Military Balance Quotes

Peace and security both in Europe and in the Pacific still depend on a balance of power.

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.

The lesson of the Cold War is that against nuclear weapons, only nuclear weapons can hold the peace.

I don't believe that China, in my lifetime or maybe my children's lifetime, be equal to the United States militarily speaking, but they are very careful to avoid any engagement in war, they are basically a peaceful country, which gives them another advantage over the United States when we are much more inclined to go to war for various reasons.

The military capabilities of the United States need to be kept comfortably superior to those of present and potential enemies. But they should be measured relatively, against those enemies’ capabilities, and not against the limit of what is technologically possible or based on some vague urge to have more.

There is a common belief that under modern conditions peace cannot be assured except on the basis of an equal balance of armaments...[but] true and lasting peace among nations cannot consist in the possession of an equal supply of armaments but only in mutual trust.

The catch word is equilibrium again, informed the field what are conventional weapons or nuclear weapons of different qualities. You cannot make up for a actual or perceived disequilibrium in the conventional field by having more nuclear weapons.

It has become impossible to give up the enterprise of disarmament without abandoning the whole great adventure of building up a collective peace system.

There's always a balance, I think, any administration has to find in not just the military but in any agency of government.

What are the implications of a China that may be on nuclear parity with the United States?

Nobody should have any illusion about the possibility of gaining military superiority over Russia. We will never allow this to happen.

The Prime Minister, both the other day and today, expressed himself as satisfied that the balance of advantage lay on our side. He laid great stress on the heaviness of the German losses and the lightness of ours. What did the Germans lose? A few thousand men, nothing to them, a score of transports, and part of a Navy which anyhow cannot match ours. What did they gain? They gained Norway, with the strategical advantages which, in their opinion at least, outweigh the whole of their naval losses. They have gained the whole of Scandinavia. What have we lost? To begin with, we have lost most of the Norwegian Army...

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

When distrust exists between governments, when there is a danger of war, they will not be willing to disarm even when logic indicates that disarmament would not affect military security at all.

We are ready to cooperate with other nations to approximate disarmament, but merest prudence forbids that we disarm alone.

Our judgment will always suspect those weapons that can be used with equal prospect of success on both sides.

In order to preserve a balance, while we aren't planning to build a missile defence of our own, as it's very expensive and its efficiency is not quite clear yet, we have to develop offensive strike systems. They [U.S.] should give us all the information about the missile defence, and we will be ready then to provide some information about offensive weapons.

...but highly placed sources within the Kennedy Administration disagreed: "[T]he assumption that the strategic nuclear balance mattered in any way was wrong... As far as I am concerned, it made no difference... If my memory serves me correctly, we had some five thousand strategic nuclear warheads as against t heir three hundred. Can anyone seriously tell me that their having three hundred and forty would have made any difference? The military balance wasn't changed. I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now..."

Look, Iraq and Iran would fight for years and years and years, it went on forever. They were almost identical strengths, and the line would never move, right? Then they would go home and rest for ten years and then they would start fighting and they'd rest, that was it. We knocked out one of those two pegs, and so now Iran is taking over.

As a first step there must be an offer to achieve equality of rights in disarmament by abolishing the weapons forbidden to the Central Powers by the Peace Treaties.

Chinese military spending is carefully monitored by the United States.

The relationship of the two problems is rather the reverse. To a great extent disarmament is dependent on guarantees of peace. Security comes first and disarmament second.

Let me be clear: I'm a believer in a robust military, which is essential for backing up diplomacy. But the implication is that we need a balanced tool chest of diplomatic and military tools alike. Instead, we have a billionaire military and a pauper diplomacy. The U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service - and that's preposterous.

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative.

Thus, if armaments were curtailed without a secure peace and all countries disarmed proportionately, military security would have been in no way affected.