Karl Donitz Quotes

Nuclear war is such an emotional subject that many people see the weapons themselves as the common enemy of humanity.

It's a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.

Nuclear weapons are what make us a great power.

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.

A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.

I have a little hope that the nuclear holocaust doesn't happen.

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

I have to bring to your notice a terrifying reality: with the development of nuclear weapons Man has acquired, for the first time in history, the technical means to destroy the whole of civilization in a single act.

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

Although September 11 was horrible, it didn't threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear weapons do.

Nuclear weapons continue to occupy a unique place in global security affairs. No other weapons, in my opinion, anyway, match their potential for prompt and long-term damage and their strategic impact.

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

The consequence of a world full of nuclear powers to me is so incomprehensible in terms of the dangers that that implies.

My feelings of revulsion and foreboding about nuclear weapons had not changed an iota since 1945, and they have never left me. Since I was 14, the overriding objective of my life has been to prevent the occurrence of nuclear war.

Firing off 1,000 or 500 or 2,000 nuclear warheads on a few minutes' consideration has always struck me as an absurd way to go to war.

One nuclear war is going to be the last nuclear - the last war, frankly, if it really gets out of hand. And I just don't think we ought to be prepared to accept that sort of thing.

In 1960 I published a book that attempted to direct attention to the possibility of a thermonuclear war, to ways of reducing the likelihood of such a war, and to methods for coping with the consequences should war occur despite our efforts to avoid it.

The trick in nuclear strategy is to maintain stability by balancing potentials and thus to discourage events from converting the hypothetical to the actual.

It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives.

I'm still bothered by the threat of nuclear war.

If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.

I can't understand why anyone would want nuclear warheads. If you shoot them off, it's not like you can take over that country-all you do is kill millions of people.

My guess is that nuclear weapons will be used sometime in the next hundred years, but that their use is much more likely to be small and limited than widespread and unconstrained.

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

I still believe that any country understands that if they use nuclear weapons, they will be wiped out of existence. They could be irrational in many ways, but I don't think they're irrational to the point that they're ready to annihilate their own country.