Military Escalation Quotes

If there were Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, it makes it certain there would be a reprisal attack against the United States at some point.

Global war has become a Frankenstein to destroy both sides. No longer is it a weapon of adventure – the shortcut to international power … It contains only the germs of double suicide.

When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, U.S. policy became pretty much to ignore them - part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson's determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escalation in Southeast Asia from the public.

The immediate cause of World War III is the military preparation of it.

There's a disconnect there between - you're telling me this [war in Iraq] is fight of our generation, and you're going to increase troops by 10 percent. And that's gonna do it. I'm sure what [George W.Bush] would like to do is send 400,000 more troops there, but he can't, because he doesn't have them.

Our numbers have increased in Vietnam because the aggression of others has increased in Vietnam. There is not, and there will not be, a mindless escalation.

If Iran and North Korea, by some horrible, devilish, nightmarish scenario, got together and went to war at the same time, one against Saudi Arabia and one against South Korea, I don't know what we would do about that. I don't know that we could stop them short of using nuclear weapons.

Peace cannot be achieved except after the cessation of military escalation and the economic and financial siege.

Some Kennedy aides have always insisted that Johnson misread J.F.K.'s plans for Vietnam. They say that Kennedy had begun to rethink the U.S. presence in Indochina and was reluctant to increase it.

North Korea is now threatening the United States with all-out war. You can see they're stepping it up. In fact, they released 10 more photos of Kim Jong Un looking through binoculars.

Among the achievements celebrated in Trump's first 100 days are the 59 cruise missiles launched at the Syrian airfield from which the gas attack on civilians allegedly came, and the dropping of the 22,000-pound MOAB bomb in Afghanistan. But what did these bombings accomplish?

I think the scale of the conflict [in Afghanistan] has dramatically changed in 2003. You're now facing a much more motivated, well-supported enemy. I don't see any quick end to this thing.

Trying to create a next world war, he found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor, he said I never engaged in this kind of thing before, but yes I think it can be very easily done.

Of course, one of the most disturbing features is the fact that while we have had roughly a ten year pause in the arms race where a lot of good work was done, this has now come to an end. For what we are seeing at the present time are new developments in anti-missile weaponry, drones, and so on.

Japan and South Korea are on high alert after North Korea successfully launched a long-range rocket. Both countries are surprised by North Korea's successful launch, but definitely not as surprised as North Korea.

I believe that the politics of intervention and the Kosovo war prompted a fresh resumption of the arms race worldwide.

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I’ve been calling for more troops for over two years, along with John McCain and others subsequent to my saying that.

To me our bombing policy appears to be suicidal. Not because it does not do vast damage to our enemy, it does; but because, simultaneously, it does vast damage to our peace aim, unless that aim is mutual economic and social annihilation.

We could still have continued the arms race, but the arms race was pointless, and it was another reason we decided to start perestroika. It was senseless to continue to accumulate weapons. We had enough weapons to destroy life on Earth 1,000 times, and therefore it was very clear to us that the arms race could spiral out of control. A conflict could have started, as both the Americans and the Soviets realized, not out of a wrong political decision but because of a failure in the command-and-control systems.

You don't have any communication between the Israelis and the Iranians. You have all sorts of local triggers for conflict. Having countries act on a hair trigger - where they can't afford to be second to strike - the potential for a miscalculation or a nuclear war through inadvertence is simply too high.

if we pursue the arms race no other problem will be solved.

United States military involvement in Syria has deepened since President Trump took office.

We will never know what would have happened if President Johnson had said no to more troops and more war [in Vietnam]. We do know what happened when he said yes.

Inside the White House there were always extreme amounts of doubt about whether they should be escalating in Afghanistan. In fact, most of the president's advisers said, "This is probably not going to work." A lot of people in the military said, "This is probably not going to work." If the thumbnail version of the Iraq war was that George W.Bush lied about mass destruction weapons, the thumbnail version of Barack Obama's war in Afghanistan is that the generals pushed him into a war he didn't want to fight.