Buzz Aldrin Quotes

NASA was invented as a response to Cold War steps. There are those who presumed that we went to the moon because we're explorers. We went to the moon because we were at war with the Soviet Union. And so when it became clear that they (Soviet Union) were not going to the moon, we're done with the moon.

People nowadays don't know about the Cold War and the U.S.'s old rivalry with the U.S.S.R.

We didn't win the Cold War, we were just a big bank that bankrupted a smaller bank because we had an arms race that wiped the Russians out.

More often than not, Americans and Westerners overestimated the power and capability of the Soviet Union.

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.

A total nuclear freeze is counterproductive - especially now, when technology is rapidly changing and the Soviets have some important strategic advantages.

When I was in the White House, I was confronted with the challenge of the Cold War. Both the Soviet Union and I had 30,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy the entire earth and I had to maintain the peace.

Where were they when the Russians went down?

There used to be this country called the Soviet Union; it's not there anymore. Our technology was better than theirs.

You yourself said to Khrushchev?, "You may be ahead of us in rocket thrust, but we're ahead of you in color television. I think that color television is not as important as rocket thrust.

The Cold War is Over

Lunokhod

Lunik

The Russians had got a real head-start into space; America was playing catch-up.

Apollo 11 will probably go down in history as one of the major responses of two nations facing each other with threatening technologies - sometimes called mutually assured destruction. It was also the America's response to the apparent superiority of the Russians in putting objects into space before USA could.

"World War III, was the Cold War".

The United States now sleeps under a Soviet moon

Here's my strategy on the Cold War: we win, they lose.

The Cold War was a war, and we won it.

You know, we did a good job in containing the Soviet Union, but we made a lot of mistakes, we supported really nasty guys, we did some things that we are not particularly proud of, from Latin America to Southeast Asia, but we did have a kind of overarching framework about what we were trying to do that did lead to the defeat of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism. That was our objective. We achieved it.

We had a world dominated by the Soviet Union on the one hand, and the Americans on the other hand. They called it the Cold War. But it wasn't cold. I am someone who comes from the third world. In the third world, the cold war wasn't cold. Millions had been killed. It was a proxy war.

Our attainments [in space] are a major element in the competition between the Soviet system and our own . . . . in this sense, [they] are part of the battle along the fluid front of the cold war.

Growing up during the Cold War period, I always found that, although we always thought that the world would end in some sort of nuclear holocaust, at some point, everybody was pretty hopeful.

Nixon tried to wrap the Soviet Union into a web of agreements that would constrain its behavior. What happened is that many people lost faith in that approach, not the least because of how the Soviets handled it.

President Roosevelt and President Truman and President Eisenhower had the same experience, they all made the effort to get along with the Russians. But every time, finally it failed. And the reason it failed was because the Communists are determined to destroy us, and regardless of what hand of friendship we may hold out or what arguments we may put up, the only thing that will make that decisive difference is the strength of the United States.