Derek Wright > Derek's Quotes

“The problem was caused by rice. The prisoners ate rice as if they had never eaten before, and kept the new toilets busy. And rice feces, among the various kinds, are unique. They come out as small hard balls, tough as cement, insoluble in water. They will not float, nor will they wash away. They lay by the hundreds of millions on the beach, like dark, ugly snails.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War

“Projections about the nation’s fate in the event of war – and no one supposed for a moment that the UK might be spared, if the Soviet Union attacked the US – were then based on 1955 estimates that ten 10-megaton H-bombs would kill twelve million of the country’s forty-six million people, and incapacitate many more. A later 1964 estimate would have been more realistic: A Soviet attack, this stated, ‘would cause the United Kingdom to cease to exist as a corporate political entity’.”
― Sir Max Hastings, Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962