Atomic War Quotes & Sayings

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

European peace movement felt that the deployment of these missiles on European soil, on German soil would be a very great danger towards the Soviet Union in that those missiles could reach the Soviet Union, make it vulnerable within five to six minutes, that it could surgical strikes, strikes into the military infrastructure and that a strike into the military infrastructure could cause in fact World War III, an atomic world war and that this could also be used for first strike, for surgical search, first strike into the Soviet Union. — Petra Kelly

o In the decision to use the bomb the base line had shifted down during the moral slide from the blockade to the area bombing of Germany and to the fire-bombing of Japan. Predictably one member of Stimson's committee made the point that the 'number of people that would be killed by the bomb would not be greater in general magnitude than the number already killed in fire raids'. — Jonathan Glover

If we [Americans] are a strong people, a united people, why do we always have to hear how great we are? What is this self-love? Where does this come from? It got worse, because after the war we thought we'd won it. That's the first myth. Frankly, Russia won it. The Soviet Union sacrificed far greater form than anyone else to win that war. Secondly, we had the atomic bomb. We should not have dropped it on Japan. We did as an example to the Soviets, not to defeat Japan and to save American lives. These are myths that we explode with a lot of research early on. — Oliver Stone

In some ways more painful is the fact that their experience appears to be fading from the collective memory of humankind. Having never experienced an atomic bombing, the vast majority around the world can only vaguely imagine such horror, and these days, John Hersey's Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth are all but forgotten. As predicted by the saying, 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,' the probability that nuclear weapons will be used and the danger of nuclear war are increasing. — Tadatoshi Akiba

Historically, the Germans had a habit of associating the names of objects with the sounds they made. After bell makers-turned-cannon-makers learned that by closing off the mouth of the cannon before lighting the fuse, the entire cannon could be made to explode, the device they invented became known as the 'bum' (for boom!). In keeping with this tradition, the first one-thousand-pound bomb was dubbed 'ein laussen bum' (meaning, "a loud boom"). After the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, they called the fission device 'ein grossen laussen bum' (or, "a big loud boom"). The next obvious step was the fusion, or H-bomb, which was pronounced 'ein grossen laussen bum all ist kaput! — Charles Pellegrino

Imperialism will not last long because it always does evil things. It persists in grooming and supporting reactionaries in all countries who are against the people, it has forcibly seized many colonies and semi-colonies and many military bases, and it threatens the peace with atomic war. Thus, forced by imperialism to do so, more than 90 per cent of the people of the world are rising or will rise in struggle against it. Yet, imperialism is still alive, still running amuck in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the West imperialism is still oppressing the people at home. This situation must change. It is the task of the people of the whole world to put an end to the aggression and oppression perpetrated by imperialism, and chiefly by U.S. imperialism. — Mao Zedong

The atomic bombs will surely shorten the war, and let us hope that they will effectively end war as a possibility in human affairs. — Ernest Lawrence

This weapon the atomic bomb has added an additional responsibility-or, better, an additional incentive-to find a sound basis for lasting peace. It provides an overwhelming inducement for the avoidance of war. It emphasizes the crisis we face in international matters and strengthens the conviction that adequate safeguards for peace must be found. — Leslie Groves

All the rare-book dealers regaled me with stories of the trade. They told me that after the war there were too many books and not enough bookshop space, so all the dealers in London BURIED hundreds of old books in the open bomb craters of London streets. Today the buried books would be worth a fortune if they could be recovered, if the new buildings could be torn down and the rebuilt streets torn up. I had a sudden vision of an atomic war destroying everything in the world, except here and there an old book lying where it fell when it was blasted up out of the depths of London. — Helene Hanff

We shouldn't be afraid of atomic bombs and missiles. No matter what kind of war breaks out - conventional or thermonuclear - we'll win. As for China, if the imperialists unleash war on us, we may lose more than three hundred million people. So what? War is war. The years will pass, and we'll get to work producing more babies than ever before.27 — Henry Kissinger

