Quotes on The Arms Race
Let him who desires peace prepare for war.
Vegetius (4th century AD) Roman military strategist
The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art.
John Foster Dulles (1888-1959) American Republican politician
If this phrase of the “balance of power” is to be always an argument for war, the pretence for war will never be wanting, and peace can never be secure.
John Bright (1811-1889) English Radical politician
Security is a game in which the final goal is never quite in reach.
Laurence Martin (b. 1928) British author, academic
Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands.
H. G. Wells (1866-1946) British author, social thinker written in 1914
The world knows, and above all the Soviets know, that no American President will sacrifice New York or Washington to save Berlin.
Richard Nixon (b. 1913) American president
One cannot fashion a credible deterrent out of an incredible fashion.
Robert McNamara (b. 1916) American industrialist, politician, financier
Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) American president
The emotional security and political stability in this country entitle us to be a nuclear power.
Sir Ronald Mason (b. 1930) Chief Scientific Adviser, Ministry of Defence, 1983
Nuclear weapons are not in my line; unfortunately I am in their line.
E. M. Forster (1879-1970) British novelist
The superpowers often behave like two heavily-armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.
Henry Kissinger (b. 1923) American adviser on international affairs