SCHOLAR ISLAND

"Nothing is gained by exaggerating the possibilities of tomorrow. We need not worry over the consequences of breaking up the atom."

-Floyd W. Parsons (American engineer and editor and U.S. Fuel Administrator during World War I), "A Look Ahead," The Saturday Evening Post ,April 4,1931

O TinyBombOTiny

BombWhatGangof

MadmenMadeThee"

-George Starbuck

Book: "Brotherhood of The Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller" by Gregg Herken

Over $10 trillion has been spent on developing and building nuclear weapons in this century. A little over half of this was spent by the U.S.

"Nuclear detonations are as seductive as they are repulsive: Equal parts beauty and terror, they compel us to contemplate the very fabric of matter. They trace the vast powers of creation and destruction in the universe, and they map frighteningly similar powers of invention and violence with ourselves. The magnitude of their meanings resists easy comprehensions, but I prefer a pathway to understanding that leads through ideas of landscape representation. A thermonuclear detonation operates on exactly the same principles as those that feed the sun and stars, but it is an entirely created landscape, a man-made planet. We can hardly be said to have spawned anything more powerful or fundamental, and we are still struggling to absorb the implications."

Michael Light

100 Suns

"The beginning of the Atomic Age has brought less hope than fear. It is a primitive fear, the fear of the unknown, the fear of forces man can neither channel nor comprehend….it is the fear of irrational death."

Norman Cousins

Modern Man is Obsolete



"The Nuclear Age. All of us sitting in this train. It is moving. Who’s the engineer? Who Planned the Trip? Was it the experts? The Technocrats? Expertocracy-a weird concept, and yet so much a part of our present-day reality."

Otto F. Walter

"But when you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and values."

Oppenheimer

"In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. "How are we to live in an atomic age?" I am tempted to reply: "Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis , an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents."

   In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, drear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors-anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty."

C.S. Lewis

Present Concerns: Essays by C.S. Lewis, "On Living in an Atomic Age"

"Maine Yankee (Wiscasset, Maine,USA) is now officially closed, and is being dismantled. More than 900 tons of radioactive spent fuel, more than at any other decommissioned nuclear power station in America, are still stored there. A federal report posted on the website of the National Council on Radiation Protection estimates that if a tenth of 1% of the spent fuel's radiation were released into the air it would produce lethal doses over 1,000 square miles. The stuff is dangerous for 10,000 years. Much of it is covered only by a metal shed. According to the Department of Energy. it will be removed in 2020, at the earliest. Others say it will not go until 2038.

article: Obey the rules...the Economist, Dec 22,2001

"The resulting explosion spread hot,, extremely radioactive debris from the reactor over more than 2,000 square miles. The result was that 17 million people, including 2.5 million children below the age of 5 years, all suffered some degree of radioactive contamination. Many people near the site of the explosion died of radio-active poisoning and burns soon after the accident."

Stanley Coren

Sleep Thieves

"This is the greatest thing in history!"

President Harry Truman (on receiving news that the nuclear bomb had successfully exploded over Hiroshima)

"how noble, how splendid was that holocaust of August 9, when flames soared up from the cathedral, dispelling the darkness of war and bringing the light of peace!....Eight thousand people together with their priests, burning with pure smoke, entered into eternal life."

-Nagai Takashi  The Bells of Nagasaki

"No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent."

-Charles de Gaulle   New York Times,, may 12,1968

"Is it not strange that we now calmly sit

and wait until the Infernal Fire is lit,

When even the whisper of some pestilence

Into hysterics drives and makes us tense,

On thorns to flee the place or find some way

The foul, contagious plague to keep at bay,

With reason for the safety of our life?

But this atrocious menace now so rife

And so immediate we quite disregard,

In this one case completely off our guard,

As if it is so small and so remote

That 'tis not worth the effort ev'n to note."

Gopi Krishna

"Babies Satisfactorily Born'-U.S. Army code message on the successful

test of the first atomic bomb.

"Revolutionary all right. Human civilization approaching suicide"

On Friday, July l6th

"At 5:30 everything happened at once. Human beings cannot distinguish between millionths of a second, so no one saw the first flash of atomic fire. They did see its dazzling reflection on far hills. All of them went into mild shock--Oppenheimer was clinging to an upright in his bunker--and thirty seconds later they were jarred again as a wind of hurricane force, followed by a deafening force, followed by a deafening roar, swept the desert." "One jubilant physicist shouted, "The sun can't hold a candle to it! " It was literally true: at 5:30 the temperature at Zero had been one hundred million degrees Fahrenheit, three times the temperature in the interior of the sun and ten thousand times the heat of the surface."

