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1500 are too many...1 is too many.
"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."
Bhagavad Gita, the sacred Hindu epic recalled by J. Robert Oppenheimer while viewing the first nuclear explosion in Alamagordo, New Mexico, July 16, 1945
"And just at that instant there rose as if from the bowels of the earth a light not of this world, the light of many suns in one. It was a sunrise such as the world had never seen, a great green supersun climbing in a fraction of a second to a height of more than eight thousand feet, rising ever higher until it touched the clouds, lighting up earth and sky all around with dazzling luminosity. Up it went, a great wall of fire about a mile in diameter, changing colors as it kept shooting upward, from deep purple to orange, expanding, growing bigger, rising as it was expanding, an elemental force freed from its bonds after being chained for billions of years."
William L. Laurence, New York Times, August 26, 1945, Account of the Trinity Test on 16 July 1945
"We can sum it up in one sentence: Our technical civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests.......Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only goal worth struggling for. This is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments -- a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason."
Albert Camus, Combat, 8 August 1945
"We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead. That is our business. Behind the black portent of the new atomic age lies a hope which, seized upon with faith, can work out a salvation. If we fail, then we have damned every man to be the slave of fear. Let us not deceive ourselves: we must elect world peace or world destruction."
Bernard Baruch, Speech to UN Atomic Energy Commission, 14 August 1946
"There are plenty of problems in the world, many of them interconnected. But there is no problem which compares with this central, universal problem of saving the human race from extinction."
John Foster Dulles, Speech to UN General Assembly, 1952
"The survivors would envy the dead."
Nikita Khrushchev, Pravda, 20 July 1963
"A full scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes...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 conceive of its horrors."
President John F. Kennedy, address to the nation on the Limited Test Ban Treaty, 26 July 1963
"In an all-out nuclear war, more destructive power than in all of World War II would be unleashed every second during the long afternoon it would take for all the missiles and bombs to fall. A World War II every second--more people killed in the first few hours than all the wars of history put together. The survivors, if any, would live in despair amid the poisoned ruins of a civilization that had committed suicide."
President Jimmy Carter, Farewell Address to the American People, 14 January 1981
"From now on it is only through a conscious choice and through a deliberate policy that humanity can survive."
Pope John Paul II, Address in Hiroshima, 1981
"it is not morally acceptable to intend to kill the innocent as part of a strategy of deterring nuclear war."
U.S. Catholic Bishops' Pastoral Letter on War and Peace, 1983
"It is simply not acceptable that our future lies in the hands of only five nuclear weapon states. It belongs to all nations, to all peoples, to present as well as future generations."
Joint declaration of the members of the Five Continent Peace Initiative, 22 May 1984
"Almost imperceptibly, over the last four decades, every nation and every human being has lost ultimate control over their own life and death. For all of us, it is a small group of men and machines in cities far away who can decide our fate. Every day we remain alive is a day of grace as if mankind as a whole were a prisoner in the death cell awaiting the uncertain moment of execution. And like every innocent defendant, we refuse to believe that the execution will ever take place."
Members of the Five Continent Peace Initiative, Argentina, India, Mexico, Tanzania, Sweden, and Greece, The "Delhi Declaration" 28 January 1985
"Humankind continues to face the threat of nuclear annihilation. Today's hesitation leads to tomorrow's destruction. The fates of all of us are bound together here on earth. There can be no survival for any without peaceful coexistence for all."
Takeshi Araki, Mayor of Hiroshima, 6 August 1985
"Nuclear weapons are clearly inhumane weapons in obvious violation of international law. So long as such weapons exist, it is inevitable that the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be repeated -- somewhere, sometime -- in an unforgivable affront to humanity itself."
Takashi Hiraoka, Mayor of Hiroshima, Hiroshima Peace Declaration, 6 August 1995
"The human race cannot coexist with nuclear weapons."
Iccho Itoh, Mayor of Nagasaki, Nagasaki Peace Declaration, 9 August 1995
The Insanity
"It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives."
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, Testimony to House Appropriations Committee, 1961
"Everybody's going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around...Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. It's the dirt that does it."
T.K. Jones, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces, Research and Engineering, LA Times 16 January 1982
"U.S. defense policies ensure our preparedness to respond to and, if necessary, successfully fight either a conventional or nuclear war."
FY 1983 Budget of the United States Government
"the supreme guarantee of the security of the [NATO] Allies is provided by the strategic nuclear forces of the Alliance. ...Alliance nuclear forces continue to play a unique and essential role in the Alliance's strategy of war prevention..."
NATO Communique, 29 November 1995
"Anyone who considers using a weapon of mass destruction against the United States or its allies must first consider the consequences. ...We would not specify in advance what our response would be, but it would be both overwhelming and devastating."
Secretary of Defense William Perry, 18 April 1996
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