The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts. — Omar N. Bradley

In the question of peace, people spoke up and demonstrated for peace and against the threat of war, the threat of atomic war. — Stefan Heym

I suppose that history will remember my term in office as the years when the Cold War began to overshadow our lives. I have hardly a day in office that has not been dominated by this all-embracing struggle. And always in the background there has been the atomic bomb. But when history says that my term of office saw the begining of the Cold War, it will also say that in those eight years we have set the course that can win it. — Harry S. Truman

In no other type of warfare does the advantage lie so heavily with the aggressor. — James Franck

If surrender could have been brought about in May, 1945, or even in June or July, before the entrance of Soviet Russia into the [Pacific] war and the use of the atomic bomb, the world would have been the gainer. — Joseph Grew

We have got to accept Big Government for the duration-for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged, given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores. ... And if they deem Soviet power a menace to our freedom (as I happen to), they will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in Washington-even with Truman at the reins of it all. — William F. Buckley Jr.

Over everything - up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks - was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city's bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of the plants intact; it had stimulated them. — John Hersey

When we blew the first atomic bomb at White Sands near the end of the war, nobody knew what was going to happen. There was a theory that the chain reaction would continue forever. And we would have created a little tiny sun out there in the desert that would burn until the end of the universe. It wasn't a widely held theory, but it was a theory that nobody had a way of disproving. There were people who thought it wouldn't go off at all, that it would simply sit out there and melt and produce a great big dirty cloud of radioactivity. Nobody knew. — Stephen King

Mankind must give up war in the Atomic Era. What is at stake is the life or death of humanity. — Albert Einstein

To talk of atomic energy in terms of atomic bombs is like talking of electricity in terms of the electric chair. — Pyotr Kapitsa

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

How do we prevent Iran developing an atomic bomb, when, on the American side, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not recognised as a war crime? — Gunter Grass

If atomic bombs are to be 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. — J. Robert Oppenheimer

Peterson remembered with a smile that the US Department of the Interior had made a thorough prediction of trends in 1937, and had missed atomic energy, computers, radar, antibiotics, and World War II. Yet they all kept on, with this simple-minded linear extrapolation that was, despite a bank of computers to refine the numbers, still merely a new way to be stupid in an expensive fashion. — Gregory Benford

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

Japan suffered terribly from the atomic bomb but never adopted a pose of moral superiority, implying: 'We would never have done it!' The Japanese know perfectly well they would have used it had they had it. They accept the idea that war is war; they give no quarter and accept none. Total war, they recognize, knows no Queensberry Rules. If you develop a devastating new weapon during a total war, you use it; you do not put it into the War Museum. — George Mikes

I think that horror films have a very direct relationship to the time in which they're made. The films that really strike a film with the public are very often reflecting something that everyone, consciously or unconsciously feeling - atomic age, post 9-11, post Iraq war; it's hard to predict what people are going to be afraid of. — Eli Roth

In America, it was decided to attempt the production of atomic bombs with an effort that would constitute a large part of the collective American war effort. In Germany, an effort one thousandth the scale of the American was applied to the problem of producing atomic energy that would drive engines. — Werner Heisenberg

Scientists expected that the Super, a fusion or "thermonuclear" weapon, would be an awesomely destructive horror that could unleash the equivalent of several million tons of TNT. This was hundreds of times more powerful than atomic bombs. A few well-placed hydrogen bombs could kill millions of people. Among the foes of development were famous scientists who had supported atomic development during World War II. One was Albert Einstein, who took to the radio to say that "general annilihation beckons. — James T. Patterson

After the atomic bombs were dropped, the war ended and we went into Tokyo Bay with the rest of the fleet, the Missouri and the rest of them, while they signed the terms of surrender that ended the war. — Barney Ross

