“I happened to read recently a remark by the American nuclear physicist W. Davidson, who noted that the explosion of one hydrogen bomb releases a greater amount of energy than all the explosions set off by all countries in all wars known in the entire history of mankind. And he, apparently, is right.”

— Nikita Khrushchev

Address to the United Nations, New York City (September 18, 1959), as reported by The New York Times (September 19, 1959), p. 8. The physicist quoted was eventually found to be William Davidon, associate physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, Illinois.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I happened to read recently a remark by the American nuclear physicist W. Davidson, who noted that the explosion of one…" by Nikita Khrushchev?

Nikita Khrushchev 22

First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1894–1971

Related quotes

“It would be interesting to use high temperatures - in the billions, which develop during atomic bomb explosions, for conducting synthetic reactions (for example, the formation of helium from hydrogen), which are the source of energy of stars and which could raise the energy liberated during the explosion of basic matter (uranium, bismuth, lead) even higher.”

Yakov Frenkel (1894–1952) Russian physicist

Quoted in The world of Andrei Sakharov: a Russian physicist's path to freedom (2005) By Gennadiĭ Efimovich Gorelik, Antonina W. Bouis, p. 134.

“Europe today is a powder keg and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal … A single spark will set off an explosion that will consume us all … I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you where … Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off.”

Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) German statesman, Chancellor of Germany

No record of this quotation appears to exist in German.
In The World Crisis, Vol I: 1911-1914 https://books.google.com/books?id=6l6Fgnz8fXIC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA96#v=onepage&q&f=false (originally published in 1923), Winston Churchill asserted that during the July Crisis, German shipping magnate and diplomat Albert Ballin told him that Bismarck had said to him, "that one day the great European War would come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans" a year before his death.
The full quote above appears in "European Diary" by Andrei Navrozov, in Chronicles Vol. 32 (2008) as a comment during the Congress of Berlin in 1878. "European Diary" is a series of excerpts from Navrozov's unpublished (as of 2017) novel in English, Earthly Love: A Day in the Life of a Hypocrite.
Disputed

“What happened?" he demanded. "I heard an explosion!"

"Yeah. That was me. I set the boat alight."

"What?"

"I set fire to the boat."

"But we're on the boat!"

"I know.”

Anthony Horowitz book Skeleton Key

Source: Skeleton Key

“My own feeling was that witnessing the explosion of an atomic bomb, and having to examine all the dead animals, had a profound effect on my father.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

p 12
Achieving The Impossible (2010)

“The greatest danger of bombs is in the explosion of stupidity that they provoke.”

Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright

Le plus grand danger de la bombe est dans l'explosion de bêtise qu'elle provoque.
Pour Jean Grave, Le Journal (19 Feb 1894)

“He got along with everyone and had a very jovial character that helped him play with a striking amount of joy and calmness. He had a great shot and he could accelerate very quickly, … all-around skilled and above all explosive.”

Ferenc Puskás (1927–2006) Hungarian-Spanish association football player

Luis Suarez http://web.archive.org/web/20080220063441/http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/11/17/sports/EU_SPT_SOC_Puskas_Quotes.php

“I told my therapist I was having nightmares about nuclear explosions. He said don't worry, it's not the end of the world.”

Jay London (1966) American comedian

One-liners

“We are supposedly a country at war, but we’re all going about watching American Idol and having not all that different a time than if we weren’t at war. I observe the weird juxtaposition of reading the newspaper and then tuning into American Idol and getting really upset when Constantine gets voted off and then wondering where my head was at. But in a way, that’s also the salvation of the country, our level of optimism.”

Paul Weitz

on making American Dreamz http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/entertainment/movies/14326165.htm
Also phrased as: "I think it was just the weird feeling of, being like a lot of Americans and sort of reading the paper in the morning and worrying about terrorism and whether the administration was handling things in the right way, and then in the evening worrying even more about whether Constantine was going to get kicked off American Idol. It was really just kind of observing myself and, finding this weird disconnect, between the supposedly deadly serious situation of being at war with us going about our daily lives as if nothing is happening."

“Accelerationism links the implosion of decision-space to the explosion of the world – that is, to modernity. It is important therefore to note that the conceptual opposition between implosion and explosion does nothing to impede their real (mechanical) coupling. Thermonuclear weapons provide the most vividly illuminating examples. An H-bomb employs an A-bomb as a trigger. A fission reaction sparks a fusion reaction. The fusion mass is crushed into ignition by a blast process.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

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)

“Look at the history of the (United States). The history of the country is basically what? Get something for nothing, right? Take, kill. They invaded the country, they robbed the land of the American Indians, they killed almost all of them off… That's the history of the United States. A despicable country.”

Bobby Fischer (1943–2008) American chess prodigy, chess player, and chess writer

Radio Interview, September 11 2001 http://www.geocities.jp/bobbby_b/mp3/F_19_1.MP3
2000s

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Nikita Khrushchev 22

Related quotes

Related topics