Manchester

The Glory and the Dream

"We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon

on the Mount. "

General Omar Bradley

(address on armistice Day) 1948

Discussing the role of the IRS in a nuclear attack the Internal Revenue Service Handbook (1976) says, "During a state of national emergency resulting from enemy attack, the essential functions of the Service will be as follow: (1) assessing, collecting, and recording taxes

"All you have to do is hammer it into the right form and

you' re ready to go. " (description of building an atom) bomb)

William Higinbotham

Physicist AEC

Brookhaven National Laboratory

"Among the young atomic scientists, some looked upon their work as a kind of intellectual exercise of no particular significance and involving obligations; but for others, their researches seemed like a religious experience."

Robert Jungk

Brighter than a Thousand Suns

 The bomb was designed by a man named "Christy". The name of the

exact place of detonation was "Journada del Muerto" (Journey

of Death) and upon hearing of the explosion, Churchill re-

marked, " It' s the second coming. "

"The test was referred to under the code name 'Trinity' . No clear explanation was employed, above all in such a connection. One probability is that it was taken from the name of a " turquoise "mine near Los Alamos, which had been laid under a curse one supposes that it was chosen because at that time the first three atom bombs were approaching completion, and that the code name was derived simply and solely from the existence of that hellish trinity."

Robert Jungk

Brighter than a Thousand Sun

"On May 21, 1946, not quite a year later, Slotin was carrying out an experiment, similar to those he had so often successfully performed in the past. It was connected with the preparation of the second atom-bomb test, to be performed in the waters of the South Sea atoll of Bikini. Suddenly his screwdriver slipped. The hemispheres came too close together and the material became critical. The whole room was instantly filled with a dazzling, bluish glare. Slotin, instead of ducking and thereby possibly saving himself, tore the two hemispheres apart with his hands and thus interrupted the chain reaction. By this action he saved the lives of the seven other persons in the room. He had realized at once that he himself would be bound to succumb to the effects of the excessive radiation dose which he has absorbed. But he did not lose his self-control for a moment. He told his colleagues to go and stand exactly where they had been at the instant of the disaster. He then drew on the blackboard, with his own hand, an accurate sketch of their relative positions, so that the doctors could ascertain the degree of radiation to which each of those present had been exposed." -

Robert Jungk

Brighter than a thousand suns

"Teller often used to translate into German verses by the

Hungarian poet Ady, a great favorite of his. One of these

translations, which were never published, seems full of the

presentiment of an existence which Teller and other research

workers in atomic physics were fated to lead."

The Lord takes all whom he strikes and loves,

he bears them far from Earth. . .

their hearts aflame, their brains made ice,

Earth sends her laughter up to them

and, compassionate, the sun strews diamond dust

upon their lonely way.

Robert Jungk

"It is true that the existence of the 'ultimate weapon' is an appalling danger for humanity. But the fewer the people who control such weapons, the less likely are they to be used. Human society in the modern world survives only because decisions are taken by only a very small number of men. "-

Louis Pauwels & Jacques Bergier

The Morning of the Magicians

"It was like the grand finale of a mighty symphony of the elements; fascinating and terrifying, uplifting and crushing, ominous, devastating, full of great promise and great foreboding. . .On that moment hung eternity. Time stood still. Space contracted to a pinpoint. It was as though the earth had opened and the skies split. One felt as though he had been privileged to witness the birth of the world-to be present at the moment of creation when the Lord said: 'Let there be light' . "

William L. Laurence

"Now we are all sons-of-bitches'

(thought occurring to Kenneth T. Bainbridge (The official

test leader) after the detonation of the first atomic bomb.)

"With the discovery or the atom, everything changed, except man's

thinking. Because of this we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."

Albert Einstein

"...(it was) a single projectile 

Charged with all the power of the Universe.

An incandescent column of smoke and flame

As bright as the thousand suns

Rose in all its splendor....

....It was an unknown weapon,

An iron thunderbolt,

A gigantic messenger of death,

Which reduced to ashes 

the entire race of the 

Vrishnis and the Andhakas

...The corpses were so burned

As to be unrecognizable.

