I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.
I remembered being young in the late ’70s and early ’80s and growing up at the height of the Cold War. I remembered how scared I was of nuclear weapons, how often I though about them and about the possibility of everything and everyone I knew vanishing in a second in temperatures hotter than the centre of the sun.
The lesson of the Cold War is that against nuclear weapons, only nuclear weapons can hold the peace.
If the Russian nuclear arsenal was fired at the United States and other targets, and we fired back at them with thousands of nuclear weapons, it would be the end of life on earth.
It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives.
Our world faces many grave challenges: Widening conflicts and inequality. Extreme weather and deadly intolerance. Security threats – including nuclear weapons. We have the tools and wealth to overcome these challenges. All we need is the will.
Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.
I’ve repeatedly voted for sanctions against Iran. And I think all options should be on the table to prevent them from having nuclear weapons.
The nexus between terrorism and nuclear weapons, or even nuclear material, is obviously a current concern.
The broad goal, laid out by Congress, the Obama administration, and the U.N. Security Council, was that Iran would suspend all enrichment-related activities and not be permitted a path to ever pursue a nuclear weapons program.
Indeed, the very first resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations – adopted unanimously – called for the elimination of nuclear weapons.
At the height of Iraq’s clandestine nuclear weapons program, which nearly succeeded in building a bomb in 1991, Tuwaitha incorporated research reactors, uranium mining and enrichment facilities, chemical engineering plants and an explosives fabrication center to build the device that detonates a nuclear core.
I think we’ve already voted at the U.N., in the Security Council, to get rid of nuclear weapons. Let’s get rid of them. Let’s get rid of ours and then Iran will stop, I believe. And so everybody else will, because if everybody doesn’t have them, then we’re safe, at least safe from a nuclear attack.
I don’t like the fact that North Korea is testing nuclear weapons, and I don’t like the fact that they’re testing missiles and shooting them out in the sea in kind of an antagonistic fashion.
We must eliminate all nuclear weapons in order to eliminate the grave risk they pose to our world. This will require persistent efforts by all countries and peoples. A nuclear war would affect everyone, and all have a stake in preventing this nightmare.
We have a legal and moral obligation to rid our world of nuclear tests and nuclear weapons.