In retrospect, I came to Nagasaki for the regenerative properties. The second atomic bomb blast so many years ago, which had swept up most of the city in a plutonium cloud, had made the city radioactively peace-loving. Reversing the usual cycle that turns victim into perpetrator, the people who stepped from the rubble filled their hearts with a fervent devotion to peace in all its forms.
In my mind's eye I see them: wounded and dying, their lungs filled with ash and smoke. The ash sits there for some time, and when they exhale, miraculously, something akin to love comes out. — Daniel Clausen

People who talk of outlawing the atomic bomb are mistaken - what needs to be outlawed is war. — Leslie Groves

One must expect a war between U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. which will begin with the total destruction of London. I think the war will last 30 years, and leave a world without civilised people, from which everything will have to build afresh-a process taking say 500 years. Stated just one month after the Hiroshima atomic explosion. Russell became one of the best-known antinuclear activists of his era. — Bertrand Russell

General Atomics, the progenitor of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, started life in 1955 when a major military contractor, General Dynamics, feared that the military hardware market might dry up. It began exploring peacetime uses of atomic energy, but abandoned the effort when cold-war military spending took off. — Charles Duhigg

The term railway was to Victorian England what atomic or aerodynamic were to be after World War II, and network and virtual are today. When it came to investments, the romantic appeal of being a party to this technological revolution often dominated profit considerations. — Richard Bookstaber

The use of the blockade against Germany to starve large numbers of people to death broke through the moral barrier against the mass killing of civilians. It was the precedent for the 'conventional' bombing of civilians in the Second World War and then for the use of the atomic bomb. — Jonathan Glover

The conflict that exists today is no more than an old-style struggle for power, once again presented to mankind in semireligious trappings. The difference is that, this time, the development of atomic power has imbued the struggle with a ghostly character; for both parties know and admit that, should the quarrel deteriorate into actual war, mankind is doomed. — Albert Einstein

Yesterday, we fought wars which destroyed cities. Today, we are concerned with avoiding a war which will destroy the earth. We can adapt atomic energy to produce electricity and move ships, but can we control its use in anger? — Robert Kennedy

A good thing? Or a strong omen ... Only time would tell what these newfangled neutrons and fission reactions would give to our ever-changing world.In all probability,this new scientific birth would change all of our lives forever and perhaps end the brutal war we were now engaged in? — Will Leamon

Men and women of the world, never again plan war! With this atomic bomb, war can only mean suicide for the human race. From this atomic waste the people of Nagasaki confront the world and cry out: No more war! Let us follow the commandment of love and work together. The people of Nagasaki prostrate themselves before God and pray: Grant that Nagasaki may be the last atomic wilderness in the history of the world. — Takashi Nagai

2. Humanity & Peace -
2.09 THE NUCLEAR QUESTION
Any act against the constitution,
Must be declared to be but void,
But atomic acts against humanity,
Are the strength to be but tried.
[22] - 2
The future of any of the countries,
Does lie way above its people,
And the future of humanity -
On numerous BOMBS so ample.
[23] - 2 — Munindra Misra

The German physicists knew at least so much about the manufacture and construction of atomic bombs that it was clear to them that the manufacture of bombs in Germany could not succeed during the war. For this reason, they were spared the moral decision whether they should make an atomic bomb, and they had only worked on the uranium engine. — Werner Heisenberg

Nations tend to see the other side's war atrocities as systemic and indicative of their culture and their own atrocities as justified or the acts of stressed combatants. In my travels, I sense a smoldering resentment towards WWII Japanese behavior among some Americans. Ironically, these feelings are strongest among the younger American generation that did not fight in WWII. In my experience, the Pacific vets on both sides have made their peace. And in terms of judgments, I will leave it to those who were there. As Ray Gallagher, who flew on both atomic missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki argues, When you're not at war you're a good second guesser. You had to live those years and walk that mile. — James D. Bradley

I think that if the atomic bomb did nothing more, it scared the people to the point where they realized that either they must do something about preventing war or there is a chance that there might be a morning when we would not wake up. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Nor do I take into account a danger of starting a chain reaction of a scope great enough to
destroy part or all of the planet ... But it is not necessary to imagine the earth being destroyed like a nova by a stellar explosion to understand vividly the grow ing scope of atomic war and to recognize that unless another war is prevented it is likely to bring destruction on a scale never before held possible, and even now hardly conceived, and that little civilization would survive it. — Albert Einstein