The hair and nails fell out;

Pottery broke without apparent cause,

And the birds turned white....

....After a few hours

All foodstuffs were infected....

....to escape from this fire

The soldiers threw themselves in streams

To wash themselves and their equipment."

(from the ancient Mahabharata)

*********

Claude Eatherly came back to America a changed man. His friends could hardly recognize him, he had become taciturn and reserved, shunned the company of his fellows. He began to suffer periods of dark depression. In 1947 he received his discharge and returned to his home in Van Alstyne, Texas, refusing the pension he was entitled to. He even wanted to send his medals back to the Pentagon but his friends prevailed upon him to refrain. They could not, however, keep him from expressing his shame and fear at the least mention of Hiroshima. To be called a "war hero" caused him to blush, turn sharply on his heels and walk away. When he was asked about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his face worked with painful emotion. . . .Eatherly began sending money to the mayor of Hiroshima. . .to be used for the children who had lost their parents in the explosion. He wrote a letter to the municipal council of Hiroshima recounting his part in the bombardment and explaining that it was he who had given the "go ahead" signal and therefore considered himself guilty of the destruction of Hiroshima. . .He wandered about the country from job to job, started to study but gave it up and took to drink and cards. Nothing could drive out his memories. The 'voices" of the Hiroshima victims pursued him incessantly. He would wake up at night crying out for the burning children to be saved. Early in 1950 he tried to commit suicide. Then he decided that he must get himself punished in order to ease his conscience. If society refused to recognize him as a criminal for his part in the bombing of Hiroshima, he reasoned, he must commit some crime recognized as such in the United States. By suffering punishment for that he would expiate his real crime."

Robert Jungk -

The Unending Nightmare of Claude Eatherly

Hiroshima pilot

"In our times, thermonuclear war may seem unthinkable, immoral, insane, hideous, or highly unlikely, but it is not impossible. To act intelligently we must learn as much as we can about the risks. We may thereby be able better to avoid nuclear war. We may even be able to avoid the crises that bring us to the brink of war, but despite our efforts we may someday come face to face with a blunt choice between surrender or war. We may .even have war thrust upon us without being given any kind of choice. "

Herman Kahn

Thinking About The unthinkable

"Every man, woman , and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, miscalculation, or madness. "

John F . Kennedy

Sept. 25, 1961

********

"After such a war.. .nothing would remain which resembles present civilization. The fight for mere survival would dominate everything.. ' "A new dark age would begin on earth. "

Hans A Bethe

Professor of Physics, Cornell Univ

"mankind has already survived a few ordeals which come close to the horror predicted for a future nuclear war. Carthage could not have been demolished more completely by an H-bomb than it was by Roman legions. Genghis Khan is reported to have killed 1,600,000 men, women, and children in Heart. Not one person was left alive when Tamarlane passed through Baghdad. The Black Death wiped out one-fourth of Europe’s population in 1349-50. Men have fought many wars in which no prisoners were taken and lost many sieges in which all the besieged, regardless of age or sex, were slain."

Wilmot Robertson

The Dispossesed Majority.

"Those who survived the atom bomb were the people who ignored their friends crying out in extremis; or who shook off wounded neighbors who clung to them, pleading to be saved…..In short, those who survived the bomb were, if not merely lucky, in a greater or lesser degree selfish, self-centered, guided by instinct and not civilization…..and we know it, we who have survived. Knowing it is a dull ache."

A physician at Nagasaki

"Since the government first began work on the atomic bomb in 1940, the U.S. nuclear arsenal has cost about $4 trillion dollars. 3 times more than was spent in procurement for all of WWII. Another $1 trillion could be added to operating & maintaining the arsenal a figure equal to the $5 trillion national debt. What exactly is $4 trillion. It is the amount of all outstanding mortgages on all buildings and homes in the U.S. –9 years of Total U.S. Corporate profits."

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

….up to 40 potential Chernobyls are waiting to happen in the former Soviet Union and Central Europe…….

A Federal (U.S.) intelligence report says 10 reactors in slovakia, Lithuania, Russia, Bulgaria and Ukraine face an abnormally high risk….

