Martin Amis Quotes
What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening to use nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves.
Amis, Martin. "Introduction: Thinkability." Einstein's Monsters. Jonathan Cape, 1987, p. 18.
1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma
This was his last publication. He died of a heart attack as the magazine was being printed. Since this was written one other possible use of nuclear weapons has been suggested—namely, retaliation for a biological attack. From a policy point of view, maintaining an arsenal of biological weapons for retaliatory purposes is dangerous and use for retaliation of biological weapons is not very controllable and arguably less humane than a nuclear weapon. His point however still holds. We have to have a national defense policy against many threats and we have to have defense policies that handle all these without nuclear tactics is insufficient to handle any of the threats without causing more problems and we have other weapons and techniques that are just as, if not more, effective. They and systems under development have the major role in our current defense policy.
Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog). Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
