A Quote by Herman Kahn

World War I broke out largely because of an arms race, and World War II because of the lack of an arms race.

Herman Kahn

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War Arms Arms Race Because Broke Lack Largely Out Race World World War World War I World War II

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Herman Kahn
American - Scientist
February 15, 1922 - July 7, 1983

Soviet mathematics was particularly good in the second half of the 20th century, basically because of the arms race, because the Soviet Union realized... World War II created the conditions for the Soviet Union to become a superpower.

Masha Gessen

That is potentially putting us all in the target hairs now is the reactivation of a new nuclear arms race. This arms race and this cold war is potentially hotter than it's been at any time in my lifetime.

Jill Stein

We could still have continued the arms race, but the arms race was pointless, and it was another reason we decided to start perestroika. It was senseless to continue to accumulate weapons. We had enough weapons to destroy life on Earth 1,000 times, and therefore it was very clear to us that the arms race could spiral out of control. A conflict could have started, as both the Americans and the Soviets realized, not out of a wrong political decision but because of a failure in the command-and-control systems.

Mikhail Gorbachev

Because the US has control of the sea. Because the US has built up its wealth. Because the US is the only country in the world really not to have a war fought on its territory since the time of the Civil War ... Therefore we can afford mistakes that would kill other countries. And therefore we can take risks that they can't ... the core answer to why the United States is like this is we didn't fight World War I and World War II and the Cold War here.

George Friedman

My opposition to war was not because of the horrors of war, not because war demands that the race offer up its very best in their full vigor, not because war means economic bankruptcy, domination of races by famine and disease, but because war is so completely ineffective, so stupid. It settles nothing.

Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch

World War II made war reputable because it was a just war. I wouldn't have missed it for anything. You know how many other just wars there have been? Not many. And the guys I served with became my brothers. If it weren't for World War II, I'd now be the garden editor of The Indianapolis Star. I wouldn't have moved away.

Kurt Vonnegut

We didn't win the Cold War, we were just a big bank that bankrupted a smaller bank because we had an arms race that wiped the Russians out.

Norman Mailer

Almost everything about American society is affected by World War II: our feelings about race; our feelings about gender and the empowerment of women, moving women into the workplace; our feelings about our role in the world. All of that comes in a very direct way out of World War II.

Rick Atkinson

One began to hear it said that World War I was the chemists' war, World War II was the physicists' war, World War III (may it never come) will be the mathematicians' war.

Philip J. Davis

We do not have the right to forget that reactionary imperialism exists and its forces actively operate in the world, that they encourage the arms race and that they try to restore the spirit of the Cold War.

Andrei Grechko

World War II broke out in 1939, and many people credit that war with saving the economy.

Robert Kiyosaki

After every major conflict - World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union - what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep across-the-board cuts.

Leon Panetta

I think in many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II. After all, where else in the world at this point did you have Americans in uniform who were being bombed by Nazi planes four years before the U.S. entered World War II? Hitler and Mussolini jumped in on the side of Francisco Franco and his Spanish nationalists, sent them vast amounts of military aid, airplanes, tanks - and Mussolini sent 80,000 ground troops as well - because they wanted a sympathetic ally in power. So I think it really was the opening act of World War II.

Adam Hochschild

Americans, particularly after World War II, tended to romanticize war because in World War II our cause was the cause of humanity, and our soldiers brought home glory and victory, and thank God that they did. But it led us to romanticize it to some extent.

Neil Sheehan

One can imagine a kind of hormonal arms race or genetic arms race, whether it's to do with height or IQ, conceivably, in the future. So it's limitless, and that's another of the features that sets it apart from medical intervention.

Michael Sandel

It's important to remember that World War II was experienced very much as a continuity in that sense. Most of World War II in most of Europe wasn't a war; it was an occupation. The war was at the beginning and the end, except in Germany and the Soviet Union, and even there really only at the end. So the rest of time it's an occupation, which in some ways was experienced as an extension of the interwar period. World War II was simply an extreme form, in a whole new key, of the disruption of normal life that began in 1914.

Tony Judt

A Quote by Herman Kahn

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