Nobel lecture (2005)
Context: A good start would be if the nuclear-weapon states reduced the strategic role given to these weapons. More than 15 years after the end of the Cold War, it is incomprehensible to many that the major nuclear-weapon states operate with their arsenals on hair-trigger alert — such that, in the case of a possible launch of a nuclear attack, their leaders could have only 30 minutes to decide whether to retaliate, risking the devastation of entire nations in a matter of minutes.
“Could anyone in his right mind speak seriously of any limited nuclear war? It should be quite clear that the aggressor's actions will instantly and inevitably trigger a devastating counterstroke by the other side. None but completely irresponsible people could maintain that a nuclear war may be made to follow rules adopted beforehand, with nuclear missiles exploding in a "gentlemanly manner" over strictly designated targets and sparing the population.”
As quoted in Pravda (25 July 1981); also in Russian Roulette : The Superpower Game (1982) by Arthur M. Cox, p. 10.
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Dmitriy Ustinov 4
Soviet military commander and politician 1908–1984Related quotes
“A war today or tomorrow, if it led to nuclear war, would not be like any war in history.”
1963, Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty speech
Context: A war today or tomorrow, if it led to nuclear war, would not be like any war in history. A full-scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes, with the weapons now in existence, could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors, as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, "the survivors would envy the dead." For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot even conceive of its horrors. So let us try to turn the world away from war. Let us make the most of this opportunity, and every opportunity, to reduce tension, to slow down the perilous nuclear arms race, and to check the world's slide toward final annihilation.
A Prescription for Hope (1985)
Context: As no national interest would justify inflicting genocide on the victim and suicide on the aggressor, a prevalent misconception is that nuclear war will never be fought. But the realities of our age compel an opposite assessment. In no previous epoch were adversaries so continuously and totally mobilized for instant war. It is a statistical certainly that hair-trigger readiness cannot endure as a permanent condition. Furthermore, the unrelenting growth in nuclear arsenals, the increasing accuracy of missiles, and the continuing computerization of response systems all promote instabilities which court nuclear war by technical malfunction; by miscalculation, human aberration or criminal act.
“It is madness for any country to build its policy with an eye to nuclear war.”
As quoted in Indefensible Weapons : The Political and Psychological Case Against Nuclearism (1992) by Robert Jay Lifton and Richard A. Falk, p. 224
Prime Minister's Questions (15 June 1982) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104968
First term as Prime Minister
2010s, 2015, Address to the United States Congress (March 2015)
p 29 of Towards the Nuclear Holocaust (1980) Menard Press, London.
As quoted in Soviet Strategy and the New Military Thinking (1992) by Derek Leebaert and Timothy Dickinson, p. 68