There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books. — John Hersey

On the ethics of war the Quran and the New Testament are worlds apart. Whereas Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, the Quran tells us, 'Whoso commits aggression against you, do you commit aggression against him' (2:194). The New Testament says nothing about how to wage war. The Quran, by contrast, is filled with just-war precepts. Here war is allowed in self-defense (2:190; 22:39), but hell is the punishment for killing other Muslims (4:93), and the execution of prisoners of war is explicitly condemned (47:4). Whether in the abstract is is better to rely on a scripture that regulates war or a scripture that hopes war away is an open question, but no Muslim-majority country has yet dropped an atomic bomb in war. — Stephen R. Prothero

It is a damned sight easier to start wars than to end them. This truth has been stated for as long and as often as it has been ignored. High time and thank God, we are at least moving toward de-escalation in Vietnam. The road to extrication will be long, painful, bitter. But it must be trod. We are so bogged down in Vietnam that we cannot respond effectively anywhere else in the world to a military power play except through atomic bombardment. — Malcolm Forbes

This is Communism's view of war. War is necessary. War is an instrument for achieving a goal.

But unfortunately for Communism, this policy ran up against the American atomic bomb in 1945. Then the Communists changed their tactics and suddenly became advocates of peace at any cost. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn't someone want to talk about it! We've started and won two atomic wars since 2022! Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much? I've heard the rumors about hate too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don't, that's sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes! — Ray Bradbury

To have security against atomic bombs and against the other biological weapons, we have to prevent war, for if we cannot prevent war every nation will use every means that is at their disposal; and in spite of all promises they make, they will do it. At the same time, so long as war is not prevented, all the governments of the nations have to prepare for war, and if you have to prepare for war, then you are in a state where you cannot abolish war. — Albert Einstein

A person whose job is deep thinking about atomic war would no more call a 'megadeath' a 'million corpses' than an embalmer would refer to a 'loved one' as a 'stiff.' — Russell Baker

History's long rhythm of challenges and response, of solutions that breed new crises, is not to be interrupted. But the Cold War left one shining example of human wisdom as a legacy for the future. Fifty years after the first use of atomic weapons, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain unique and poignant shrines to the inspiring fact that they have no successor. The long confrontation of the Cold War, a struggle to the death between two systems for the mastery of human destiny, was managed and resolved without that nuclear war which lurked in the monstrous imminence in silos and submarines around the globe. That was the real victory. — Martin Walker

WITH THE EMBERS STILL BURNING:
The scientific community has done a pronounced amount of hand-wringing about its involvement in the atomic bomb's creation, and a disproportionately absent amount of the soul-searching with respects to its creation of the science of eugenics. The 450,000 deaths due to the bomb are relatively small in the shadow of the many millions dead as a result of National Socialism's eugenic campaign. The casualties of The Holocaust are the casualties of the science of eugenics, which so many scientists had actively campaigned for leading up to World War II. Yet, the scientific community has confronted its complicity with collective silence and sometimes outright censorship. — A.E. Samaan

What do I actually mean when I say 'delusion'? I mean the absurdity of the claim that the excessive atomic armament of both sides creates a 'balance of terror' that reduces the danger of war; that in the long run it even offers a minimum of security ... Hence the cynical saying: He who strikes first will die second. — Christa Wolf

Some think the worst horrors of war might be avoided by an international agreement not to use atomic bombs. This is a vain hope. — John Boyd Orr

If to a poet a physicist may speak
Freely, as though we shared a common tongue,
For "peace in our time" I should hardly seek
By means that once proved wrong.
It seems the Muscovite
Has quite a healthy, growing appetite.
We can't be safe; at least we can be right.
Some bombs may help - perhaps a bomb-proof cellar,
But surely not the Chamberlain umbrella.
The atom is now big; the world is small.
Unfortunately, we have conquered space.
If war does come, it comes to all,
To every distant place.
Will people have the dash
That Britons had when their world seemed to crash
Before a small man with a small mustache?
You rhyme the atoms to amuse and charm us -
Your counsel should inspire, and not disarm us.

