Nuclear Quotes

If we do have too start over again with another Adam and Eve, then I want them to be Americans and not Russians, and I want them on this continent and not in Europe.

To my mind, the nuclear bomb is the most useless weapon ever invented. It can be employed to no rational purpose. It is not even an effective defense against itself. It is only something with which, in a moment of petulance or panic, you commit such fearful acts of destruction as no sane person would […]

We knew the world would never be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the “Bhagavad Gita”… “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another. (Recalling the explosion of the […]

Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of the atom is talking moonshine.

When you are talking about absurd and preposterous quantities of overkill, the relationship size of arsenals has no serious meaning.

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.)

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.