Uranium Rusting in storage pools troubling U.S. (NYT,12/8/94)

Deadly Nuclear Waste seems to have leaked in Washington State (NYT, 12/28/93

An estimated 125 thousand people in Ukraine have died because of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and disease rates have soared. (AP, 4/25/94

U.S. Spread Radioactive fallout in secret cold war weapons test (NYT,12/6/93

Radiated kids called Cold War’s Infantry (USA Today, 1/14/94)

200 Infants fed Radiation in 50’s (USA Today 1/14/94)

PANEL SAYS U.S. MAY HAVE DONE THOUSANDS OF HUMAN RADIATION EXPERIMENTS (NYT 10/22/94)

204 SECRET nuclear tests are made public (NYT 12/8/93)

About 9,000 Americans, including children and newborns, were used in 154 human radiation tests sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission….government officials said today.

The figures released by the Office of Human Radiation Experiments of the Department indicate that the scope of the experimentation is greater than had been previously known. It does not include tests done by the Pentagon and other federal agencies."(NYT 2/10/95)

"In the U.S.S.R. , writes Medvedev, "the ordinary citizen was made to believe the peaceful atom was virtually a panacea and the ultimate in genuine safety, ecological cleanliness, and reliability. " He quotes Soviet scientists and managers who waxed as enthusiastic in the heyday of nuclear power development as the U.S. AEC’s Lewis Strauss. "Nuclear power stations are like stars that shine all day long!" academician M.A. Styrikovich claimed in 1980. "We shall sow them all over the land. They are perfectly safe.!"

Richard Rhodes

Nuclear Renewal

See: Burial of Radioactive Waste under the Seabed ….by Charles D. Hollister and Steven Nadis…Scientific American Jan 1998

********

In 1950, President Truman publicly announced that he was considering using nuclear weapons in Korea. Then in 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles offered to give three atomic bombs to France to use at Dienbienphu in Vietnam, but the French refused. In 1956, President Eisenhower got the Joint Chiefs of Staff to commit themselves to a plan to use nukes if the Chinese tried to occupy two islands-Quemoy and Matsu- that lie just off the Chinese coast. Three years later in 1961, the Joint chiefs of Staff recommended to Kennedy that they should be used if the Chinese tried to do anything about the proposed U.S. occupation of Laos. Instead, Kennedy decided not to occupy Laos America came to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 General Westmoreland, in his memoirs, revealed that the use of tactical nuclear weapons was considered when Khe Sanh was under siege in 1968…..etc.etc.

From Weird History 101

A retired Russian general, Alexander Lebed, told 60 Minutes that Russia’s military has lost 100 suitcase-sized nuclear weapons.

see: THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS LEGACY reviewed by Klaus B. Stadie

Environment, vol 38 nr 1

"Nothing will make me give up my work, In the Barents Sea, as in Vladivostok, the nuclear submarine reactors are in very bad condition. We must do something soon because nobody is keeping the situation under control."

Aleksandr Niktin (Russian Navy Captain)

"Le Nourvel Observateur" Paris, Sept 25 1997

"The worldwide proliferation of weapons of mass destruction appears to be an intransigent problem that only grows worse with the passage of time. Rather than attempt to identify every possible American adversary and aim some relatively small portion of our nuclear arsenal at ever one of these nations with no guarantee of deterring that adversary from launching at attack in any case), it makes sense from both a military and economic perspective to construct a defensive shield against all aggressors."

Anthony J. Dennis

"A Japanese priest walking toward Hiroshima, against the tide of shocked and mutilated survivors streaming from the city, saw them first-a group of twenty soldiers, stumbling blindly, in unspeakable agony. They were soldiers from an antiaircraft battery, far enough from ground zero not to have been killed outright. They had been looking up at a single plane high above when the bomb exploded. Looking straight into the heart of the atomic blast. It was the last thing they ever saw. The savage light, brighter than a thousand suns, burned every piece of flesh from their faces. Their eye sockets were hollow."

Martin Caidin

When War Comes

********------- -- ----- -

"Within a few seconds the thousands of people in the streets and the gardens in the center of the town were scorched by a wave of searing heat. Many were killed instantly, others lay writhing on the ground screaming in agony from the intolerable pains of their burns, Everything standing upright in the way of the blast--walls, houses, factories and other buildings--was annihilated and the debris spun around in a whirlwind and was carried up in the air. Trams were picked up and tossed aside as though they had no weight nor solidity. Trains were flung off rails as though they were toys. Horses, dogs, and cattle suffered the same fate as human beings. Every living thing was petrified in an attitude of indescribable suffering. Horses dogs and cattle suffered the same fate as human beings."

