Les Fleurs du Mal, by Charles Baudelaire The Bhagavad-Gita Collected Works, by Bernhard Riemann

3. Les Fleurs du Mal, by Charles Baudelaire The Bhagavad-Gita Collected Works, by Bernhard Riemann Theaetetus, by Plato L’education sentimentale, by Gustave Flaubert The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri The Three Centuries, by Bhartrihari The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot The notebooks of Michael Faraday Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

4. Yuli Khariton, Director Arzamas Nuclear Lab Sig Hecker, Director Los Alamos National Lab February 1992

6. For now we have entered the atomic age, and war has undergone a technological change which makes it a very different thing from what it used to be, War today between the Soviet empire and the free nations might dig the grave not only of our Stalinist opponents, but of our own society, our world as well as theirs. The war of the future would be one in which man could extinguish millions of lives at one blow, demolish the great cities of the world, wipe out the cultural achievements of the past - destroy the very structure of a civilisation that has been slowly and painfully built up through hundreds of generations. Such a war is not a possible policy for rational men. President Harry Truman, 1953

7. Let me tell you that if war comes it will be horrible. Atomic war will destroy civilisation. It will destroy our cities. There will be millions of people dead. War today is unthinkable with the weapons which we have at our command. If the Kremlin and Washington ever lock up in a war, the results are too horrible to contemplate. I can’t even begin to imagine them. Dwight Eisenhower, 1954

8. We are in a completely new situation. that cannot be resolved by war. Neils Bohr, 1945 The problem of the Soviet Union was a new kind of problem, and the old rules simply didn’t apply to our present situation. Dwight Eisenhower, 1954

9. Strategic doctrines are designed, in large part, to justify the weaponry that the arms race has imposed on both the United States and the Soviet Union. Miroslav Nincic, US political scientist You don’t do the staff work and then make a decision. You make a decision and then do the staff work. John Manley, Los Alamos

10. The LGM-118 Peacekeeper, also known as the MX missile (for Missile-eXperimental), was a land-based ICBM deployed by the United States starting in 1986. The Peacekeeper was a MIRV missile that could carry up to 10 re-entry vehicles, each armed with a 300-kilotonW87warhead in a Mk.21reentry vehicle (RV). A total of 50 missiles were deployed starting in 1986, after a long and contentious development program that traced its roots into the 1960s.

11. Bomb casings for South African nuclear weapons Designed for air delivery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction

12. After more than forty years, we have had no third world war, and the balance of nuclear terror ... may have helped to prevent one. But I am not at all sure of this; back then, in those long-gone years, the question didn't even arise. What most troubles me now is the instability of the balance, the extreme peril of the current situation, the appalling waste of the arms race ... Each of us has a responsibility to think about this in global terms, with tolerance, trust, and candour, free from ideological dogmatism, parochial interests, or national egotism. Andrei Sakharov

13. 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 we 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. Commission Report to US State Department, January 1953

14. The world will not soon be free of nuclear weapons, because they serve so many purposes. But as instruments of destruction, they have long been obsolete. Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun

15. Reality is that which, when you don’t believe in it, doesn’t go away. Peter Viereck, American poet

16. The principle of common security asserts that countries that can only find security in cooperation with their competitors, not against them. UN Report, 1982

17. The task of insuring security is more and more taking the form of a political task and can be resolved only by political means....In our time, genuine equal security is guaranteed not by the highest number but by the lowest possible level of strategic balance, from which it is essential to exclude entirely nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction. Mikhail Gorbachev, 1986, Soviet Communist Party Conference

18. If one country keeps building weapons while the other doesn’t do a thing, the one that arms will not gain anything from it. The weaker party could just explode its stockpile, even on its own territory, which would mean suicide for it and a slow death for its opponents. Mikhail Gorbachev, 1985

19. The strategic fact is that the most important ‘application’ of nuclear weapons is not to use them. Niël Barnard, NI Chief under P W Botha and F W De Klerk

20. As long as any state has nuclear weapons, others will seek to acquire them. 1996 Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons

21. The problem of nuclear weapons is nuclear weapons. Richard Butler