Nuclear Bomb Quotes

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”
― J. Robert Oppenheimer

“It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry for a thousand years.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth... How far from here was 34th street?... All those buildings, all smashed — and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless.

But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“It's called the Infinity Effect.”
― Edward M. Wolfe, In the End

“Can there be any question that the human is the least harmonious beast in the forest and the creature most toxic to the nest?”
― Randy Thornhorn

“Beneath the violet pillar, in the vacuum before the roar of the cloud, there came a soft sound that might have been heard by those who listened closely: the gentle sigh of an idea unbound.”
― Lydia Millet, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

“Most folks don't have but a few days to a week's worth of food in their houses at any given time. When they run out, they'll have to forage. Only the fools will forage in town. The smart ones will look on the outskirts.”
― Edward M. Wolfe, Hell on Ice

“I dispute the point that nuclear energy is 'clean' and 'cost-effective'. As I recall, when we first harnessed nuclear power it was to drop an atom bomb on a civilian population, not to save the environment. However, you must admit, the victors are never tried for war crimes.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly,

“The most striking impression was that of an overwhelming bright light. I had seen under similar conditions the explosion of a large amount—100 tons—of normal explosives in the April test, and I was flabbergasted by the new spectacle. We saw the whole sky flash with unbelievable brightness in spite of the very dark glasses we wore. Our eyes were accommodated to darkness, and thus even if the sudden light had been only normal daylight it would have appeared to us much brighter than usual, but we know from measurements that the flash of the bomb was many times brighter than the sun. In a fraction of a second, at our distance, one received enough light to produce a sunburn. I was near Fermi at the time of the explosion, but I do not remember what we said, if anything. I believe that for a moment I thought the explosion might set fire to the atmosphere and thus finish the earth, even though I knew that this was not possible.”
― Emilio Segrè, Enrico Fermi, Physicist

“Japan knows the horror of war and has suffered as no other nation under the cloud of nuclear disaster. Certainly Japan can stand strong for a world of peace.”
― Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project

“... the blast signatures of a detonated supernova and that of a nuclear bomb are identical.”
― Eric Chaisson, Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos

“Is the music broke, Mommy?”
― Edward M. Wolfe, Hell on Ice

“I looked for it [heavy hydrogen, deuterium] because I thought it should exist. I didn't know it would have industrial applications or be the basic for the most powerful weapon ever known [the nuclear bomb] ... I thought maybe my discovery might have the practical value of, say, neon in neon signs.

[He was awarded the 1931 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering deuterium.]”
― Harold Urey

“But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet there'll be a reckoning. Who knows?”
― Harry S. Truman

“Nuclear weapons free world is not a dream but a necessity for human survival. We need stop waiting for things to happen. We need to go ahead and make things happen.”
― Amit Ray, Nuclear Weapons Free World - Peace on the Earth

“O where will you go when the blinding flash
Scatters the seed of a million suns?
And what will you do in the rain of ash?

I'll draw the blinds and pull down the sash,
And hide from the sight of so many noons.
But how will it be when the blinding flash

Disturbs your body's close-knit mesh
Bringing to light your lovely bones?
What will you wear in the rain of ash?

I will go bare without my flesh,
My vertebrae will click like stones.
Ah. But where will you dance when the blinding flash

Settles the city in a holy hush?
I will dance alone among the ruins.
Ah. And what will you say to the rain of ash?

I will be charming. My subtle speech
Will weave close turns and counter-turns-
No. What will you say to the rain of ash?
Nothing, after the blinding flash

- Terminal Colloquy”
― Charles Martin, Villanelles

“El Pelos, cuando le preguntaron en clase de Física por las tres reglas de conducta en caso de detonación nuclear, contestó:
- Primero: mirar, porque un espectáculo así sólo se ve una vez en la vida. Segundo: tumbarme y reptar hasta el cementerio más próximo, y tercero y principal: hacerlo despacio, para que no cunda el pánico.
Le cascaron un cuatro, pero no le impusieron una contribución al debate.”
― Thomas Brussig, Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee

