Words matter. These are the best Nuclear War Quotes from famous people such as J. G. Ballard, Alastair Reynolds, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jamais Cascio, Noam Chomsky, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.
I’m still bothered by the threat of nuclear war.
Without perestroika, the cold war simply would not have ended. But the world could not continue developing as it had, with the stark menace of nuclear war ever present.
Much as Cold War nuclear strategists could argue about winning a nuclear war by having more survivors, advocates of a Global Warming War might see the United States, Western Europe, or Russia as better able to ride out climate disruption and manipulation than, say, China or the countries of the Middle East.
There are two problems for our species’ survival – nuclear war and environmental catastrophe – and we’re hurtling towards them. Knowingly.
Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.
My feelings of revulsion and foreboding about nuclear weapons had not changed an iota since 1945, and they have never left me. Since I was 14, the overriding objective of my life has been to prevent the occurrence of nuclear war.
When I was a kid, I had two nightmares: one was nuclear war, and the other was that my parents would get a divorce; and when I was twenty, they split up, and I just felt like I needed to confront all those things that scared me as a kid – entering young adulthood and trying to have relationships.
I’ve been working with Global Zero. They are a great organization leading the resistance against nuclear war and the elimination of nuclear weapons.
We still live with this unbelievable threat over our heads of nuclear war. I mean, are we stupid? Do we think that the nuclear threat has gone, that the nuclear destruction of the planet is not imminent? It’s a delusion to think it’s gone away.
The first thing that matters: I am a child of the eighties. I grew up in a neon wonderland of talking horses, compassionate bears, hair that didn’t move in a stiff wind, and the constant threat of nuclear war.
From a scientific perspective there is some indication that a nuclear war could deplete the earth’s ozone layer or, less likely, could bring on a new Ice Age – but there is no suggestion that either the created order or mankind would be destroyed in the process.
You don’t have any communication between the Israelis and the Iranians. You have all sorts of local triggers for conflict. Having countries act on a hair trigger – where they can’t afford to be second to strike – the potential for a miscalculation or a nuclear war through inadvertence is simply too high.
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.
Look at what President Kennedy managed to achieve during the Cuban missile crisis. If Bush had been president in 1962, do you think he would have avoided a nuclear war?
One of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war.
Most of my nightmares that jolt me awake either involve the cosmos or something completely out of human control. In reality, I worry more about nuclear war, or war in general.
Not to get political, but it seems like every day I read the paper, and you’re reading about nuclear war and Russians taking over the country and Nazis again. It’s like every once in a while, the world blinks for a second, and it goes, ‘Darkseid is!’ The world has changed, and it’s changed in a ‘Darkseid is’ way.
I can’t really worry about nuclear war any more than I can worry about the aliens coming.
Sometimes people ask me why I began perestroika. Were the causes basically domestic or foreign? The domestic reasons were undoubtedly the main ones, but the danger of nuclear war was so serious that it was a no less significant factor.
We believe in peace in the settlement of all disputes through peaceful means, in the abolition of war, and, more particularly, nuclear war.
There are legitimate concerns long term, in my view, about nuclear war and policy and stuff like that. But the world has become a better place every 20 years for the last 2,000 years.
There has been a transition from a nuclear-annihilation scenario to an isolated-terrorist-nuclear-bomb scenario. But we’re still locked into a mind-set that nuclear war would be so overwhelming that any kind of preparedness would be futile.
There is nothing worth having that can be obtained by nuclear war – nothing material or ideological – no tradition that it can defend. It is utterly self-defeating.
One nuclear war is going to be the last nuclear – the last war, frankly, if it really gets out of hand. And I just don’t think we ought to be prepared to accept that sort of thing.
Many foolish people believe that nuclear war cannot happen, because there can be no winner. However, the American war planners, who elevated U.S. nuclear weapons from a retaliatory role to a pre-emptive first strike function, obviously do not agree that nuclear war cannot be won.
If there is anything more frightening than the threat of global nuclear war, it is the certainty that humans not only stand on the verge of producing new life forms but may soon be able to tinker with them as if they were vintage convertibles or bonsai trees.
I’m not saying anyone should go to nuclear war with Russia. What we should do is contain them and show them that there are consequences if they do terrible things, which is what sanctions are all about.
No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway’s postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.
It’s a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.
An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us.
Even with the best intentions, you can have a nuclear war, a nuclear holocaust, through miscalculation, through accidents.
Nuclear war is such an emotional subject that many people see the weapons themselves as the common enemy of humanity.
I would eat fruitcake if there’d been a nuclear war and I’d run out of canned goods.
Kennedy said that if we had nuclear war we’d kill 300 million people in the first hour. McNamara, who is a good businessman and likes to save, says it would be only 200 million.
