Nuclear Quotes - page 43
Common sense says it would be madness for a group of Chechens to smuggle explosives all the way from Urus-Martan to Moscow. Since the First Chechen War, Chechens are routinely singled out for harassment by Russian police, vehicles are stopped and searched, identity papers demanded. Besides, there has long been a strong Chechen mafia in Moscow, very capable of getting its hands on arms or explosives in the city. In Russia, in the 1990s, you could bribe your way into a nuclear rocket silo. The 'Chechen terrorists' would have been risking a great deal by hauling their explosives roughly 1,000 miles to Moscow when they could have bought them at the back of a local flea market.
John Sweeney (journalist)
What has come to be called the balance of terror may seem less frightful to fanatics leading a country with a population of 600 millions. Even a war directed explicitly against centers of population may seem to it tolerable and perhaps the best means of dominating the world. Chou En-lai is reported to have told a Yugoslav diplomat that an all-out nuclear war would leave 10 million Americans, 20 million Russians, and 350 million Chinese.
Henry Kissinger
After years of encirclement and repeated rebuffs from Washington, years of threat, isolation, and demonization, the Pyongyang leaders are convinced that the best way to resist superpower attack and domination is by developing a nuclear arsenal. It does not really sound so crazy. As already mentioned, the United States does not invade countries that are armed with long-range nuclear missiles (at least not thus far). Having been pushed to the brink for so long, the North Koreans are now taking a gamble, upping the ante, pursuing an arguably "sane” deterrence policy in the otherwise insane world configured by an overweening and voracious empire.
Michael Parenti
As no national interest would justify inflicting genocide on the victim and suicide on the aggressor, a prevalent misconception is that nuclear war will never be fought. But the realities of our age compel an opposite assessment. In no previous epoch were adversaries so continuously and totally mobilized for instant war. It is a statistical certainly that hair-trigger readiness cannot endure as a permanent condition. Furthermore, the unrelenting growth in nuclear arsenals, the increasing accuracy of missiles, and the continuing computerization of response systems all promote instabilities which court nuclear war by technical malfunction; by miscalculation, human aberration or criminal act.
Bernard Lown
Combatting the nuclear threat has been our exclusive preoccupation, since we are dedicated to the proposition that to insure the conditions of life, we must prevent the conditions of death. Ultimately, we believe people must come to terms with the fact that the struggle is not between different national destinies, between opposing ideologies, but rather between catastrophe and survival. All nations share a linked destiny; nuclear weapons are their shared enemy.
Bernard Lown
Alfred Nobel believed that the destructiveness of dynamite would put an end to war. He deeply believed that the tragic reality of mass carnage would achieve results which all the preaching of peace and goodwill had so far failed to achieve. His prophecy now must gain fulfillment. Recoiling from the abyss of nuclear extermination, the human family will finally abandon war. May we learn from barbaric and bloody deeds of the twentieth century and bestow the gift of peace to the next millennium. Perhaps in that way we shall redeem some measure of respect from generations yet to come. Having achieved peace, in the sonorous phrase of Martin Luther King, Jr. spoken here twenty-one years ago, human beings will then "rise to the majestic heights of moral maturity".
Bernard Lown
I happen to be a pacifist but if I had had to make a decision about fighting a war against Hitler, I may have temporarily given up my pacifism and taken up arms. But nobody is to compare what is happening in Viet Nam today with that. I'm convinced that it is clearly an unjust war and it's doing so many things - not only on the domestic scene, it is carrying the whole world closer to nuclear annihilation.
Martin Luther King Jr.
When I was young, we didn't discuss abortion or homosexuality. What I think most people feel is that we don't want all these particular areas to be aggressive when there is a feeling of tolerance of them which is generally understood and accepted. But if they become aggressive in minority interests...that is something I feel many people – and certainly I myself – recoil from. ... [The] nuclear family is the most loving you can have.
James Callaghan
Eventually, [...] [we] will have to contend with the problems of the Long Emergency: the end of industrial growth, falling standards of living, economic desperation, declining food production, and domestic political strife. A point will be reached when the great powers of the world no longer have the means to project their power any distance. Even nuclear weapons may become inoperable, considering how much their careful maintenance depends on other technological systems linked to our fossil fuel economy.
James Howard Kunstler
The responsibility for the control of U.S. nuclear weapons rests solely with the President, who exercises the control of their use in all foreseeable circumstances. This has been the case since 1945, under four Presidents. It will continue to be the case as long as I am President of the United States. In this atomic age we have always been required to show restraint as well as strength. At moments of decisive tests, our nuclear power has been essential. But we have never rattled our rockets or come carelessly to the edge of war.
Lyndon B. Johnson
Let no one think atomic weapons are simply bigger and more destructive than other weapons; that they are just another development like the airplane or the tank. The total number of Americans killed in battle from the Revolution until tonight is a little over 526,000 people. Today a single nuclear weapon can kill more than 526,000. Our experts tell us as of today that a full-scale nuclear exchange between the East and the West would kill almost 300 million people around the world, and in the midst of that terror and tragedy we could expect that weapon after weapon would soon engulf a portion of mankind. A cloud of deadly radiation would drift and destroy, menacing every living thing on God's earth, and in those unimaginable hours unborn generations would forever be lamed.
Lyndon B. Johnson
Before Viet-Nam was a name, before the Congo was a map, before there was a NATO or a nuclear weapon these factions were working here at home--working against minimum wages, working against the 40-hour week, working against social security, working against labor's rights, working against the TVA and the REA, working against slum clearance and public works, working against the United Nations and the nuclear test ban, working against the Alliance for Progress, working against aid to our neighbors in the world. Yes, that is where they stood three decades ago, and that is where they stand today. That is where the line is really drawn in America in this election year. These factions despise the word "democracy," dislike the word "equality," and they distrust the word "peace." They would now reduce the word "compassion" to a whisper, and they would have us mention it only in apology.
Lyndon B. Johnson
I want to point out that we have increased in conventional forces in the last 2 years the number of our divisions from 11 to 16, and we are also providing equipment for 22 divisions in case it were necessary to mobilize our Guard. We have six divisions in Europe, and we have the equipment for two more. Now, I think the Cuban incident indicated the importance of a strong conventional force. The greatest factor on our side was the fact that we had superior conventional strength on the scene, and it would have been necessary to equalize that strength for the Soviets to initiate the use of nuclear weapons, which of course they were quite reluctant to do.
John F. Kennedy
The task of building the peace lies with the leaders of every nation, large and small. For the great powers have no monopoly on conflict or ambition. The cold war is not the only expression of tension in this world - and the nuclear race is not the only arms race. Even little wars are dangerous in a nuclear world. The long labor of peace is an undertaking for every nation - and in this effort none of us can remain unaligned. To this goal none can be uncommitted.
John F. Kennedy
Continued unrestricted testing by the nuclear powers, joined in time by other nations which may be less adept in limiting pollution, will increasingly contaminate the air that all of us must breathe. Even then, the number of children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs might seem statistically small to some, in comparison with natural health hazards. But this is not a natural health hazard - and it is not a statistical issue. The loss of even one human life, or the malformation of even one baby - who may be born long after we are gone - should be of concern to us all. Our children and grandchildren are not merely statistics toward which we can be indifferent.
John F. Kennedy
