Alva Myrdal Quotes

I have to bring to your notice a terrifying reality: with the development of nuclear weapons Man has acquired, for the first time in history, the technical means to destroy the whole of civilization in a single act.

Although September 11 was horrible, it didn't threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear weapons do.

If we are to be destroyed we will do it ourselves by warfare with thermonuclear weaponry.

This means that the only function of nuclear weapons, while they exist, is to deter a nuclear attack.

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 combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons can destroy nations.

To me, nuclear weapons are the secret crisis of our time. Frankly, everyone needs to reread John Hersey's 'Hiroshima.'

This is the reality of nuclear weapons: they may trigger a world war; a war which, unlike previous ones, destroys all of civilization.

Nuclear weapons continue to occupy a unique place in global security affairs. No other weapons, in my opinion, anyway, match their potential for prompt and long-term damage and their strategic impact.

Even with the best intentions, you can have a nuclear war, a nuclear holocaust, through miscalculation, through accidents.

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.

Firing off 1,000 or 500 or 2,000 nuclear warheads on a few minutes' consideration has always struck me as an absurd way to go to war.

It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives.

I'm still bothered by the threat of nuclear war.

If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.

It's a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.

I still believe that any country understands that if they use nuclear weapons, they will be wiped out of existence. They could be irrational in many ways, but I don't think they're irrational to the point that they're ready to annihilate their own country.

The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.

Nut With A Nuke

If an SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) system were to keep out ninety percent of incoming nuclear missiles, it would be a ninety percent success and most Americans would be dead.

A nuclear weapon is not just a football that you can use at will.

I would not recommend the use of any atomic weapon, no matter how small, when both sides have the power to destroy the world.

Find it quite impossible to get excited about the atomic bomb as such, can’t see that it really alters anything.

We do not believe that a nuclear war should be fought and we do not believe that a nuclear war can be won.

The atomic bomb was the turn of the screw. It has made the prospect of future war unendurable.