#weapons

National Missile Defense is of a nature to retrigger a proliferation of weapons, notably nuclear missiles. Everything that goes in the direction of proliferation is a bad direction. ↗

— Jacques Chirac

#defense #direction #everything #goes #missile

There's no way out," he announced with satisfaction, "and no amount of wishful dreaming will produce one. The demon won't go back in its bottle, the face-off is for ever, the embrace gets tighter and the toys cleverer with every generation, and there's no such thing for either side as enough security. Not for the main players, not for the nasty little newcomers who each year run themselves up a suitcase bomb and join the club. We get tired of believing that, because we're human. We may even con ourselves into believing the threat has gone away. It never will. Never, never, never." "So, who'll save us then, Walt?" Barley asked. "You and Nedsky?" "Vanity, if anything will, which I doubt," Walter retorted. "No leader wants to go down in history as the ass who destroyed his country in an afternoon. And funk, I suppose. Most of our gallant politicians do have a narcissistic objection to suicide, thank God. ↗

— John le Carré

#nuclear-weapons #russia #spy #war #dreams

India can live without nuclear weapons. That's our dream, and it should be the dream of the U.S. also. ↗

— Abdul Kalam

#dream #india #live #nuclear #nuclear weapons

If we are really anxious not to have nuclear weapons in Iran, the first thing is to call an international conference on abolishing all nuclear weapons, including Israeli nuclear weapons. ↗

— Bruce Kent

#call #conference #first #first thing #including

The French had an obvious financial interest in Iraq. That's been documented. They were involved financially in Iraq and in some cases, I think with weapons of mass destruction. ↗

— Curt Weldon

#cases #destruction #documented #financial #financially

The idea that information can be stored in a changing world without an overwhelming depreciation of its value is false. It is scarcely less false than the more plausible claim that after a war we may take our existing weapons, fill their barrels with information. ↗

— Norbert Wiener

#barrels #changing #claim #depreciation #existing

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

— Herman Kahn

#common enemy #emotional #enemy #humanity #many

Nuclear weapons are intrinsically neither moral nor immoral, though they are more prone to immoral use than most weapons. ↗

— Herman Kahn

#intrinsically #moral #more #most #neither

The widespread diffusion of nuclear weapons would make many nations able, and in some cases also create the pressure, to aggravate an on-going crisis, or even touch off a war between two other powers for purposes of their own. ↗

— Herman Kahn

#aggravate #also #between #cases #create

To the extent that these advanced weapons or their components are treated as articles of commerce, perhaps for peaceful uses as in the Plowshare program, their cost would be well within the resources available to many large private organizations. ↗

— Herman Kahn

#articles #available #commerce #components #cost