E. P. Thompson Quotes

It is not important what the other side says or means. What is important are the military capabilities of the other side.

We have to get rid of those nuclear weapons.

So, we need to delegitimize the nuclear weapon, and by de-legitimizing... meaning trying to develop a different system of security that does not depend on nuclear deterrence.

If peace should break out, what are we going to do with all these weapons.

Great armaments lead inevitably to war.

If the [present] deterrent is the mutual annihilation of each other ..., what else do we need and why?

Disarmament has become the urgent imperative of our time. I do not say this because I equate the absence of arms to peace, or because I believe that bringing an end to the nuclear arms race automatically guarantees the peace, or because the elimination of nuclear warheads from the arsenals of the world will bring in its wake that change in attitude requisite to the peaceful settlement of disputes between nations. Disarmament is vital today, quite simply, because of the immense destructive capacity of which men dispose.

China, North Korea's last ally in the world has just voted agaisnt them [in the United Nations]. What would you do if you thought every country in the world was against you and you wanted to survive? You would buy insurance. And the best insurance you could get to prevent invasion would be nuclear weapons, and that is just what North Korea has done. So now, when the President [Trump] threatens them, what do they do? They go out and buymore insurance.

We defended our allies in Europe for 40 years during the worst days of the Cold War - very threatening days of the Cold War - and nothing happened. So deterrence does work.

Politicians - well, first of all, they should get rid of nuclear weapons, I think.

Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.

The talk about balance, nuclear balance, seems to me to be metaphysical and doesn't seem to be real at all.

And it raises a fundamental question: How long can we move the world in one direction while we move in another direction, and do we want to backslide into an era that we finally emerged from where we had a nuclear weapon for every tactical mission?

Nuclear weapons are infinitely less important in our foreign policy than they were in the days of the Cold War. I don't think we need nuclear weapons any longer.

I want to move to a world of no nuclear weapons but I want to do that through multilateral disarmament so that we all disarm together.

What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.

Really, of all the important mission responsibilities assigned to United States Strategic Command by the president, none is more important than our responsibility to deter a strategic attack on the United States and our allies and partners.

If we had made it clear from the very beginning that we were not going to tolerate another nuclear power on the face of the earth, and had done it in Korea, where we could have accomplished it militarily, if necessary, I would put a stop to it and would have put a stop to it there.

There are some people that will be deterred by the fact that we have nuclear weapons... But those people are the folks we can deal with anyway.

A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us.

We have a moral imperative to keep up the search for something better than mutual assured destruction.

Containment

Nuclear weapons are what make us a great power.

Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological nation plans for it.

Better red than dead.