“Whoever is planning a nuclear war or seriously thinking about using nuclear weapons must directly be taken to a mental hospital! Mad people are mentally sick and they only need a medical treatment! Every nation has the responsibility to weed their deranged politicians out from their governments!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“No power should be taken for granted and used recklessly, even a knife is super lethal in the hands of an innocent toddler. That's why new parents childproof the home before childbirth, how do we peopleproof a planet so they don't hurt each other!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World

“The USA government states that the New Mexico Trinity nuclear bomb site is still highly radioactive and 'harmless'. It is interesting to note in the era of Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) that it is USA government policy that radio frequency (RF) and electricity are also 'harmless'.”
― Steven Magee

“The use of the blockade against Germany to starve large numbers of people to death broke through the moral barrier against the mass killing of civilians. It was the precedent for the 'conventional' bombing of civilians in the Second World War and then for the use of the atomic bomb.”
― Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century

“After the instrumentation was reset, Fermi told Weil to remove the rod another six inches. The pile was still subcritical. The intensity was increasing slowly - when suddenly there was a very loud crash! The safety rod, ZIP, had been automatically released. Its relay had been activated by an ionization chamber because the intensity had exceeded the arbitrary level at which it had been set. It was 11:30 a.m., and Fermi said, "I'm hungry. Let's go to lunch.”
― Albert Wattenberg

“When the rods were pushed back in and the clicking had died down, we suddenly experiences a let-down feeling, for all of us understood the language of the counter. Even though we had anticipated the success of the experiment, its accomplishment had a deep impact on us. For some time we had known that we were about to unlock a giant; still we could not escape an eerie feeling when we had actually done it. We felt as, I presume, everyone feels who has done something that he knowns will have very far-reaching consequences which he cannot foresee.”
― Eugene Wigner

“On August 29th, 1949, when the Soviets conducted their own successful nuclear test, our love for the bomb began to lessen. Perhaps it was foolhardy to think that we alone could hold fire in a fennel stalk. At 5:29 a.m. on that July morning, all we saw was the future when, in fact, we should have remembered how Zeus chained Prometheus to a mountaintop and sent an eagle to eat his liver daily. Night after night, his liver regrew, and day after day, the eagle ate it.”
― B.J. Hollars, Harbingers

“A generation of school-aged children swallowed the lie that we fed them. Their parents swallowed it, too. Not because they believed it, but because hope was more palatable than hopelessness. The truth, of course, was that no "duck and cover" technique could ever deflect a bomb.”
― B.J. Hollars, Harbingers

“Patricia: What they did was stupid and cruel and why I am going to write the president of the United States telling him that if there is any place in this country where nuclear bomb testing should be allowed, it's Corpus Christi, Texas.”
― Terrence McNally, Corpus Christi

“Fundamentally, and in the long run, the problem which is posed by the release of atomic energy is a problem of the ability of the human race to govern itself without war. There is no permanent method of excising atomic energy from our affairs, now that men know how it can be released. Even if some reasonably complete international control of atomic energy should be established, knowledge would persist, and it is hard to see how there could be any major war in which one side or another would not eventually make and use atomic bombs. In this respect the problem of armaments was permanently and drastically altered in 1945.

The world will not soon be free of nuclear weapons, because they sene so many purposes. But as instruments of destruction, they have long been obsolete.”
― Richard Rhodes

“Today, Los Alamos and newspapers like The New Mexican are celebrating August 6. They call it "The 25th Anniversary of the Atomic City", or the birth of "The Atomic Age, but those are just fine words for a Day of Murder-for the single most horrible slaughter in human history.
We cannot celebrate Murder with them. We will celebrate instead the awakening of ourselves and all the Sleeping Giants, rising up everywhere in the world to cry BASTA YA. Let the Manufacturers of Death celebrate the birth of their Atomic Age. We will celebrate the dawn of the People's Age.
Power, at last, to the People!

(1970)”
― Enriqueta Vasquez, Enriqueta Vasquez and the Chicano Movement: Writings from El Grito del Norte (Hispanic Civil Rights (Paperback))