NO-NUKES QUOTES

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* Except for fools and madmen, everyone knows that nuclear war would he an unprecedented human catastrophe.
-- Carl Sagan

It is now almost 40 years since the invention of nuclear weapons. We have not yet experienced a global thermonuclear war -- although on more than one occasion we have come tremulously close. I do not think our luck can hold forever. Men and machines are fallible, as recent events remind us. Fools and madmen do exist, and sometimes rise to power. Concentrating always on the near future, we have ignored the long-term consequences of our actions. We have placed our civilization and our species in jeopardy. Fortunately, it is not yet too late. We can safeguard the planetary civilization and the human family if we so choose. There is no more important or more urgent issue.
-- Carl Sagan

* The use of a mere dozen nuclear weapons ... would be a human catastrophe without parallel. ... Because so few weapons can kill so many people, even far-reaching disarmament proposals would leave us implicated in plans for unprecedented slaughter of innocent people. The sole measure that can free us from this burden is abolition.
-- Jonathan Schell

[A] new generation, innocent of the divisions of the Cold War, this coming-of-age. ... If its members do not feel the urgency to escape the nuclear danger that some of its parents felt, neither has it developed the deep attachment to nuclear arms also often found among their parents, including most of the governing class. ... The call for abolition should therefore be, among other things, a call from an older generation to younger one.
-- Jonathan Schell

Of course, some will say the goal [of abolition] is a utopian dream of human perfection. We needn't worry. There will be more than enough sins left for everyone to commit after we have taken nuclear bombs away from ourselves.
-- Jonathan Schell

* We are the generation that brought the bomb in. We have got to be the generation that should take it out.
-- Martin Sheen

The last major childhood disease remains and it's the worst of them all: nuclear war.
-- Beverly Sills

 

Dear Mr. Andropov,

My name is Samantha Smith. I am ten years old. Congratulations on your new job. I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war. Are you going to vote to have a war or not? If you aren't please tell me how you are going to help to not have a war. This question you do not have to answer, but I would like to know why you want to conquer the world or at least our country. God made the world for us to live together in peace and not to fight.

Sincerely,

Samantha Smith

* Peace is the one condition of survival in this nuclear age.
-- Adlai Stevenson


* here seems now no reasonable justification for continuing any civil plutonium program.
-- Jinzaburo Takagi

My recent activities have been concentrated on criticism on and actions against Japan's and worldwide plutonium programs, since it is, as I believe, one of the greatest threats to the world...
-- Jinzaburo Takagi

 

"Now we have something that could really extinguish life on our planet. Mankind has not found itself in a similar situation since the end of the palaeolithic age…. In fact, the threat to mankind's survival has been much greater since 1945 than it was during the first million years of history."
-- Arnold Toynbee

“As long as the two nuclear superpowers maintain arsenals in the tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, there is no way they can with any consistency urge that other nations not be allowed to acquire theses weapons.”
-- Admiral Stansfield Turner, USN (ret). and CIA director (1977-81)

"I have sacrificed my freedom and risked my life in order to expose the danger of nuclear weapons which threatens this whole region. I acted on behalf of all citizens and all of humanity."
-- Mordechai Vanunu

"More and more states are realizing the deficit in possessing nuclear weapons and that nuclear weapons do not promote economic development in most of the undeveloped states. These countries are ready to back and support any initiative that will bring the end of nuclear weapons in the entire world. They know that the abolition of nuclear weapons in Europe, the US and the entire world will only bring help and encouragement to global economic activities, including globalization. So anti-nuclear activists should work in this new field to use economic reasons and alliances to defeat nuclear weapons. This could be done especially at economic summits like the G-8 and WTO meetings where decisions or declarations could be issued to abolish nuclear weapons. Rather than fighting the WTO like anarchist environmentalists, we can recreate the WTO and G-8 to begin working toward zero nuclear weapons."
-- Mordechai Vanunu

 

We do not believe that a nuclear war should be fought and we do not believe that a nuclear war can be won.
-- Atal Bihari Vajpayee

The main reason we are held hostage by the most destructive technology on earth is simple: the complete lack of international resolve to ban nuclear weapons and banish them from the arsenals of the world.
-- Christopher Weeramantry

But elimination will only happen if all countries — nuclear and non-nuclear states — genuinely work towards this result. Nuclear states must abolish their arsenals, as was indicated by the unanimous opinion of the international Court of Justice, the highest international tribunal. The five nuclear states seem to expect others to refrain from obtaining bombs while at the same time maintaining their own caches of deadly weapons.
-- Christopher Weeramantry

* The creation of a nuclear weapons convention is not only achievable, it is imperative if civilisation is to survive.
-- Christopher Weeramantry

* Mankind needs peace more than ever, for our entire planet, threatened by nuclear war, is in danger of total destruction. A destruction only man can provoke, only man can prevent.
-- Elie Wiesel

* We believe in taking down the barriers, but we also believe in the most energetic reconciliation among peoples by getting them to know each other, talk each other's languages, understand each other's fears and beliefs, getting to know each other physically, philosophically, and spiritually. It is much harder to kill your near neighbor than the thousands of unknown and hostile aliens at the other end of a nuclear missile. We have to create a world in which there are no unknown, hostile aliens at the other end of any missiles.
-- Betty Williams

* ...nuclear threats and nuclear weapons are the last argument of weak, stressed and irresponsible politicians. People must act very quicky to stop the movement to nuclear war.
-- Alla Yaroshinskaya

The world was shaken twice in the last decade: once when the USSR dissolved, and once when terrorists attacked the US on September 11. In the Gorbachev era, we actually lost our way to change the world for the better. We lost some wonderful possibilities to begin a process for deep reductions of the stockpile, and to eliminate nuclear weapons once and for all. Now one of the main obstacles to achieving a nuclear-free world is the new US Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). What can we do? Leaders are still sure that peace is possible because their countries have nuclear weapons. I am sure nuclear threats and nuclear weapons are the last argument of weak, stressed and irresponsible politicians. People must act very quicky to stop the movement to nuclear war. But Russian people do not wish to spend money for new weapons of mass destruction; Russian people wish to build a new peaceful life after years of the Communists? totalitarian regime and many years of transition-period chaos. Russia today wishes to build its civil economy, not military industry. But the US NPR and the US deployment of space-based national missile defense (NMD) will provoke Russia to build new nuclear armaments. Combined with NATO expansion (to the Russian border), these US initiatives will break down the whole world order, and every nation will pay their own political and economic price for that nuclear apartheid.
-- Alla Yaroshinskaya

A convention on the comprehensive ban of nuclear weapons should be negotiated. Since biological and chemical weapons have been prohibited, there is no reason why nuclear weapons, which are more destructive, should not be comprehensively banned and thoroughly destroyed. All it takes to reach this objective is strong political will.
-- Jiang Zemin

No-Nukes Quotes

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Hiroshima Day - August 6

 

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