“I am going to tell you something you must not tell to any human being. We have split the atom. The report of the great experiment has just come in. A bomb was let off in some wild spot in New Mexico. It was only a thirteen-pound bomb, but it made a crater half a mile across. People ten miles away lay with their feet towards the bomb; when it went off they rolled over and tried to look at the sky. But even with the darkest glasses it was impossible. It was the middle of the night, but it was as if seven suns had lit the earth; two hundred miles away the light could be seen. The bomb sent up smoke into the stratosphere…It is the Second Coming. The secret has been wrested from nature…Fire was the first discovery; this is the second.”

On the issue of nuclear weapons, in England Their England : Monsters, Maniacs and Moore (1987) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv44V4d_fDQ
Context: It doesn’t even matter if we ever fire these missiles or not. They are having their effect upon us because there is a generation growing up now who cannot see past the final exclamation mark of a mushroom cloud. They are a generation who can see no moral values that do not end in a crackling crater somewhere. I’m not saying that nuclear bombs are at the root of all of it, but I think it is very, very naïve to assume that you can expose the entire population of the world to the threat of being turned to cinders without them starting to act, perhaps, a little oddly.
I believe in some sort of strange fashion that the presence of the atom bomb might almost be forcing a level of human development that wouldn’t have occurred without the presence of the atom bomb. Maybe this degree of terror will force changes in human attitudes that could not have occurred without the presence of these awful, destructive things. Perhaps we are faced with a race between the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse in one line and the 7th Cavalry in the other. We have not got an awful lot of mid ground between Utopia and Apocalypse, and if somehow our children ever see the day in which it is announced that we do not have these weapons any more, and that we can no longer destroy ourselves and that we’ve got to do something else to do with our time than they will have the right to throw up their arms, let down their streamers and let forth a resounding cheer.

Source: Henry Rios series of novels, Rag and Bone (2001), p.174

King's comment to Commander Whitehill on July 4, 1950, which was transcribed in Whitehill's notes. As quoted in The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (1995) by Gar Alperovitz, p. 321

At a Labour Party conference in the UK, quoted in The Independent. "Clinton urges caution over Iraq as Bush is granted war powers" (3 October 2002) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/clinton-urges-caution-over-iraq-as-bush-is-granted-war-powers-607775.html
2000s
Context: A preemptive action today, however well-justified, may come back with unwelcome consequences in the future. And because … I've done this. I've ordered these kinds of actions — I don't care how precise your bombs and your weapons are, when you set them off, innocent people will die.

Source: Summer Lightning (1929)

Source: The Life And Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006), p. 78

A Personal Matter (1964)

Cleopatra
Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

"Talk with the American Correspondent Anna Louise Strong"(August 1946)