Quotes
Fundamentally, and in the long run, the problem which is posed by the release of atomic
energy is a problem of the ability of the human race to govern itself without war.
-A report of a panel of consultants on disarmament of the Secretary of State, January
1953.
I am sure that at the end of the world, in the last millisecond of the earth's existence,
humanity will see what we have just seen.
-George Kistiakowsky, the explosives expert who had designed the first atomic bomb's trigger, after the Trinity test.
Scarcely had the sound and fury of the Trinity blast faded when General Groves reminded his aides: "We must keep this thing quiet." Replied one: "But sir, I think they heard the noise in five states." Said another: "Can you give us an easy job, general, like hiding the Mississippi River?"
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be
fought with sticks and stones.
-Albert Einstein
Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most
revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire.
-A. Einstein
This basic force of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow
nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of
control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the
world. We scientists recognise our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow
citizens an understanding of atomic energy and its implication for society. In this lies our
only security and our only hope - we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life
and not for death.
-A. Einstein, January 22, 1947
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift
toward unparalleled catastrophe.
-A. Einstein
I have examined Man's wonderful inventions. And I tell you that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine. The peasant I tempt today eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons.
-The Devil, speaking in "Don Juan in Hell," Act III of "Man and Superman," by George Bernard Shaw, 1902
If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky,
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...
"I am become Death,
The destroyer of Worlds."
-from The Bhagavad-Gita (Quoted by Oppenheimer after Trinity)
Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the
sciences are among the great epics.
-Robert Oppenheimer
It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because
they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.
-R. Oppenheimer
If atomic bombs are added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the
arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse
the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima.
-R. Oppenheimer
We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position
to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own.
We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but
only at the risk of his own life.
-R. Oppenheimer
When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do
about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.
-R. Oppenheimer
In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the
physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
-R. Oppenheimer
If we fight a war and win it with H-bombs, what history will remember is not
the ideals we were fighting for but the methods we used to accomplish them.
These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who ruthlessly
killed every last inhabitant of Persia.
-Hans A. Bethe
It is still and unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a
blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs.
-Stanislaw Ulam
We must be curious to learn how such a set of objects - hundreds of power plants,
thousands of bombs, tens of thousands of people massed in national establishments - can
be traced back to a few people sitting at laboratory benches discussing the peculiar
behavior of one type of atom.
-Spencer R. Weart
What will people of the future think of us? Will they say, as Roger Williams said of the
Massachusetts Indians, that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that
we resigned our humanity? They will have the right.
-C.P. Snow
Cogito ergo boom.
-Susan Sontag
At last, after innumerable glamorous and frightful years, mankind approaches a war which is totally
predictable from beginning to end.
-Frederic Raphael
It is a secret from nobody that the famous random event is most likely to arise from those parts of the
world where the old adage “There is no alternative to victory” retains a high degree of plausibility.
-Hannah Arendt
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 madness.
-John F. Kennedy
We are heading towards catastrophe. I think the world is going to pieces. I am very pessimistic. Why?
Because the world hasn’t been punished yet, and the only punishment that could be adequate is the
nuclear destruction of the world.
-Elie Wiesel
There are no accidents, only nature throwing her weight around. Even the bomb merely releases energy
that nature has put there. Nuclear war would be just a spark in the grandeur of space. Nor can radiation
“alter” nature: she will absorb it all. After the bomb, nature will pick up the cards we have spilled, shuffle
them, and begin her game again.
-Camille Paglia
For the first time in the history of mankind, one generation literally has the power to destroy the past, the
present and the future, the power to bring time to an end.
-Hubert H. Humphrey
The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man’s adjustment to it—
the speed of his acceptance.
-E. B. White
There is no evil in the atom; only in men’s souls.
-Adlai Stevenson
If used in numbers, atomic bombs not only can nullify any nation's military effort, but
can demolish its social and economic structure and prevent their re-establishment for
long periods of time. With such weapons, especially if employed in conjunction with
other weapons of mass destruction such as pathogenic bacteria, it is quite possible to
depopulate vast areas of the earth's surface, leaving only vestigal remnants of man's
material works.
-Report of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Operation Crossroads, June 30, 1947
General Thomas Farrell, Deputy to General Leslie Groves commented to Groves immediately after the Trinity test, "The war is over." "Yes," Groves replied, "just as soon as we drop one or two of these things on Japan."
No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.
-Charles de Gaulle
"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration , Communist indoctrination,
Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiricy to sap and impurify
all of our precious bodily fluids."
-General Jack D. Ripper, from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love the Bomb
“I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty
million killed, tops. Depending on the breaks.”
-General “Buck” Turgidson, from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Bomb
God created the earth in six days. Man can destroy it in one hour.
-unknown
If anyone says he hates war more than me, well, he better have a knife on him. That's all I
can say.
-Jack Handey