Friedrich Durrenmatt Quotes

I think one country with nuclear weapons is one country too many.

As long as some of us choose to rely on nuclear weapons, we continue to risk that these same weapons will become increasingly attractive to others.

Everybody has to chip in, I think, and see how we can have a functioning system of collective security where we do not continue to face the threat of countries trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction or particularly nuclear weapons.

The misconception that a victory can be worth its price, has in the nuclear age become a total illusion.

In a world which is armed to its teeth with nuclear weapons, every quarrel or difference of opinion may lead to violence of a kind quite different from what is possible today.

I'm not concerned about weapons of mass destruction.

Where is the indignation about the fact that the US and USSR have thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?

We cannot allow the world’s worst leaders to threaten us with the world’s worst weapons.

The goal [of disarmament] is no longer a dream. It is a practical matter of life or death. The risks inherent in disarmament pale in comparison to the risks inherent in an unlimited arms race...

There is no secret; and there is no defense. Within some few years Russia and many smaller countries can have their installations ready to make atom bombs by the hundreds, just like America, Atom bombs are the cheapest means of town-destruction …. Russia has numbers of devoted agents in every country--they can easily be smuggled in and hidden, to destroy everything for miles around at the fixed moment. An immense army of security officers and spies will be needed, continually to inspect every box or case in any house.

I think we have to get rid of nuclear weapons. The idea that somehow by having nuclear weapons you make the world a safer place is essentially insane.

In a nuclear age, each of us is threatened when peace is not secured everywhere.

We don't need another nuclear arms race to proceed a pace and then to encourage other countries to become very, to develop these kinds of capabilities also. This is not what we need.

When the President of Iran talks about removing Israel from the face of the Earth and is building nuclear bombs with a range of 3000km, you have to be worried.

If we have isolated individuals able to inflict enormous harm, imagine what a single lunatic can do with a nuclear weapon. I think the whole base of civil society is at risk.

The politicians in this world... have at their command weapons of mass destruction far more complex than their own thinking processes.

The world has placed chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in a separate category because their use constitutes a crime against all humanity.

The rapid dissemination of technology and information offers entirely new ways of production, but it can also bring the spectre of more states developing weapons of mass destruction.

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 think the issue of North Korea is one where the international community as a whole has to work to resolve the crisis.

It is not viable for one country to demand a right to increase and upgrade its nuclear weapons capabilities while asking others to eliminate theirs.

The weapons were conceived and created by a small band of physicists and chemists; they remain a cataclysmic threat to the whole of human society and the natural environment.

Nuclear deterrence doesn't work outside of the Russian - U.S. context; Saddam Hussein showed that.

Indeed, the whole human species is endangered, by nuclear weapons or by other means of wholesale destruction which further advances in science are likely to produce.

We must abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue weapons of mass destruction, yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security - and indeed to continue to refine their capacities and postulate plans for their use.