(Teller's reply to an anonymous British man's poem/message (that Americans are too belligerent), both in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists). — Edward Teller

I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the earth will be killed. — Albert Einstein

World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism. — Stephen Ambrose

Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war, I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will. — J.D. Salinger

The problem of an atomic war must not be confused by minor problems such as Communism versus capitalism. An atomic war would kill everyone, left, right, or center. — Linus Pauling

Japan knows the horror of war and has suffered as no other nation under the cloud of nuclear disaster. Certainly Japan can stand strong for a world of peace. — Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomized at a time when the Japanese were suing desperately for peace. — David T. Dellinger

Armageddon. The slaughter of humanity. An atomic war no one wanted, but which no one had the wisdom to avoid. — Edward Bernds

Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime. — George Wald

Fortunately, I have forgotten most of the things that have happened to me. Fortunately, the mind has a limited capacity for remembering. It would be horrible if I remembered the details of a hundred and eighty thousand years - the details of four thousand lifetimes that I have lived since the first great atomic war. — Fredric Brown

The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job. The ultimate weapon in the war between the sexes: the limp prick. The banner of the enemy's encampment: the prick at half-mast. The symbol of the apocalypse: the atomic warhead prick which self-destructs. That was the basic inequity which could never be righted: not that the male had a wonderful added attraction called a penis, but that the female had a wonderful all-weather cunt. Neither storm nor sleet nor dark of night could faze it. It was always there, always ready. Quite terrifying, when you think about it. No wonder men hated women. No wonder they invented the myth of female inadequacy. — Erica Jong

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. — Paul Nitze

Blitz to V-E Day. After the war was over, the novelist John Hersey invented a new kind of journalism, modelled on the techniques of fiction, in his report about the atomic-bomb attack on Hiroshima, which filled an entire issue of the magazine in the summer of 1946. That June, Ross wrote to Flanner, with a touch of rue, "Probably the magazine will never get back to where it was." The war took The New Yorker out of the city and into the world. — Anonymous

What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor
inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing
permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own. I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children. — Howard Zinn

Ancient boundaries are meaningless, except for political purposes; old divisions of clan and tribe are sentimental remnants of the pre-atomic age; neither creed nor color nor place of origin is relevant to the realities of modern power to utterly seek and destroy. — Sydney J. Harris

Someone once said that World War Three would be fought with atomic weapons and the next war with sticks and stones. — Robert F. Kennedy

I was born in the middle of the Second World War when the United States dropped their atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when millions of people were dying in concentration camps, when half the planet were colonies that belonged to empires. The word feminism didn't exist. And in my lifetime I have seen all these things improved, changed. We are more connected, more informed. We can fight against stuff together in ways we couldn't before. — Isabel Allende

The human race has today the means for annihilating itself
either in a fit of complete lunacy, i.e., in a big war ... or by the careless handling of atomic technology, through a slow process of poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure. — Max Born

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

By neglecting our garden, we are storing up for ourselves, in the not very distant future, a world catastrophe as bad as any atomic war, and we are doing it with all the bland complacency of an idiot child chopping up a Rembrandt with a pair of scissors. — Gerald Durrell

Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands. — H.G.Wells

I am an atheist, but as far as blowing up the world in a nuclear war goes, I tell them not to worry. — Fred Hoyle

