Nuclear weapons

Nuclear weapons are explosive devices that derive their destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission or a combination of fission and fusion. Both reactions release vast quantities of energy from relatively small amounts of matter.

• Man has mounted science, and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of men. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.
  • Henry Adams, Letter to Charles Francis Adams Jr. (London, April 11, 1862); in J. C. Levenson, E. Samuels, C. Vandersee and V. Hopkins Winner (eds.), The Letters of Henry Adams: 1858-1868 (1982), vol. 1, p. 290

• May there not be methods of using explosive energy incomparably more intense than anything heretofore discovered? Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings—nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke? Could not explosives even of the existing type be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless procession upon a hostile city, arsenal, camp or dockyard?
  • Winston Churchill, "Shall We All Commit Suicide?", Pall Mall (September 1924). Reprinted in Thoughts and Adventures (1932), p. 250

• Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration...

  This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat or exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.

  • Albert Einstein, Letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt (August 2, 1939, delivered October 11, 1939); reported in Einstein on Peace, ed. Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden (1960, reprinted 1981), pp. 294–95

• We knew the world would not 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. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multiarmed form and says, "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that one way or another.
  • J. Robert Oppenheimer, recalling his thoughts at the instant the first test atomic device exploded. Reported in The Decision to Drop to the Bomb (1965 NBC news program)

• Now we're all sons-of-bitches.
  • Kenneth Bainbridge, remark to Robert Oppenheimer immediately after the first atom bomb test explosion at Alamogordo, as quoted in Lansing Lamont, Day of Trinity (1966), p. 242

• My God, what have we done?
  • Robert A. Lewis, co-pilot and aircraft commander of the Enola Gay (August 6, 1945)

• The use of the atomic bomb with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.
  • Herbert Hoover, Letter (August 8, 1945) to Colonel John Callan O’Laughlin, publisher of Army an Navy Journal, as quoted in Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (1996), p. 459. Cited as "O’Laughlin Correspondence File, Box 171, Post-Presidential Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library"

• The American, English and French newspapers are spewing out elegant dissertations on the atomic bomb. We can sum it up in a single phrase: mechanized civilization has just achieved the last degree of savagery.
  • Albert Camus, Combat (August 8, 1945). Quoted in Nicholas Humphrey; Robert Jay Lifton, In a Dark Time (1984), p. 27

• The news today about "Atomic bombs" is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world! Such explosives in men's hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope "this will ensure peace". But one good thing may arise out of it, I suppose, if the write-ups are not overheated: Japan ought to cave in. Well we're in God's hands. But He does not look kindly on Babel-builders.
  • J. R. R. Tolkien, from a letter to his son Christopher (August 9, 1945) in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981)

• Can one imagine that The Bomb could ever be used "in a good cause"? Do not such means instantly, of themselves, corrupt any cause? The bomb is the natural product of the kind of society we have created. It is as easy, normal, and unforced an expression of the American way of Life as electric ice-boxes, banana splits, and hydro-matic drive automobiles.
  • Dwight Macdonald, in Politics magazine (August, 1945)

• The atomic bomb is the Second Coming in Wrath.
  • Winston Churchill, on hearing about the Trinity test, as recollected in Harvey H. Bundy, "Remembered Words," The Atlantic (March 1957)

• The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
  • Albert Einstein, Statement on the Atomic Bomb to Raymond Swing, before October 1, 1945, as reported in Atlantic Monthly, vol. 176, no. 5 (November 1945), in Einstein on Politics (2007), p. 373

• Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we know it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking.
  • Albert Einstein, "Only Then Shall We Find Courage", New York Times Magazine (June 23, 1946)

• I regard the employment of the atom bomb for the wholesale destruction of men, women and children as the most diabolical use of science.
  • Mohandas Gandhi, in Harijan magazine (29 September 1946), quoted in Itty Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb (Zed Books, 1998), p. 30

• So far as I can see the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained mankind for ages.
  • Mahatma Gandhi, (1946). In William Borman, Gandhi and Non-Violence (1986), p. 170

• In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humour, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
  • J. Robert Oppenheimer, Lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 25 November 1947; in The Open Mind (1955), ch. 5

• It is arguable whether the human race have been gainers by the march of science beyond the steam engine. Electricity opens a field of infinite conveniences to ever greater numbers, but they may well have to pay dearly for them. But anyhow in my thought I stop short of the internal combustion engine which has made the world so much smaller. Still more must we fear the consequences of entrusting a human race so little different from their predecessors of the so-called barbarous ages such awful agencies as the atomic bomb. Give me the horse.
  • Winston Churchill, address to the Royal College of Surgeons (July 10, 1951). Collected in Stemming the Tide (1953), p. 91

• Be careful above all things not to let go of the atomic weapon until you are sure, and more than sure, that other means of preserving peace are in your hands.
  • Winston Churchill, Final Speech to US Congress (January 17, 1952), as cited in The War That Must Never Be Fought: Dilemmas of Nuclear Deterrence (2015)

• The great danger facing us today is not so much the atomic bomb that was created by physical science. Not so much that atomic bomb that you can put in an aeroplane and drop on the heads of hundreds and thousands of people as dangerous as that is. But the real danger confronting civilization today is that atomic bomb which lies in the hearts and souls of men, capable of exploding into the vilest of hate and into the most damaging selfishness—that's the atomic bomb that we've got to fear today. Problem is with the men. Within the heart and the souls of men. That is the real basis of our problem.
  • Martin Luther King Jr., "Rediscovering Lost Values", Sermon delivered at Detroit's Second Baptist Church (February 28, 1954)

