Thermonuclear Quotes

“That’s the thing about the collapse of civilization, Blake. It never happens according to plan – there’s no slavering horde of zombies. No actinic flash of thermonuclear war. No Earth-shuddering asteroid. The end comes in unforeseen ways; the stock market collapses, and then the banks, and then there is no food in the supermarkets, or the communications system goes down completely and inevitably, and previously amiable co-workers find themselves wrestling over the last remaining cookie that someone brought in before all the madness began.”
― Mark A. Rayner, The Fridgularity

“Fundamentally, and in the long run, the problem which is posed by the release of atomic energy is a problem of the ability of the human race to govern itself without war. There is no permanent method of excising atomic energy from our affairs, now that men know how it can be released. Even if some reasonably complete international control of atomic energy should be established, knowledge would persist, and it is hard to see how there could be any major war in which one side or another would not eventually make and use atomic bombs. In this respect the problem of armaments was permanently and drastically altered in 1945.

The world will not soon be free of nuclear weapons, because they sene so many purposes. But as instruments of destruction, they have long been obsolete.”
― Richard Rhodes

“What I learned was more than sufficient to impress upon me the horror, the real danger, and the utter insanity of thermonuclear warfare, which threatens everyone on earth. Our reports, and the conferences where we discussed a strategic thermonuclear strike on a potential enemy, transformed the unthinkable and monstrous into a subject for detailed investigation and calculation ... I could not stop thinking about this, and I came to realize that the technical, military, and economic problems are secondary; the fundamental issues are political and ethical. Gradually, subconsciously, I was approaching an irrevocable step—a wide-ranging public statement on war and peace and other global issues.”
― Andrei Sakharov