Arms Reduction Quotes

We have never practiced the policy of competitive armaments.

Barack Obama has injected fresh momentum into efforts - stalled for a decade - to bring about nuclear disarmament.

During the Cold War, America undertook serious military cuts only once: after the election of Richard Nixon, during the Vietnam War. The result: Vietnam fell to the Communists, the Russians moved into Afghanistan, and American influence around the globe waned dramatically.

America must get off a permanent war footing.

Definitely, I am not advocating an arms race.

Today I can declare my hope and declare it from the bottom of my heart that we will eventually see the time when that number of nuclear weapons is down to zero and the world is a much better place.

If the world is disarmed, and remains disarmed, there will be no more world wars.

Disarmament offers the only effective way to bring militarism under control.

Among pacifists it was above all the English who always insisted on the importance of disarmament. They said that the man in the street would not understand the kind of pacifism that neglected to demand immediate restriction of armaments.

You can’t go making new nuclear weapons and talk to the rest of the world about giving them up.

Moral disarmament is to safeguard the future; material disarmament is to save for the present, that there may be a future to safeguard.

Since the end of the Cold War two main nuclear powers have begun to make big reductions in their nuclear arsenals. Each of them is dismantling about 2,000 nuclear warheads a year.

In the spirit of commitment to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, we will strive to achieve real progress in disarmament and arms control.

We know enough about broken negotiations, secret preparations and the [Soviet] advantage gained from a long test series never to offer again an uninspected moratorium.

Peace is not just a matter of the absence of violence. It is also necessarily about removing the potential for violence – namely the uncontrolled possession of weapons. It would be naive to believe that anybody can be at ease when it is known that a potential opponent is stockpiling arms, even if the latter swears on whatever he or she believes, that the weapons will not be used. Weapons are meant to be used and pretexts will eventually be found for their use at some point or the other.

We shall continue, in this era of negotiation, to work for the limitation of nuclear arms and to reduce the danger of confrontation between the great powers.

The popular, and one may say naive, idea is that peace can be secured by disarmament and that disarmament must therefore precede the attainment of absolute security and lasting peace.

The present level of armaments could be taken as the starting point. It could be stipulated in an international treaty that these armaments should be simultaneously and uniformly reduced by a certain proportion in all countries.

Any arms agreement should be verifiable.

We demand a strict and sweeping reduction of armaments by land and sea so that there shall be no competitive military program or naval building. Until agreements to this end have been made we advocate an army and navy adequate for our national safety.

We in no way are naive to think that just because Russia and the United States agree to reduce their arsenals, that everyone else will fall in line.

Limitation of armaments in itself is economically and financially important quite apart from security.

We should, I believe, announce in no uncertain terms that we are against disarmament.

Not acting to rid the world of weapons of mass destruction is neither politically nor morally acceptable.

We ought to disarm Germany completely.