Eyewitness report of the bombing of Hiroshima

"He began wondering just how small and light a nuclear explosive could be-how much yield could be got out of something with the over-all size of a soft-ball."

John McPhee on Theodore Taylor

The Curve of Binding Energy

"Mankind has reached the ultimate stage in the long history of war: either he must find a way to live without war, or he must cease to live at all. It is the task of the generation of the nuclear age to study this inescapable problem and to solve it."

Gaston Bouthoul

War

"The atomic bomb is the writing on the wall in letters of fire, warning us at once and for all to see, of both our infinite strength and our infinite weakness as thinking beings."

John Grierson

Grierson on Documentary

*******

"So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained mankind for ages. There used to be the so-called laws of war which made it tolerable. Now we know the naked truth. War knows no law except that of might. The atom bomb brought an empty victory to the allied armies, but it resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see."

Gandhi

"In this age of the atom bomb unadulterated non-violence is the only force that can confound all the tricks of violence put together. '

Gandhi

"There is at least one defense against the atomic bomb, it lies in our mastery of this science of human relationships all over the world. It is the defense of tolerance, of understanding of intelligence and thoughtfulness. It is not an easy task. It is one which places burdens without precedent both upon those who teach and those who come to be taught. There must be new inspiration, new meaning, new energies. There must be a rebirth of education. If this new and urgent task is to be met. All of our educational resources. all, note you-must be pledged to this end."

Harry S. Truman

(speaking at Fordham University)

"For years I have believed that war should be abolished as an outmoded means of resolving disputes. ..and my abhorrence reached its height with the perfection of the atom bomb. "

MacArthur

"On the second anniversary of Hiroshima, when a bell of peace was rung at the very spot Where the bomb had exploded, he asked that "the agonies of that fateful day serve as a warning to all men of all races" that nuclear weapons "challenge the reason and the logic and the purpose of man. . .This, "he (Macarthur) said, "is the lesson of Hiroshima. God grant that it not be Ignored."

William Manchester

American Caesar

"The premise of Marxism-Leninism on war as a continuation of policy by military means remains true in an atmosphere of fundamental changes in military matters. The attempt of certain bourgeois ideologists to prove that nuclear missile weapons leave war outside the framework of policy and that nuclear war moves beyond the control of policy, ceases to be an instrument of policy and does not constitute its continuation is theoretically incorrect and politically reactionary."

An article from the Soviet magazine Communist of the Armed Forces Nov 75

"We are not dealing with war in any rational, Clausewitzian sense-the use of military force as another means for government to achieve political ends beneficial to the nation. In any major strategic exchange, the reciprocal damage would create conditions that would make victory and defeat virtually indistinguishable, save perhaps that the victors might survive a bit longer than the vanquished."

General Maxwell Taylor

"The best defense against the atom bomb is not to be there when it

goes off."

British Army Journal

"Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic power of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concepts of narrow nationalism. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the people of the world. We scientists recognize our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of the simple facts of atomic energy and its implications for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope-we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not death."

Einstein

Jan 22,1947

********

All nuclear bombs and the nuclear parts of nuclear bombs are

designed in

Livermore, California and Los Alamos, New Mexico

The plutonium that would explode comes from reactors in

Hanford, Washington and Savannah River, S. Carolina

The plutonium parts of nuclear bombs are put together at

Rocky Flats, Colorado

Non-nuclear parts of nuclear bombs are designed at

Livermore, California

Albuquerque, New Mexico by Sandia Corp

(part of Western Electric, part of AT & T)

Electric and electro magnetic parts of nuclear bombs are made in

Kansas City, Missouri

by Bendix Corp

Detonators are made in

Miamisburg, Ohio by Monsanto Corp

neutron generators are made in

Pinellas Florida

Bombs are made from all these parts being put together in

Pantex, Texas & Burlington, Iowa Inc.

Old bombs do not die. When outdated they are stored in

Manono Mountain, New Mexico (near Albuquerque

or taken apart in Pantex, Texas or Burlington, Iowa

The plutonium taken out of dismantled bombs goes back to

Rocky Flats, Colo.

