NUCLEAR WAR QUOTES III
quotations about nuclear war
But this very triumph of scientific annihilation--this very success of invention--has destroyed the possibility of war's being a medium for the practical settlement of international differences. The enormous destruction to both sides of closely matched opponents makes it impossible for even the winner to translate it into anything but his own disaster.... Global war has become a Frankenstein to destroy both sides. No longer is it a weapon of adventure--the shortcut to international power. If you lose, you are annihilated. If you win, you stand only to lose. No longer does it possess even the chance of the winner of a duel. It contains now only the germs of double suicide.
DOUGLAS MACARTHUR
speech to a joint session of the Congress of the Republic of the Philippines, July 5, 1961
One faction of the nuclear war-fighters is willing to embrace the enormous uncertainties in a first strike and the chilling concept of "acceptable loss" because they feel that nuclear war is, in some sense, an inevitability. If we are in a pre-war situation, then the enormous risks entailed by a first strike suddenly become secondary.
MICHIO KAKU & DANIEL AXELROD
introduction, To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon's Secret War Plans
In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.
WILLIAM L. SHIRER
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Normal human activity is worse for nature than the greatest nuclear accident in history.
MARTIN CRUZ SMITH
Wolves Eat Dogs
The double horror of two Japanese city names [Hiroshima and Nagasaki] grew for me into another kind of double horror; an estranging awareness of what the United States was capable of, the country that five years before had given me its citizenship; a nauseating terror at the direction the natural sciences were going. Never far from an apocalyptic vision of the world, I saw the end of the essence of mankind an end brought nearer, or even made, possible, by the profession to which I belonged. In my view, all natural sciences were as one; and if one science could no longer plead innocence, none could.
ERWIN CHARGAFF
Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life before Nature
Within the U.S. nuclear complex, a common refrain is that "you can't put the nuclear genie back in the bottle," a statement providing a moment of animistic self-reflection where nuclear technology is assumed to have taken on a life of its own, now defining its own destiny, charting an inevitable, if uncanny, course. The genie metaphor is carefully chosen, as it represents both the possibility of wondrous gifts (unlimited energy, national security, international prestige) and the potential for treacherous acts (terrorism, species mutation, nuclear war).
JOSEPH MASCO
The Nuclear Borderlands
It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness.
ARUNDHATI ROY
The Cost of Living
It is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death, sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
The Russell-Einstein Manifesto
Nuclear war is just understood to be the inevitable climax of a danger that's lived long enough to be completely forgotten, until it all suddenly comes roaring in at 5 a.m.
SEAN O'NEAL
"If you want to see how we'll handle nuclear apocalypse, watch Miracle Mile", A.V. Club, September 12, 2017
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts. And the way to make sure it never starts is to abolish the dangerous costly nuclear stockpiles which imprison mankind.
OMAR BRADLEY
speech on Armistice Day, 1948
The point of nuclear war is to give total destruction to another party. There are no moves, no maneuvers. That's a conventional war.
PAK SONG IL
"The Risk of Nuclear War with North Korea", The New Yorker, September 18, 2017
I must tell the House quite frankly that if I were confronted with a Japanese at this present moment and were asked to tell him that I believed that he was wrong in the treatment of those British prisoners in his hands, I could not but accept a similar criticism from him on the question of the atom bomb. I should be quite unable to avoid it. I am afraid I must say on the question of principle here involved--this question of moral principle--that I believe it to be humbug, when so many people, women, children, old folk, were killed by the atom bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. For every individual photograph that could be produced of a wounded and battered British prisoner of war in Japanese hands, I think one could find an equally horrible photograph of a victim of the atomic bomb.
TONY BENN
speech in the House of Commons, May 10, 1951
The Nazis are regarded as animals in human form because they gassed, shot, or burned perhaps as many as six million Jews. Today the people of the United States are quite prepared, if provoked, to actually burn alive hundreds of millions of innocent men and women, young and old. I deliberately put the matter in such blunt terms because it is long past time to do so and because there is apparantly no other way to start people thinking of the moral questions raised by nuclear weapons.
STEVE ALLEN
But Seriously: Steve Allen Speaks His Mind
In a world which had become a nuclear powder keg upon which nearly a billion people now sat, it was a mistake--perhaps one of suicidal proportions--to believe there was a difference between good shooters and bad shooters. There were too many shaky hands holding the lighters near too many fuses. This was no world for gunslingers. If there had ever been a time for them, it had passed.
STEPHEN KING
The Drawing of the Three
War had become nothing more than slaughtering soldiers from a safe distance. When this failed to produce victory, civilians too became targeted for annihilation. It took more than a century, two world wars and the invention of the ultimate weapon, the atomic bomb, before the impact of this change started to become fully realized: war had become 'total war'. Warfare in the twentieth century is now an industry. It is bureaucratized, to the extent that its main decisions are being taken anonymously and committed to paper by people far removed from the actual killing zones.
HYLKE TROMP
"On the Nature of War and the Nature of Militarism"
The wheel of Time wrote the first half of the poetry of mass destruction on the black board of the ashes of a funeral ground by dint of a pair of pens of nuclear bombs.
MANMOHAN ACHARYA
Gita Milindam
We can turn our earth into a barren, lifeless minor star spinning in space, waterless, with little or no atmosphere, with not even cockroaches left on it. To face this possibility and still behave with decency; to still create beautiful things as though they will last forever; to still make music and poetry and paint pictures; to still consciously cultivate the gentler, tender side of ourselves is to aspire to a grace which makes us more than the animals we surely are.
PETER ABRAHAMS
The Black Experience in the 20th Century
Wherever the President of the United States travels, a military aide-de-camp carrying "the football" is just a few steps away. It isn't the kind Tom Brady throws. In the laconic jargon that national security officers use, "the football" is a briefcase that allows the President to launch a nuclear attack. These days "the football" seems closer to being used than at any time in the last half-century. President Trump has issued thinly veiled threats of a nuclear first strike against North Korea. His emotional volatility makes those threats terrifying. Because of a deep flaw in our legal order, this is an existential fear rather than a theoretical one. American law allows the President to launch a nuclear strike on the basis of nothing more than his own impulse.
STEPHEN KINZER
"It's far too easy for Donald Trump to start a nuclear war", Boston Globe, August 18, 2017
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.
PETER ABRAHAMS
The Black Experience in the 20th Century
Everything that can be said on the nuclear threat has already been said. Nothing has ever happened.... Nothing will ever happen. It is a system of general terror. But we are as if turned to stone by this potential destruction.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories