Quotes About Hard-liners

One of the ironic things," Kennedy observed to Norman Cousins in the spring of 1963, "…is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I've got similar problems…. The hard-liners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another."8

I suspect the soviets never did want to use those bombs. The most Stalinist of Soviet hard-liners - Stalin, for example - must have realized a nuclear war would be a hard thing to clean up after.