Quotations from the 1980s

1980

• “Miss Flitch reckoned that we could need about 8000 chemical toilets to carry on the normal way. This produced some jeering from the defeatist element on the Committee, one of whom asked what we could do when 100,000 contaminated Londoners poured into our village. I said that if they came, they would be shot.” - Mr. Robert Tufton, civil-defence committee in West Suffolk.
• “It is out of the questions to deploy on German soil nuclear potential which threatens the Soviet Union.” - General Bastian resigning from West German army.
• “CND Back With A 100,000 Bang” – News headline.
• “Defeat is invisible in a war of nuclear weapons.” - Lord Zuckerman.
• “Glasgow University CND has over 300 members.” – Sanity
• “Full-scale nuclear war is likely to be waged to coerce the Soviet Union to give up some recent gain.” – Colin Gray, Advisor to President Reagan.
• “I think France and Europe should not share in the suicide of the Superpowers. We must set up an adequate nuclear force of our own, and we can have it in three of four years’ time.” – Advisor to French President.

1981

• “NATO is the peace movement.” – Daily Telegraph.
• “We are doing just about enough, just about right.” – Sir Leslie Mavor on civil defence .
• “To my mind, the nuclear bomb is the most useless weapon ever invented.” – George Kennan, reformed architect of the Cold War.
• “It may be possible to have a Just War, but there can be no such thing as a Just Mutual Obligation.” – Archbishop of Canterbury.
• “Bombing cities, washing dishes, we won’t do your dirty work.” – Poison Girls.
• “You cannot fight a controlled nuclear war.” – Field Marshall Lord Carver.
• “US Wants Britain to Store Gas Bomb.” – Guardian.
• “The US Air Force recently announced the successful test of a laser beam capable of destroying ICBM’s in flight.” – Times.
• “We fought World War One in Europe, we fought World War Two in Europe, and if you dummies let us, we’ll fight World War Three in Europe.” – US Admiral Laroque.
• “If the civil-defence budget was in my hands, I would spend all 120 million dollars on morphine.” – American scientist.
• “We set out to achieve improved capabilities to prevail deterrence and US capabilities to prevail, should deterrence fail.” – US Defence Secretary Weinberger.
• “It is inconsequential whether NATO is actually planning a first strike or not. The decisive factor is simply whether this potential leads to fear on the part of the adversary that this could be the case.” – West German Major-General Bastian.

1982

• “Hell hath no fury like a peace woman scorned, by comparison with whom even a Cruise missile becomes a soft symbol of sweetness and light.” – Peregrine Worsthome.
• “An H-Bomb could spoil your whole day.” – Car sticker.
• “I’m a lot happier in my bed because of the sailors at the nuclear bases.” – Councillor in Glasgow debating nuclear-free zones.
• “What the bloody hell is it for? It’s a waste of money.” – Field Marshall Lord Carver on Trident.
• “I’m not prepared to be involved in nuclear mass murder.” – Gunner Jeffrey Clare, CND member dismissed from army.
• “We rub up against the Soviets every single day.” – US Navy Secretary Lehman.
• “Gotcha!” – Sun.
• “I think we will probably destroy ourselves.” – US Admiral Rickover.

1983

• “I don’t like nuclear missiles. But they don’t do damage in the way the Greenham women do.” – Woman living near Greenham peace camp.
• “The Priest and the Kremlin.” – Sun on Bruce Kent.
• “There is no point in having any more of these weapons than the bare minimum.” – Duke of Edinburgh.
• “Kinnock The Peacemaker – Labour Chief Leads CND Rally” – Mail on Sunday.
• “It is disobedience, but the enforcement of law, to refuse to be an accomplice to the preparation of nuclear war.” – Prof. of International Law, Robert Falk.
• “We have a different regard to human life than those monsters do.” – President Reagan on the Soviet Union.
• “If there are enough shovels to go round, everybody’s going to make it.” – US Deputy-Under-Secretary of Defense on civil defence.
• “Victims of a nuclear strike in Bognor would be given burial at sea. All dead people can e taken out in a rowing boat.” – Civil defence speaker.

1984

• “My Lords, does the Minister agree that these slightly varied, but basically repetitive questions on the nuclear deterrent by the Noble Lord, Lord Jenkins of Putney, not only take up an excessive amount of time of this House, but are questions of an alarmist nature, attempting to distort the defence situation, and that they may actually be causing unnecessary anxiety to the members of the general public?” – Baroness Gardner of Dodgy Grammar.
• “Naturally I’m a supporter of the CND movement.” – Annie Lennox.
• “I will call upon and encourage my sons and their friends to refuse army service, because through the deployment of first-strike weapons, war could originate in Germany for a third and final time.” – Gunter Grass.
• “What I would like to have is a 155 mm modern round that could become enhanced-radiation-capable, and when the time comes and the allies have no gas-pains over that, we can send the module over.” – US General Rogers on the neutron bomb.

