Nuclear War Quotes

“Humans are wired to advance. Humans do whatever it takes.
And yet, nuclear war zeros it all out.
Nuclear weapons reduce human brilliance and ingenuity, love and desire, empathy and intellect, to ash.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“A nuclear crisis is not a worst-case scenario, it is the worst-case scenario.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“The fundamental idea behind this book is to demonstrate, in appalling detail, just how horrifying nuclear war would be.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“Albert Einstein was asked what he thought about nuclear war, to which he is said to have responded, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“With time, after a nuclear war, all present-day knowledge will be gone. Including the knowledge that the enemy was not North Korea, Russia, America, China, Iran, or anyone else vilified as a nation or a group. It was the nuclear weapons that were the enemy of us all. All along.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“It is the astonishing speed with which ballistic missile submarines can launch nuclear weapons, and hit multiple targets nearly simultaneously, that makes them the handmaidens of the apocalypse.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“An immediate consequence of a nuclear strike [would be] that democracy would be completely gone and military rule would take place.” Perry believes that if military rule is ever imposed on today’s America, “it would be almost impossible to undo military rule” in the United States.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“Paranoia is a psychological phenomenon, same as deterrence.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“Perry believes that if military rule is ever imposed on today’s America, “it would be almost impossible to undo military rule” in the United States.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“If it’s a Bolt out of the Blue attack,” says Fugate, “population protection planning is a different animal. With a Bolt out of the Blue attack, population protection planning won’t happen because everyone will be dead.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“During the Cuban Missile Crisis, in 1962, U.S. forces were placed at DEFCON 2,119 meaning war involving nuclear weapons was presumed to be imminent. Okay”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“Launch on Warning policy is why—and how—America keeps a majority of its deployed nuclear arsenal on ready-for-launch status, also known as Hair-Trigger Alert.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“The Global Operations Center, Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“The Missile Warning Center, Cheyenne Mountain Complex, Colorado The National Military Command Center, Pentagon, Washington, D.C.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“It was decades later that Rubel confessed that this U.S. plan for nuclear war he participated in reminded him of the Nazis’ plans for genocide.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“Why stockpile 1,000 or 18,000 or 31,255 nuclear bombs when a single one of them the size of Ivy Mike, dropped on New York City or Moscow, could leave some 10 million people dead?”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“By 1957, there were 5,543 bombs in the U.S. stockpile.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“Marshall Islands.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“An atomic bomb will kill tens of thousands of people, as did the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A thermonuclear bomb, if detonated on a city like New York or Seoul, will kill millions of people in a superheated flash.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“A climate-altering, famine-causing, civilization-ending, genome-changing, newer, bigger, even more monstrous nuclear weapon—one that the scientists involved called “the Super.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“U.S. began making new and bigger plans, to use scores of atomic weapons in the next world war. A war that could be expected to kill, at minimum, 600 million people, one-fifth of the entire world’s population.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“survivor experience, and countless others like theirs were for decades suppressed by the U.S. Army and its occupation forces in Japan.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“Dr. Charles H. Townes: inventor of the laser; Nobel Prize in Physics, 1964”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“Jeffrey R. Yago: engineer; advisor to Electromagnetic Pulse Task Force of National and Homeland Security”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“A story where 12,000 years of civilization in the making gets reduced to rubble in mere minutes and hours. This is the reality of nuclear war. For as long as nuclear war exists as a possibility, it threatens mankind with Apocalypse.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“after a briefing on likely nuclear death tolls: “And we call ourselves the human race.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“Thousands of commercial airplanes using fly-by-wire technology systems lose wing and tail controls, lose cabin pressure and landing gear, lose instrument landing systems as they head violently toward the ground. One class of passenger aircraft is mercifully spared, namely the older model 747s, used by the Defense Department for its Doomsday Planes. “747 pilots still use a foot pedal and a yoke, mechanically linked to the control surfaces,” Yago tells us. “There’s no fly-by-wire technology there.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“No trace of the killer reptiles was found by anyone, that we know of, for 66 million years. Until just a few hundred years ago, in 1677, when the director of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, Robert Plot, found a dinosaur femur in the village of Cornwall and drew it for a science journal, misidentifying the bone as belonging to a giant. After nuclear war, who, if anyone, will know we were once here?”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“It was decades later that Rubel confessed that this U.S. plan for nuclear war he participated in reminded him of the Nazis’ plans for genocide. In his memoir, he referred to a time in an earlier world war when a group of Third Reich officials met at a lakeside villa in a German town called Wannsee. It was there, over the course of a ninety-minute meeting, that this group of allegedly rational men decided among themselves how to move forward with the genocide in a war they were presently winning—World War II—so as to ensure total victory for themselves. Millions of people needed to die, these Reich officials agreed.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario