Quotes About Nuclear

First, that the number of Soviet troops116 in Cuba was not seven thousand, as we had at first supposed, or seventeen thousand, as the CIA estimated at the end of the crisis, but forty-two thousand. And second, that along with SAMs and ballistic missiles, they had been secretly equipped with over a hundred tactical nuclear weapons, warheads included. So

This was one of Kissinger's first visits to Rand, after a long period of coldness that had begun in the late 1950s because of Rand's critique of his advocacy of limited nuclear wars as instruments of U.S. policy in his 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.

In the limit, every flight commander, if not every pilot with a weapon aboard, would feel authorized, under some circumstances, to initiate nuclear war with the Communist bloc.

What a true history of the Cuban missile crisis reveals is that the existence of masses of nuclear weapons in the hands of leaders of the superpowers, the United States and Russia—even when those leaders are about as responsible, humane, and cautious as any we have seen—posed then, and still do, intolerable dangers to the survival of civilization.

McNamara had indicated to me in the luncheon in his office that he would never recommend any such thing. And as I've said, much later he revealed that in fact he had advised both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson never, under any circumstances, to initiate the use of nuclear weapons. He said that they had agreed with him.

The planning we were threatening to carry out was best described by a skeptical Pentagon colleague: "We send in a series of increasingly larger probes. If they're all stopped, we fire a [nuclear] warning shot. If that doesn't work, we blow up the world.

In the face of an enemy believed to be Hitlerian in savagery and armed with a nuclear force believed (incorrectly) to be superior to our own, all these concerns and considerations of safety and high-level control gave way.

the phenomenon of nuclear winter wasn't predicted by environmental scientists until decades after the Cuban missile crisis.

Yet what seems to me beyond question is that any social system (not only ours) that has created and maintained a Doomsday Machine and has put a trigger to it, including first use of nuclear weapons, in the hands of one human being—anyone, not just this man, still worse in the hands of an unknown number of persons—is in core aspects mad. Ours is such a system. We are in the grip of institutionalized madness.

Thus, virtually any threat of first use of a nuclear weapon is a terrorist threat. Any nation making such threats is a terrorist nation. That means the United States and all its allies, including Israel, along with Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea.

Just like the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, any future attack by a single tactical nuclear weapon near a densely populated area would kill tens to hundreds of thousands of noncombatants, as those did. Thus, virtually any threat of first use of a nuclear weapon is a terrorist threat. Any nation making such threats is a terrorist nation. That means the United States and all its allies, including Israel, along with Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea.

At the end of his two terms, President Eisenhower bequeathed to the Kennedy administration eighteen thousand nuclear weapons.

York posed the question, how many nuclear weapons are needed to deter an adversary rational enough to be deterred? Concurring with Bundy's judgment—as who would not?—he answered his question, "somewhere in the range of 1, 10, or 100 … closer to 1 than it is to 100." In 1986, the U.S. had 23,317 nuclear warheads and Russia had 40,159, for a total of 63,836 weapons.76

Our 21st-century world is an incredibly dangerous one. Between brutal civil wars, violent extremism, spreading autocracy, rising inequality, territorial expansionism, election interference, and nuclear proliferation, our policymakers have their hands full.

We did more to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions with a computer virus than we ever could have with bombs (and we did still more with diplomacy - the abandonment of which is also bad for our military, because militaries can only stop a problem, not fix a problem).

The controls of life are structured as forms and nuclear arrangements, in a relation with the motions of the universe.

We now recognize that abuse and neglect may be as frequent in nuclear families as love, protection, and commitment are in nonnuclear families.

Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation.

Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

You know what uranium is, right? This thing called nuclear weapons like lots of things are done with uranium including some bad things.

Granite contains a number of naturally occurring substances, one of them being that much-loved radioactive element uranium. Because of this, New York's Grand Central Station gives off more radiation than is permitted at a nuclear power station. Don't worry if you go there though, the rules about building nuclear power stations are extremely strict, and you're not going to come to any harm even if you lived your entire life in the station.

The future of mankind is going to be decided within the next two generations, and there are two absolute requisites: We must aim at a stable-state society [with limited population growth] and the destruction of nuclear stockpiles. … Otherwise I don't see how we can survive much later than 2050.

Every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable .. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.

Unconditional war can no longer lead to unconditional victory. It can no longer serve to settle disputes. It can no longer be of concern to great powers alone. For a nuclear disaster, spread by winds and waters and fear, could well engulf the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the committed and the uncommitted alike. Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.