Support for a first strike extended far beyond the upper ranks of the U.S. military. Bertrand Russell - the British philosopher and pacifist, imprisoned for his opposition to the First World War - urged the western democracies to attack the Soviet Union before it got an atomic bomb. Russell acknowledged that a nuclear strike on the Soviets would be horrible, but "anything is better than submission." Winston Churchill agreed, proposing that the Soviets be given an ultimatum: withdraw your troops from Germany, or see your cities destroyed. Even Hamilton Holt, lover of peace, crusader for world government, lifelong advocate of settling disputes through mediation and diplomacy and mutual understanding, no longer believed that sort of approach would work. Nuclear weapons had changed everything, and the Soviet Union couldn't be trusted. Any nation that rejected U.N. control of atomic energy, Holt said, "should be wiped off the face of the earth with atomic bombs. — Eric Schlosser

So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained for ages. There used to be so-called laws of war, which made it tolerable. Now we know the truth. War knows no law except that of might. The atomic bomb brought an empty victory but it resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see ... — Mahatma Gandhi

After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin? — Kurt Vonnegut

In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show. — Wilfred Burchett

It is people who are violent, rather than "religions"; and since we secularised our politics we have had two major world wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, and the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - none of which were inspired by religion. If we want to understand the dangers of our world, we can no longer accept the old received ideas. — Karen Armstrong

It does not seem ever to have been satisfactorily answered why the two first operational atomic bombs were used - against the strongly voiced wishes of the leading physicists responsible for developing them - to destroy two cities instead of being deployed in the equivalent of spectacularly shooting out candles. — Richard Dawkins

John McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War, to add his comments before leaving. McCloy said that all the talk of invading Japan struck him as rather "fantastic." The secretary asked, "Why not use the atomic bomb?" The meeting was once more called to order and McCloy's remark was discussed. Truman listened intently as the men at the table argued the merits of first warning the Japanese to surrender and then using the new weapon if the enemy ignored the ultimatum. The dialogue broke down because of one basic truth. No one in the room knew whether the device being readied in New Mexico would actually work. Without that knowledge, strategy was pointless. — William Craig

In the event of atomic war there is a tremendous biological advantage in the so-called undeveloped areas that have a high birth rate and high death rate because, man, they can plow under those mutations. — William S. Burroughs

Since the advent of the atomic bomb, the United States has always needed two kinds of enemies. On one level, it has needed a tactical enemy that it can go out and fight in the field in a shooting war. Since 1945, these enemies have been created and appeared as North Korea, North Vietnam, Grenada, El Salvador, Panama, Iraq and now Colombia. On another level, however, the US needs a strategic enemy that will justify outrageous expenditures of capital for strategic weapon systems like ICBMs, Trident submarines and "Star Wars" missile defence systems. — Michael Ruppert

(1) the commitment to ending the war successfully at the earliest possible moment; (2) the need to justify the effort and expense of building the atomic bombs; (3) the hope of achieving diplomatic gains in the growing rivalry with the Soviet Union; (4) the lack of incentives not to use atomic weapons; and (5) hatred of the Japanese and a desire for vengeance. — J. Samuel Walker

We view our atomic arsenal as proudly and as devotedly as any pioneer ever viewed his flintlock hanging over the mantel as his children slept, and dreamed. — William F. Buckley Jr.

A bright light filled the plane. The first shock-wave hit us. We were eleven and a half miles slant range from the atomic explosion but the whole airplane cracked and crinkled from the blast ... We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud ... mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall. — Paul Tibbets

If, as I have reason to believe, I have disintegrated the nucleus of the atom, this is of greater significance than the war.
[Apology to the international anti-submarine committee for being absent from several meetings during World War I.] — Ernest Rutherford

One effect could be that the huge atomic arsenal created in the cold war could be reduced significantly. — Gerhard Schroder

As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the Nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired. — George Orwell

I come and stand at every door
But none can hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead for I am dead

I'm only seven though I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I'm seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow

My hair was scorched by swirling flame
My eyes grew dim my eyes grew blind
Death came and turned my bones to dust
And that was scattered by the wind

I need no fruit I need no rice
I need no sweets nor even bread
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead for I am dead

All that I need is that for peace
You fight today you fight today
So that the children of this world
Can live and grow and laugh and play

- The Girl Child — Nazim Hikmet