We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. (Recalling the explosion of the first atomic bomb near Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945.)
Nuclear Quotes
There are those who soothe themselves with the fiction that any use of nuclear bombs by “our friends” the US would be benevolent and justified. Use by others, of course, would be malevolent and unjustified. Such biased attributions are universally applied when any line is drawn between “us” and “them”. This fiction is dramatically shattered […]
We will not act prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of world-wide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth. But neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.
Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralized police state. If, as seems to be […]
Atomic power will make electricity too cheap to meter.
One member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff… argued that we could use nuclear weapons, on the basis that our adversaries would use theirs against us in an attack. I thought, as I listened, of the many times that I had heard the military take positions which, if wrong, had the advantage that no one […]
Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected. The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff… But curiously little […]
In the late 1950s, we were deep in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. We were building bomb shelters in our back yards. I have personal memories of going with my father to the bomb-shelter dealer to view their ghoulish wares. I was too young to truly appreciate their implications, but […]
Some argue that the U.S. could have demonstrated the bomb on an uninhabited island, or could have encouraged surrender by promising that Japan could keep its emperor. Yes, perhaps, and we should have tried. We could also have waited longer before dropping the second bomb, on Nagasaki. But, sadly, the record suggests that restraint would […]
Nuclear weapons can wipe out life on Earth, if used properly.
