Ronald Reagan Quotes

I visited the Chinese side last year. The Chinese are in a constant state of military readiness. They have all their nuclear weapons in the area, presumably trained on targets across the border.

If the race of nuclear armaments is allowed to develop, the only apparent way in which our country could be protected from the paralyzing effects of a sudden attack is by dispersal of industries which are essential for our war effort and dispersal of the population of our major metropolitan cities.

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

Nuclear weapons are the greatest national security risk to the United States, and they are the most important weapons in our arsenal.

You've got the North Koreans building weapons; you got the Iranians building weapons. You've got - the Pakistanis already have at least 100 nuclear weapons. Do you think there's any serious effort in this country to come to grips with that?

It is not unimaginable to have military options to respond to North Korean nuclear capability. What's unimaginable to me is allowing a capability that would allow a nuclear weapon to land in Denver, Colorado. That's unimaginable to me. So my job will be to develop military options to make sure that doesn't happen.

With all of the history of war, and the human race's history unfortunately has been a good deal more war than peace, with nuclear weapons distributed all through the world, and available, and the strong reluctance of any people to accept defeat, I see the possibility in the 1970's of the President of the United States having to face a world in which 15 or 20 or 25 nations may have these weapons.

Sarah Palin said perhaps the most irresponsible thing I've ever heard any politician say. She said, 'The only thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke.' You think she realizes that nuking Russia might not be good for someone who can see Russia from her house?

We are plunging headlong into a cold war, and we have 2,000 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert.

I actually believe that we need missile defense, because of Iran and North Korea and the potential for them to obtain or to launch nuclear weapons, but I also believe that, when we are only spending a few hundred million dollars on nuclear proliferation, then we're making a mistake.

The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children. We were the first to have this weapon in our possession, and the first to use it. There is a practical certainty that potential enemies will have it in the future and that atomic bombs will sometime be used against us.

The lethal possibility of such atomic action in the future is frightening, and while we are the first to have it in our possession, there is a certainty that it will in the future be developed by potential enemies and that it will probably be used against us.

We must not allow Iran to manipulate the economy of the world because they have a nuclear weapon…. Iran is a clear and present danger to the state of Israel, the United States, and the rest of the world.

Israel’s development of nuclear capability would be a cause for war, no matter how suicidal it would be for us.

We can not allow a terrorist state to become a nuclear power.

Instead of planning to deter would-be [nuclear] proliferators, U. S. policy makers have developed a preference for preventative war, They now seem to feel that deterrence is too weak to deal with radical regimes, forgetting that the precise purpose of deterrence is to counter dangerous enemies, not cautious ones.

Maintaining a U. S. Nuclear Arsenal presents only one benefit today: deterring the use of nuclear weapons by others. Thus, there is simply no reason for nuclear weapons to play a central role in U. S. Defense Policy any longer.

It is hard to seriously suggest that from a national-security standpoint, 1,000 warheads are not enough to protect the United States. Such an arsenal is literally overkill, sufficient to destroy every major population center on the planet outside of our borders.

As someone who took an oath to defend this country, I refuse to sit idle until the unimaginable occurs: Iran cheats or simply runs out the clock, and the largest state sponsor of terrorism threatens the United States and its allies with a nuclear weapon.

Russia has had very aggressive military exercises. They've practiced mock nuclear attacks on Warsaw. Russian bombers practiced attacking strategic military targets in Sweden. The military aggression gets everybody nervous.

Preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon is one of the most important objectives of our national security policy, and I strongly advocated for and supported the economic sanctions that brought Iran to the negotiating table.

America is not really a strong enough state for us to regard it as an enemy of Russia.

The biggest threat that we face right now is not a nuclear missile coming over the skies. It's in a suitcase. This is why the issue of nuclear proliferation is so important. It is the - the biggest threat to the United States is a terrorist getting their hands on nuclear weapons.

The world should contemplate a nuclear weapons-armed Iran with the greatest of concern.

Once Iran gets nuclear weapons, they may believe that they are no longer vulnerable to either.