Atomic Bomb Quotes

“After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“There were people who escaped Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. 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 a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.

p.116”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

“If you think atomic explosions in Asia wouldn't affect Americans, consider this. A study published in Scientific American in 2010 looked at the probable impact of a "small" nuclear war, one in which India and Pakistan each dropped fifty atomic bombs. The scientists concluded that the explosions would ignite massive firestorms, sending enormous amounts of dust and smoke into the atmosphere. This would block some of the sun's light from reaching the earth, making the planet colder and darker - for about ten years. Farming would collapse, and people all over the globe would starve to death. And that's if only half of one percent of all the atomic bombs on earth were used.

In the end, this is a difficult story to sum up. The making of the atomic bomb is one of history's most amazing examples of teamwork and genius and poise under pressure. But it's also the story of how humans created a weapon capable of wiping our species off the planet. It's a story with no end in sight.

And, like it or not, you're in it.”
― Steve Sheinkin, Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World's Most Dangerous Weapon

“For the scientist, at exactly the moment of discovery—that most unstable existential moment—the external world, nature itself, deeply confirms his innermost fantastic convictions. Anchored abruptly in the world, Leviathan gasping on his hook, he is saved from extreme mental disorder by the most profound affirmation of the real.”
― Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb

“Trinity’s witnesses responded just as those to Apollo 11 would, as J. Robert Oppenheimer remembered: "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent." Oppenheimer later said the he beheld his radiant blooming cloud and thought of Hindu scripture: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Aloud, however, the physicist made the ultimate engineer comment: "It worked.”
― Craig Nelson, Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon

“In no other type of warfare does the advantage lie so heavily with the aggressor.”
― James Franck

“What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has been the memory of what happened at Hiroshima.

– John Hersey, quoted in Fallout by Lesley Blume”
― John Hersey

“Wasting nuclear power on warheads is a barbaric use of a scientific revolution.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Either Reformist or Terrorist: If You Are Terror I Am Your Grandfather

“we're probably sitting on Ground Zero, right here at this table, for h-Bomb number !"
table was at 57th Street and 7th Avenue NYC”
― Herman Wouk, Don't Stop the Carnival

“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))

“The socity virus is like atomic bomb when explodes it will affect on all the society.”
― Kamaran Ihsan Salih

“The society virus is like atomic bomb when explodes it will affect on all the society.”
― Kamaran Ihsan Salih

“When my eyes return to earth, they cross Neotnia, her bangs gently fluttering in the breeze as she peers at the dome’s rusted arches crisscrossing each other like a crown of thorns. It feels like she’s gazing upon the skull of the twentieth century. Like it’s the remnant of some giant, horrible beast from a more primitive and violent era.”
― Michael Grothaus, Beautiful Shining People

“Approaching the Cenotaph again, we stop so a group of school-children can stand for an unobstructed photo by the shallow memorial pool.

Each holds a paper crane in their hands, and they all look so proud. It reminds me of the class photograph from 1945. The children in today’s class also look no older than five or six, and their smiles beam just as bright. And hearing their laughter as the teacher tries to get them to settle long enough to take the photo, I recall something Mom said years after she returned from Angola: ‘No matter what language you speak or what nationality you are, tears and laughter always sound the same.”
― Michael Grothaus, Beautiful Shining People

“The published images of Hiroshima’s demolished landscape gravely undersold the reality of atomic aftermath.”
― Lesley M.M. Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World

“Summoned by Congress that November to testify about use of the bombs on Japan and their after-effects, the [General Groves] eventually conceded that radiation had been responsible for some of the deaths in the atomic cities, but informed the Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy that doctors had assured him that radiation poisoning “is a very pleasant way to die.”
― Lesley M.M. Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World

“…Hiroshima terrified Hersey from the moment he arrived; the fact that a single bomb had caused this destruction would torment him throughout the duration of his assignment.”
― Lesley M.M. Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World

“Every American who has permitted himself to make jokes about atom bombs, or who has come to regard them as just one sensational phenomenon that can now be accepted as part of civilization, like the airplane and the gasoline engine… ought to read Mr. Hersey,” the editorial read.”
― Lesley M.M. Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World

“I think that what has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been a deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory,” [Hersey] said in 1986, in a rare interview. “The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.”
― Lesley M.M. Blume, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World

“Even Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, was a believer of Bhagwat Gita and quoted the Shloka 32 (Chapter 11) that actual meant, "Time I am; destroyer of the worlds." whereas he mis-translated TIME as DEATH.”
― Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma, Krishna Crux

“When the first atomic bomb was exploded successfully, Oppenheimer and Fermi flashed the code word: Baby satisfactorily born. A most befitting yell o triumph for the coming of age of technological civilization and for the death of culture. Since then hundreds of thousands of babies were satisfactorily born with defective genes or died of leukemia brought on by radiation. Compulsive creation, genius, what the hell do you want, clap censorship on science?”
― Romain Gary, The Gasp

“¡Qué ben, que a bomba ven co seu rebombio!
A bomba, ¡bong!, a bomba, bon amigo,
A bomba con aramios, con formigas,
con fornos pra asar meniños loiros.
A bomba ten lombrices, bombardinos,
vermes de luz, bombillas fluorescentes,
peixes de chumbo, vómitos, anémonas,
estrelas de plutonio plutocrático,
esterco de cobalto hidroxenado,
martelos, ferraduras, matarratos.

A bomba, bong. A bomba, bon amigo.
Con átomos que estoupan en cadeia
e creban as cadeias que nos atan:

Os outos edificios.
Os outos funcionarios.
Os outos fiñanceiros.
Os outos ideais.
¡Todo será borralla radioaitiva!

As estúpidas nais que pairen fillos
polvo serán, mais polvo namorado.

Os estúpidos pais, as prostitutas,
as grandes damas da beneficencia,
magnates e mangantes, grandes cruces,
altezas, escelencias, eminencias,
cabaleiros cubertos, descubertos,
nada serán meu ben, si a bomba ven,
nada o amor, e nada a morte morta
con bendiciós e plenas indulxencias.

¡Qué ben, que a bomba ven! Nun instantiño
amable primavera faise cinza
de vagos isotopos placentarios,
de letales surrisas derretidas
baixo un arco de átomos triunfaes.

A bomba, ¡bong! a bomba co seu bombo
de setas e volutas abombadas,
axiña ven, vela ahí ven, bon amigo.

¡Estános ben! ¡Está ben! ¡Está bon!

¡¡¡Booong!!!”
― Celso Emilio Ferreiro, O Soño Sulagado

“Atomic bomb testing was a war crime that was never prosecuted.”
― Steven Magee

“New Mexico is home to the first atomic bomb exploded on USA soil.”
― Steven Magee

“Nevada is the home of USA atomic bomb testing.”
― Steven Magee

“Remote rural areas have always been the best places to live during war.”
― Steven Magee

“I wake up every day thinking: Is this the day the proxy wars have resulted in a nuclear catastrophe?”
― Steven Magee

“We may see a nuclear war before we die.”
― Steven Magee

“It is only a matter of time before another nuclear bomb is detonated during war.”
― Steven Magee

“Wiping a warring city off the map will be a statement to the world, as it was in 1945.”
― Steven Magee