"For every megawatt of electrical energy installed, a reactor can also produce more than a pound of plutonium a year...By 1975 the world's nuclear energy output could be producing enough plutonium to make at least 5,000 bombs a year> by 1980 as many as 20,000 to 30,000 bombs a year will be possible."

Robin Clarke

Science of War & Peace

Non-nuclear countries will be able to produce enough plutonium by 1980 to be able to make between 12,500 and 15,000 warheads annually. Included are eight countries which, while at present possessing no nuclear weapons, could make by 1980 some 8,000 to 10,000 nuclear weapons From the plutonium produced by their nuclear reactors,"

Soviet scientist V.S. Amelyanov

"It is not possible for unaided imagination to visualize the horror of an atomic blast. A hundred lightning’s, blazing in the sky all together and simultaneously hitting an area of a few square miles in a crowded town, can convey a faint idea of what happens when a nuclear bomb explodes over a thickly populated city."

Gopi Krishna

"There is no picture of hell ever drawn by the most imaginative artist

that can even distantly portray the ghastly scenes."

Gopi Krishna

"The human race has now accumulated sufficient nuclear explosive to

eliminate itself 50,000 times over."

Robin Clarke

The Science of War & Peace

"What a ghastly sight the earth will present, after a widespread exchange of nuclear missiles, what crowds of terribly wounded men, women and children would lie writhing in dreadful agony all around or what horror and anguish the dazed survivors would have to face to eke out a miserable existence, in the midst of hell, it is impossible to imagine at present. What hatred and what regrets would swell in their breasts, when they recall the insensate actions of their elders and representatives which turned the verdant earth into an inferno for them to live in is beyond expression."

Gopi Krishna

I believe that the problem of lessening the danger of annihilating humanity in a nuclear war carries an absolute priority over all other considerations."

Andrei Sakharov (Father of the Soviet Hydrogen Bomb)

Time, Feb 12,197

"Behind the black portent of the new atomic age: lies a hope which, seized upon with faith, can work out 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 U.N. Atomic Energy Commission

Aug 14,1946

"In a very real sense the public is sleeping, so far as the grave issues of nuclear war are concerned, The American people, and the peoples of other nations, have only a hazy conception of the grotesque proportions to which nuclear weapons have grown and of the size of the bomb stockpile. And when they think about the problem of nuclear war at all, they dismiss it as too terrible to be a real possibility. The United States and the Soviet Union are pictured as two adversaries standing face to face with loaded pistols, but with the triggers wired together. Only a madman, people reason, would pull the trigger.... A spirit of helpless bafflement, almost of despair, seems to have settled upon the people of the nations involved in the Cold War. They live in daily dread not only of man-created tensions but also of the frightening advance of technology. There is a growing apprehension that the ultimate decision will be taken not by man's own will but by the hardware .

W.H. Pickering, ( Director of the Jet propulsion Lab voiced such a thought 'This is the prospect we face the decision to destroy an enemy nation-and by inference our own- will be made by a radar set, a telephone circuit, an electronic computer. It will be arrived at without aid of human intelligence. If a human observer cries "Stop, let me check the calculation," it is already too late-his launching Sites are destroyed and the war is lost. It is a frightening prospect. Far more than being slaves to our machines, our very lives depend upon the accuracy and reliability of a computing machine in a far distant country. The failure of a handful of vacuum tubes and transistors could determine the fate of our civilization."

Dr . Lapp

Kill & Overkill

"Destructive power inherent in matter must be controlled by the idealism of the spirit and the wisdom of the mind. They alone stand between us and a lifeless planet. '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 the U.N. General Assembly 1952

"For technology has now circumscribed us all with a conceivable horizon of horror that Could dwarf any catastrophe that has befallen man in his more than a million years on earth."

Robert S. McNamara

Address to the editors of United Press International, San Francisco Sept 18,1967

"Human rights, civil rights, women's rights are all meaningless before the greatest issue of all-nuclear war and our survival."

Brigadier-General B.K. Sopwitz

film, War Without Winners 78

"When it comes to strategic thermonuclear war, I don't think there is such a thing as No.l or No.2 In exchanging of strategic nuclear weapons, the damage to both participants would be so great that there is no winner and therefore no such thing as No,1 and No.2"

Harold Brown Secretary of Defense

"And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights-the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation, the right to breathe air as nature provided it, the right of future generations to a healthy existence?"

