Henry A. Kissinger Quotes

So long as nuclear weapons continue to exist, so will the temptation to threaten others with overwhelming military force.

The trick in nuclear strategy is to maintain stability by balancing potentials and thus to discourage events from converting the hypothetical to the actual.

What are the implications of a China that may be on nuclear parity with the United States?

It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives.

This means that the only function of nuclear weapons, while they exist, is to deter a nuclear attack.

In the late 1950s a major topic under discussion was whether Canada should acquire nuclear weapons.

The lesson of history is when a war starts every nation will ultimately use whatever weapon it has available. ... Therefore, we must expect that if another war — a serious war — breaks out, we will use nuclear energy in some form.

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

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.

The nightmare of the Cold War was nuclear weapons in the hands of an irrational person. I don't want to live through that nightmare.

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.

The Cold War philosophy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which prevented the former Soviet Union and the United States from using the nuclear weapons they had targeted at each other, would not apply to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran. For him (Ahmadinejad), Mutual Assured Destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The whole idea of a nuclear system is to have a deterrent where we decide if we're going to use it.

I'm still bothered by the threat of nuclear war.

Our nuclear weapons are meant purely as a deterrent against nuclear adventure by an adversary.

There is no direct evidence that nuclear weapons prevented a world war. Conversely, it is known that they nearly caused one.

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

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.

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

I hope that none of the countries in the Middle East are planning anything but the peaceful utilization of nuclear energy.