these North Koreans and the Iranians go forward with their nuclear weapons program.

The other countries did not share the same concern the United States had in the early '90's - that North Korea actually had an ongoing nuclear weapons program.

The Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons would be infinitely more costly than any scenario you can imagine to stop it.

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.

Why should every country of the world not develop nuclear weapons now that America may nuke anyone at any time? … Those of us in Pakistan and India who have long fought against nuclearization of the subcontinent have been temporarily rendered speechless

The greatest threat that the world faces is a nuclear Iran. A nuclear North Korea is already troubling enough.

Iran sees India, China, Pakistan and, allegedly, Israel around them with nuclear weapons.

I remember some of the limited debate I did back in high school in the late '70s, early '80s: nuclear proliferation was always the big topic, and it's bad. We don't want to see it.

I think Donald Trump is very, very cautious about nuclear weapons, and he's seriously concerned. And this might be one of the reasons he wants to deal with Putin carefully, because he's aware of how many nuclear weapons Putin has, and that Russian doctrine is much more open about using nuclear weapons than is American doctrine.

If you're gonna sit there and be worried about what Donald Trump would do with nuclear weapons, you've got to know that it's Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who have made it possible for Iran to nuke up, and that's in nobody's best interests. That's not in the best interests of our ally, Israel. It's not in the best interests of ourselves.

You look at Russia's doing with their nuclear capability and the newness of their capability, and look at we're - what we're doing, and nobody wants to do that with respect to nukes because nukes are horrible. But you have countries that are going out of their way to do things that we're not doing. And we have to be very, very careful.

I think the Iranians are clearly determined to have a nuclear program. And we have to assume that with a nuclear program they have the capability and the will to create a nuclear weapon.

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.

The fundamental premise is that neither the United States or the international community is going to allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.

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.

We need to make it very clear to the Iranians, the same way we made it clear to the Soviet Union and China, that their first use of nuclear weapons would result in the devastation of their nation.

I worry about a democracy having nuclear weapons as much as a dictatorship having nuclear weapons.

The days are gone forever when our enemies could blackmail us with nuclear bombs.

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.