John F. Kennedy

(address at American University 1963)hugging Cruise missile that gives them almost no warning time on its

"The information about weapons systems of all kinds is very, very easily accessible. You can make yourself pretty much of an expert in about 8 to 12 hours about what deterrence systems are. You can find out all you want to know about Poseidon submarines and the number of missiles that they carry and the number of warheads they have. Just suffice it to say we've got about 9,500 strategic warheads aimed at Russia and they have about 4,500 aimed at us. And, how much is enough? at a given point, what difference does it make whether someone's first or sixth or ninth if he can destroy another nation 8 or 10 times over? Whether you're first or second is irrelevant, isn't it?"

Paul Newman

Delegate to the U.N. Special Session on Disarmament l9?8

"Before the end of this century, a score of nations could possess nuclear weapons. If this should happen, the world that we leave our children will mock our own hopes for peace, The level of nuclear armaments could grow by tens of thousands, and the same situation could well occur with advanced conventional weapons. The temptation to use these weapons, for fear that someone else might do it first, would be almost irresistible. In the past war has been accepted as the ultimate arbiter of disputes among nations. But in the nuclear era we can no longer think of war as merely a continuation of diplomacy by other means. Nuclear war cannot be measured by the archaic standards of victory and defeat. "

Jimmy Carter

U.N. General Assembly ,oct 4,1977

"We live in a world where the biggest business now is that of killing and destruction. The world spent $340 billion on arming itself in 1977 alone, and this has brought humanity to the brink of extinction."

Dr. George Wald

Nobel laureate

The Indian Express,Feb 3,1979

"We 've got to watch ourselves, we are in thrall to our own Bomb. We've got to watch out for the little explosions of nerve and fear in the constrictions of public debate, in the lassitude our private lives, in the rising levels of irrationality in our group relations, in the tendency of our elected governments to abridge our political liberties, in the pressure we feel not to dissent but to conform, to play it safe, to shut up."

Doctorow

Sarah Lawrence Graduate address 1983

"We are all under this tent."

Doctorow

"the Bomb has already done world damage."

Doctorow

"Nuclear weapons created nuclear power; nuclear power is now creating nuclear weapons. The circle has been closed and we have to break the circle or there is going to be a nuclear war in the Third World sometime in the next couple of years."

Patrick O'Heffernan

"Atomic power is nothing compared to the power of the dream that lives

in each of us that is seeking emergence."

David Spangler

Revelations

"Who has been able to penetrate the secret of the formation of a body, the generation of a single atom? What is there I will not say at the centre of a sun, but at the centre of an atom? Who has sounded to the bottom the abyss in a grain of sand? The grain of sand, gentlemen, has been studied four thousand years by science, she has turned and returned it; she divides and subdivides it; she torments it with her experiments; she vexes it with her questions to snatch from it the final word as to its secret constitution; she asks it, with an insatiable curiosity: 'Shall I divide thee infinitesimally?' Then suspended over this abyss, science hesitates, she stumbles, she feels dazzled, she becomes dizzy, and, in despair says I DO NOT KNOW:"

p. Felix de Notre Dame

Le Mystere et la Science

"The sad truth is that we’ve opened a Pandora’s box and there is no way to return to a world safe from nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorist groups. ‘Atoms for Peace’ may turn out to be one of the stupidest ideas of our time."

David Rosenbaum

Nuclear Journal Reports …Mar22,1975

"The dangers of atomic war are overrated. It would be hard on little, concentrated countries like England. In the United States we have lots of space."

-Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick (Publisher of the Chicago Tribune). Feb 23,1950

"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....You know, dirt is just great stuff.....If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody's going to make it."

-Thomas K. "T.K." Jones (Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces,) explaining to journalist Robert Scheer how the American populace could survive a nuclear holocaust, 1981

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Book: The Atom in the History of Human Thought" by Bernard Pullman

Book: "How to Build a Nuclear Bomb and Other Weapons of Mass Destruction" by Frank Barnaby

Book: "Twentieth Century Book of the Dead." by Gil Elliot

Book: "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe" by Graham Alison

Book: "100 Suns" by Michael Light

Book: "Critical Masses: Citizens, Nuclear Weapons Production, and Environmental Destruction in the United States and Russia" by Russell J. Dalton et al.

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