I felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles — this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.
Quotations about:
nuclear weapon
Note not all quotations have been tagged, so Search may find additional quotes on this topic.
It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) American clergyman, civil rights leader, social activist, preacher
“Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” National Cathedral, Washington, DC (31 Mar 1968)
(Source)
See, free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don’t attack each other. Free nations don’t develop weapons of mass destruction.
George W. Bush (b. 1946) US President (2001-2009)
Speech, Milwaukee (3 Oct 2003)
(Source)
Referring to insurgencies in Iraq.
The discussion, for the most part, was able and organized, although, like all meetings of this kind, certain statements were made as accepted truisms, which I, at least, thought were of questionable validity. One member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, argued that we could use nuclear weapons, on basis that our adversaries would use theirs against us in an attack. I thought, as I listened, of the many times I had heard the military take positions which, if wrong, had the advantage that no one would be around at the end to know.
Robert Francis Kennedy (1925-1968) American politician
Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, ch. 5 (1969)
(Source)
Originally printed in "Thirteen Days: The Story about How the World Almost Ended," McCall's (Nov 1968)
