Quotes about Nuclear War

Albert Einstein

I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—rocks!

C. S. Lewis

If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things -- praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts -- not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They might break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

Mao Zedong

The prospect of a nuclear war is not a bad thing because defeating capitalism would be worth losing up to two-thirds of the world’s population.

This is a very important quotation. It is often cited by preventive war hawks to show that deterrence might not be a sufficient inhibitor against an extreme ideological enemy. In this case it was political philosophy that would make the enemy willing to have the majority of its population die to reach the ideological objective. More fearful is the prospect of the Theocracy of Iran where the leaders may believe that nuclear jihad is a commandment of God. More critical is the Islamic theology which says that if most of the Iranian Muslim population die in a nuclear war that they start all those people will be martyrs and immediately go to God’s Paradise. Thus, even the dead Muslims are not victims and the nonbelievers should be killed. For extremely fanatical Muslims nuclear war can be a logical and holy course of action.

Albert Einstein

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

Noam Chomsky

There are people on the left who say, Look, we can't let these atrocities go on, so let's enter the war and get rid of Bashar Assad. The problem with that is you get into a nuclear war with Russia. And Syria gets wiped out along with everything else. So, it's fine to say, OK, let's stop the crimes, but how exactly?

Che Guevara

Direct aggression against Cuba would mean nuclear war. The Americans speak about such aggression as if they did not know or did not want to accept this fact. I have no doubt they would lose such a war.

John F. Kennedy

Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, miscalculation or madness.

Charles de Gaulle

We are still at the stumbling stage in atomic weapons.

John F. Kennedy

Nuclear weapons are only good for deterring. It is insane that two men, sitting on opposite ends of the world, should be able to decide to bring an end to civilization.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize that they'd been kept in the dark by the United States government as to what atomic bombs can do.

John Hersey

What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.

Barry Goldwater

A craven fear of death is sweeping across America.

The fear of nuclear war was a major emotion for most people in the world at the time. Hard liners like Goldwater were concerned that that fear would undermine support for greater nuclear development and deployment in America and maintaining opposition to nuclear test ban treaties that were under discussion. He made the mistake however of referring to the fear as “craven”, morally denigrating any American who might be in fear of nuclear war, which included just about everyone. So the Democrats took this quotation and used it in their battery of TV ads showing Goldwater as not only a hard liner, but one who had no empathy or understanding for a normal person who feared a nuclear conflict—one who was not to be trusted with the Presidency. Had Goldwater simply argued that legitimate and reasonable fear of nuclear conflict might make the nation too timid and perhaps inadvertently increase the likelihood of nuclear disaster by not standing up to the Russians, he may not have had the resentment from most people who thought Goldwater was calling their fears “craven”.

J. G. Ballard

No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway's postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.

John F. Kennedy

And we call ourselves the human race.

Statement to Secretary of State Dean Rusk just after they had been given a military briefing on every Russian city that would be wiped out with a nuclear bomb if war should break out, 1961.

Nikita Khrushchev

In the next war the survivors will envy the dead.

Jackie Kennedy used this quotation in the last letter she wrote from the White House. It was to Khrushchev.

Joseph Rotblat

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer

The atomic clock ticks faster and faster. We may anticipate a state of affairs in which the Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other but only at risk of his own life.

The Scientific Project that developed the Atomic Bomb

Hyman Rickover

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.

Nikita Khrushchev

The survivors (of a nuclear war) would envy the dead.

Jimmy Breslin

I don't know why people are always afraid of a nuclear blast.

Breslin was criticized in a Federal report for his alarmist news coverage of the Three Mile Island nuclear mishap:

Lanford Wilson

I am not sure why, but I have been obsessed by the Atom Bomb ever since it first happened.

Jesse Jackson

Choose the human race over the nuclear race. Bury the weapons and don't burn the people.

Daisaku Ikeda

Japan learned from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the tragedy wrought by nuclear weapons must never be repeated and that humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.

C. Robert Kehler

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.

Paul Samuelson

The contrafactual history is what it would have been the other way. Think of the Kennedy triumph in the missiles crisis. Worked out fine. Khrushchev blinked and so forth. The other road, you don't want to think too hard about. You could have had nuclear missiles wiping out a tenth of the globe.

Nuclear War Quotes