Robert Oppenheimer et al., Report of the General Advisory Committee, 1949
“Three technical aspects of thermonuclear weapons have made thermonuclear war a peril to the very existence of humanity. These aspects are: the enormous destructive power of a thermonuclear explosion, the relative cheapness of rocket-thermonuclear weapons, and the practical impossibility of an effective defense against a massive rocket-nuclear attack.”
Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, The Threat of Nuclear War
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Andrei Sakharov 57
Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist 1921–1989Related quotes
Foreword to The Collected Stories (June 2000)
2000s and attributed from posthumous publications
Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, The Threat of Nuclear War
as quoted by D. D. Ryutov in [G.I. Budker: reflections & remembrances, by Boris N. Breizman, Springer, 1993, http://books.google.com/books?id=e0bxFrmNtykC&printsec=frontcover#PRA1-PA278,M1, 1-56396-070-2, 278]
1961, Berlin Crisis speech
Modernity is a blast.
"A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism" https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism/ (2017)
Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), p. 58
Context: Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I. Q. s if possible.
From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful.
Quoted in https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-50265870/mikhail-gorbachev-tells-the-bbc-world-in-colossal-danger Mikhail Gorbachev tells the BBC: World in ‘colossal danger’, BBC World News,(4 November 2019)
2000s