1985

• “Did you know that some of the glossy propaganda leaflets distributed by CND are printed for them by the Russians in Moscow?” – Croyden-South Conservatives
• “It will be no good emerging from the holocaust clutching a copy of the TUC policy.” – Ron Todd.
• “Too high a proportion of British research-and-development is already devoted to the military sector.” – Financial Times.
• “Prevention may be better than later attempts at a cure.” - Sir Geoffrey Howe on Star Wars.
• “Is there anything in human history to suggest that our luck will hold?” – Irish UN Delegate Noel Dorr.
• “We are already dying of a nuclear war while you are trying to prevent it.” – Chailang, delegate from Pacific.

1986

• “I have nothing to add. I have nothing to add. I have nothing to add.” – George Younger in Parliament.
• “Why Is This Commie Getting the Nobel Peace Prize?” – Sun
• “Breaks would not be spent out of doors, and thought would have to be given to arrangements for children and staff to go home by vehicle.” – Highland Civil- Defence chief to head teacher on nuclear fallout.
• “Replace –About a third of severe accidents would result in some cases of fatal cancer – but the conditional probability of the occurrence of one or more cases of fatal cancer, given a (very likely) severe accident as defined in this study, is about 0.34.” – Atomic Energy Authority advice to improve safety report.
• “It may seem ineffective when you call the studio, and they take your time and say they’ve noted what you say. But the next morning at the editorial meeting the complaints sheets are examined, and it makes a difference.” – John Pilger.
• “Scotland’s largest-ever peace demonstration happened on Sunday 5 October.” – News story
• “I would die for my country, but I could never let me country die for me.” – Neil Kinnock.
• “At first I was frightened, but now that I have heard the facts, I am still frightened.” – Warsaw policeman on Chernobyl disaster.
• “For some reason, after-the-holocaust games seem real popular just now.” – Popular-Games Designer.

1987

• “You have been listening to a party-political broadcast by the Minister for Wealth and Hellfire.” – Radio announcer.
• “Defending Britain without nuclear weapons is like sending in horses against the cavalry.” – Norman Tebbit.
• “Nuclear weapons serve no military purpose whatsoever.” - Robert Macnamara, Ex-US Defense Secretary.
• “Many elements of the New Thinking stem from the peace movement.” – Professor Tair Tairov, a Gorbachev advisor.
• “Both superpowers leaders have stressed their distaste for the concept of nuclear deterrence, which is a remarkable tribute to the various anti-nuclear movements’ long years of campaigning.” – Jonathan Steele.
• “Multilateral disarmament is a myth!” – Michael Heseltine.
• “The Ministry of Defence is like a huge supertanker, well captained, well engineered, well crewed, the systems continually updated, but with no one ever asking where the hell it is going.” – Ex-Defence Minister John Nott.
• “I will never give up our nuclear deterrent.” – Margaret Thatcher.

1988

• “I was the one who took the lead to bring about the first real arms-reduction talks that we’ve ever been able to hold with the Soviet Union.” – Ronald Reagan.
• “Increasingly New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policies have come to be an important expression of New Zealand’s identity as a mature Pacific nation.” – Helen Clark, New Zealand Government Minister.
• “Take us to Cuba.” – Peace camper in control room of nuclear submarine.
• “It would be better for the NATO summit to end in open dissension than for Germany to crawl on its knees.” – West-German Foreign Minister Genscher.
• “The public have to be persuaded that the successful management of arms control requires no slackening of NATO’s defence effort.” – Westminster Foreign- Affairs Committee Report.
• “Nuclear weapons legitimise any human depravity.” – Father Daniel Berrigan.
• “Fish (not caught locally)” – Menu in Lake District after Chernobyl.

1989

• “We have to be careful we don’t get in the way of superpower negotiations.” – Martin O’Neil, Shadow Defence Secretary.
• “The time of standing armies and military solutions is definitely over. We owe this lesson to nuclear weapons.” – Rear-Admiral Schmahling, German think-tank chief.
• “Are we now, under the guise of modernisation , regaining the capability that we ostensibly gave up under the UNF Treaty?” “Yes.” – General Yates in US Congress.