Craig Reucassel Quotes

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?

We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon.

The Soviet Union prepared to test [nuclear weapons] while we were at the table negotiating with them. If they fooled us once it is their fault; if they fool us twice, it is our fault.

Most of our thinking about nuclear weapons is a hangover from different era …. Much about war, peace and global security changed after Hiroshima and changed again … with the end of the Cold war. It is high time our thinking changed as well.

One significant indication of the effectiveness of deterrence is that the Soviet Union and the United States share the belief that a nuclear war would begin only out of desperation or inadvertence. A weakening of deterrence could increase the possibility of a calculated “voluntary” war or worse.

Long before the terrifying potential of the arms race was recognized, there was a widespread instinctive abhorrence of nuclear weapons, and a strong desire to get rid of them.

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

We need to make it very clear to the Iranians, the same way we made it clear to the Soviet Union and China, that their first use of nuclear weapons would result in the devastation of their nation.

The real abhorrent consequence of the invention of atomic bombs is the fact that we still have them and they're spreading.

I remembered being young in the late '70s and early '80s and growing up at the height of the Cold War. I remembered how scared I was of nuclear weapons, how often I though about them and about the possibility of everything and everyone I knew vanishing in a second in temperatures hotter than the centre of the sun.

Now, as far as I know, nobody has ever put up the U.S.'s nuclear missiles on the Internet. I mean, it's not something I've heard about.

The present basic philosophy is nuclear deterrence.

The chief task was to stop the arms race before it brought utter disaster. However, after the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, any rationale for having nuclear weapons disappeared.

There is only one thing worse than one nation having the atomic bomb -- that's two nations having it.

There are two groups of people in the world, the Anglo Saxons and the Soviets who have been stockpiling nuclear weapons. France will not accept a position of permanent and massive inferiority.

I say in all sincerity that the nuclear arms race has no military purpose. Wars cannot be fought with nuclear weapons; their existence only adds to our perils because of the illusions which they have generated.

You probably don't need more weapons than what's required to destroy every city on earth. There's only 2,300 cities. So, the United States, by that criteria, only needs 2,300 nuclear weapons - well, we've got more than 25,000!

Nuclear proliferation has never entirely been brought under control, and the arsenals of nuclear powers contain bombs far more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It seems that the most important thing about Reagan was his anti-Communism and his reputation as a hawk who saw the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire.'

The point is, once they have a missile that can hit the United States, we are now back in the kind of game we used to worry about with the Soviet Union, only the Soviet Union was more mature about this whole thing than I think the North Koreans will be.

We are told that the possession of nuclear weapons - in some cases even the testing of these weapons - is essential for national security. But this argument can be made by other countries as well.

The only use for an atomic bomb is to keep somebody else from using one.

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

The days are gone forever when our enemies could blackmail us with nuclear bombs.

I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare.