Dwight D. Eisenhower Quotes

The world has been close to war before - but now man, who has survived all previous threats to his existence, has taken into his mortal hands the power to exterminate the entire species some seven times over.

Although September 11 was horrible, it didn't threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear weapons do.

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

Nuclear war is such an emotional subject that many people see the weapons themselves as the common enemy of humanity.

In nuclear war all men are cremated equal.

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

I still believe that any country understands that if they use nuclear weapons, they will be wiped out of existence. They could be irrational in many ways, but I don't think they're irrational to the point that they're ready to annihilate their own country.

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

The notion that our only strategic choice is MAD (mutually assured destruction)—which means nothing less than an unstable pact to commit instant and total mutual suicide in the event of war—is irrational, immoral and unnecessary.

For decades, we and the Soviets have lived under the threat of mutual assured destruction; if either resorted to the use of nuclear weapons, the other could retaliate and destroy the one who had started it. Is there either logic or morality in believing that if one side threatens to kill tens of millions of our people, our only recourse is to threaten killing tens of millions of theirs?

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

By God, war is not an option for two nuclear countries.

The only use for an atomic bomb is to keep somebody else from using one. It can give us no protection - only the doubtful satisfaction of retaliation...

Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it. Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse

I feel worried, deeply worried, only about one thing - the possibility that we fall... that we cannot avoid an atomic war.

The conflict that exists today is no more than an old-style struggle for power, once again presented to mankind in semireligious trappings. The difference is that, this time, the development of atomic power has imbued the struggle with a ghostly character; for both parties know and admit that, should the quarrel deteriorate into actual war, mankind is doomed.

There are indications because of new inventions, that 10, 15, or 20 nations will have a nuclear capacity, including Red China, by the end of the Presidential office in 1964. This is extremely serious. I think the fate not only of our own civilization, but I think the fate of world and the future of the human race, is involved in preventing a nuclear war.

The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.

I have to bring to your notice a terrifying reality: with the development of nuclear weapons Man has acquired, for the first time in history, the technical means to destroy the whole of civilization in a single act.

This is the reality of nuclear weapons: they may trigger a world war; a war which, unlike previous ones, destroys all of civilization.

To have the ability to destroy all and not to do it was one of the hard tests humanity passed - but only just - in the middle of the twentieth century.

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.

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.

The consequence of a world full of nuclear powers to me is so incomprehensible in terms of the dangers that that implies.

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.