• The flame from the angel's sword in the Garden of Eden has been catalyzed into the atom bomb; God's thunderbolt became blunted, so Man's dunderbolt has become the Steel Star of Destruction.
  • Seán O'Casey, Sunset and Evening Star (1954)

• In plain words; now that Britain has told the world she has the H-Bomb, she should announce as early as possible that she has done with it, that she proposes to reject, in all circumstances, nuclear warfare. This is not pacifism. There is no suggestion here of abandoning the immediate defence of this island.... No, what should be abandoned is the idea of deterrence-by-threat-of-retaliation. There is no real security in it, no decency in it, no faith, hope, nor charity in it.
  • J. B. Priestley, "Britain and the Nuclear Bombs", The New Statesman (November 2, 1957)

• I happened to read recently a remark by the American nuclear physicist W. Davidson, who noted that the explosion of one hydrogen bomb releases a greater amount of energy than all the explosions set off by all countries in all wars known in the entire history of mankind. And he, apparently, is right.
  • Nikita Khrushchev, Address to the United Nations, New York City (September 18, 1959), as reported by The New York Times (September 19, 1959), p. 8. The physicist quoted was eventually found to be William Davidon, associate physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, Illinois.

• Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.
  • John F. Kennedy, Address before the General Assembly of the United Nations (September 25, 1961) [1]

• We have genuflected before the God of Science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate.
  • Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love (1963)

• The idea that every nation ought to have an atomic bomb, like every woman of fashion ought to have a mink coat, is deplorable.
  • Clement Attlee, cited in S. Beer, Modern British Politics (Faber and Faber, 1965) and Stuart Thompson, The Dictionary of Labour Quotations (Biteback Publishing, 2013)

• It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology.

  When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atomic bomb, and then puts its hands over its eyes and says, "My God what have I done?"

  • Ursula Le Guin, "The Stalin in the Soul" in The Language of the Night (1976)

• Nuclear weapon: an agency reserved for use by the most civilized nations for the settlement of disputes that might become troublesome if left unadjusted. Unfortunately, too many formerly uncivilized nations are becoming civilized.
  • Leonard Rossiter, The Devil's Bedside Book (1980)

• The atomic bomb is a marvelous gift that was given to our country by a wise God.
  • Phyllis Schlafly, quoted in Rosemary Chalk, "Women and the National Security Debate", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (August/September 1982), p. 46 [2]

• Imagine a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has nine thousand matches. The other has seven thousand matches. Each of them is concerned about who's ahead, who's stronger. Well that's the kind of situation we are actually in. The amount of weapons that are available to the United States and the Soviet Union are so bloated, so grossly in excess of what's needed to dissuade the other, that if it weren't so tragic, it would be laughable. What is necessary is to reduce the matches and to clean up the gasoline.
  • Carl Sagan, during a panel discussion on ABC News Viewpoint following the TV movie The Day After (November 20, 1983). Misquoted as "The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five."

• How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy?
  • Sting, "Russians", The Dream of the Blue Turtles (1985)

• What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening the use of nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves.
  • Martin Amis, Einstein's Monsters (1987), "Introduction: Thinkability"

• The arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves.
  • Martin Amis, Einstein's Monsters (1987), "Introduction: Thinkability"

• We scientists are clever—too clever—are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are still thinking. Just tell us how big you want it!
  • Richard P. Feynman, as quoted in James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992), p. 204

• Any military commander who is honest with himself, or with those he's speaking to, will admit that he has made mistakes in the application of military power. He's killed people unnecessarily—his own troops or other troops—through mistakes, through errors of judgment. A hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands, maybe even a hundred thousand. But… he hasn't destroyed nations. And the conventional wisdom is don't make the same mistake twice, learn from your mistakes. And we all do. Maybe we make the same mistake three times, but hopefully not four or five. But there will be no learning period with nuclear weapons. You make one mistake and you're going to destroy nations.
  • Robert McNamara, in The Fog of War (2003)

• Is it right and proper that today there are 7500 strategic offensive nuclear warheads, of which 2500 are at 15 minute alert to be launched by the decision of one human being?
  • Robert McNamara, in The Fog of War (2003)

• There is Dimona nuclear reactor, and Israel ownership of weapon mass destruction, no one raises this issue, this is extremely dangerous. How can the Arabs and Muslims recognize so-called Israel while it owns the nuclear arsenal? this is impossible, unless they also enjoyed the right of having their own nuclear arsenal, there is also the refugees problem there are 4 million Palestinians who should return this is the basis of the problem.
  • Muammar Gaddafi, Talk to Al-Jazeera (September 25, 2009) Al-Jazeera

• The only people who should be allowed to govern countries with nuclear weapons are mothers, those who are still breast-feeding their babies.
  • Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who lived in Hiroshima when it was hit by an atomic bomb, survived, chose to move to Nagasaki, which was then hit by another atomic bomb, and survived that, too, living until 2010, all according to Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), p. 684

• Anti-war movement
• Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• Military Industrial Complex
• NATO
• Nuclear war