QUOTES
"It
is my profound conviction that nuclear weapons did not, and will not, of themselves
prevent major war. To the contrary, I am persuaded that the presence of these
hideous devices unnecessarily prolonged and intensified the Cold War. In today's
security environment, threats of their employment have been fully exposed as neither
credible nor of any military utility."
If
we truly cling to the values that underlie our political system, if we truly believe
in the dignity of the individual, and if we cherish freedom and the capacity to
realize our potential as human beings on this planet, then we are absolutely obligated
to pursue relentlessly our capacity to live together in harmony and according
to the dictates of respect for that dignity, for that sanctity of life. It matters
not that we continuously fall short of the mark. What matters is that we continue
to strive.
“It
is a measure of arrogance to assert that a nuclear weapons-free world is impossible
when 95% of the nations of the world are already nuclear-free. I think that the
vast majority of people on the face of this earth will endorse the proposition
that nuclear weapons have no place among us. There is no security in nuclear weapons.
It is a fool’s game.”
Nuclear
weapons play on our deepest fears and pander to our darkest instincts. They corrode
our sense of humanity, numb our capacity for moral outrage, and make thinkable
the unimaginable. They prey on democracies and totalitarian societies alike, shrinking
the norms of civilized behavior and dimming the prospects for escaping the savagery
so powerfully imprinted on our genetic code.
People
who say to me that the elimination of nuclear weapons is utopian have somehow
managed to completely ignore the fact that the end of the Cold War was a far more
utopian prospect only ten years ago than eliminating nuclear weapons is now.
A
world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear
weaopns…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat….
Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’
For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live
under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most
murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid
waste.
There
are still thousands of warheads loaded on operational systems and standing on
high states of alert on virtually hair-trigger posture. And you have to ask yourself:
Why is that? Who is the enemy? What is the threat?
