Ballistic Missiles Quotes

Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon.

It's funny how these days, when every household has its own inter-continental ballistic missile, you hardly even think about them. . . . A lot of us, though, have started painting the missiles different colors, even decorating them with our own designs, like butterflies or stenciled flowers. They take up so much space in the backyard, they might as well look nice, and the government leaflets don't say that you have to use the paint they supply.

Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? If memory serves, it was not the Vatican.

Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons?

a millisecond before fifty-two tonnes of intercontinental ballistic missile obliterated him completely.

Nice prong," said Sophronia after a moment. Felix grinned and waggled his eyebrows lasciviously. "Thank you for saying so." Sophronia was instantly suspicious. "You mean that isn't a ballistic exploding steam missile fire prong?" "No such thing, my dear Ria, but it certainly sounds wicked, doesn't it?" "Then what is it?" He handed the evil-looking object over. "Ah, a portable boot-blackening apparatus with pressure-controlled particulate emissions, and attached accoutrement to achieve the highest possible shine. For the stylish gentleman on the go.

The insanity of the human race had reached its historical zenith. The Cold War was at its height. Nuclear missiles capable of destroying the Earth ten times over could be launched at a moment’s notice, spread out among the countless missile silos dotting two continents and hidden within ghostlike nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines patrolling deep under the sea. A single Lafayette- or Yankee-class submarine held enough warheads to destroy hundreds of cities and kill hundreds of millions, but most people continued their lives as if nothing was wrong. As an astrophysicist, Ye was strongly against nuclear weapons. She knew this was a power that should belong only to the stars. She knew also that the universe had even more terrible forces: black holes, antimatter, and more. Compared to those forces, a thermonuclear bomb was nothing but a tiny candle. If humans obtained mastery over one of those other forces, the world might be vaporized in a moment. In the face of madness, rationality was powerless. *

During the late 1970s, a coded switch was finally placed in the control center of every SAC ballistic missile. It unlocked the missile, not the warhead. And as a final act of defiance, SAC demonstrated the importance of code management to the usefulness of any coded switch. The combination necessary to launch the missiles was the same at every Minuteman site: 00000000. Peurifoy

Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon. In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.

The United States once planned to nuke the Moon. According to physicist Leonard Reiffel, one of the leaders of the project, hitting the Moon with an intercontinental ballistic missile would have been relatively easy to accomplish.

think in terms of Iran, our differences with Iran stem from policies and actions of its government, and we've talked about that for some time, specifically the support for international terrorist groups, the opposition to Arab-Israeli peace process, their pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and the ballistic missile systems with which to deliver such weapons, and their poor human rights record.

In my childhood, the Soviet Union always seemed close, a few minutes' flight by intercontinental ballistic missile. Reader's Digest featured articles on Soviet and American nuclear arsenals. The obsession with the superpowers' destructive capacity was a way to ignore the people who suffered directly in the Cold War, such as the Latin Americans we kept invading and the East Europeans the Soviets kept invading.

We are asleep again, while North Korea tests nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, Iran is not far behind, and ISIS, a movement as brutal and psychotic as Nazism, emerges. It had never been my intention to write a sequel to One Second After, but wherever I spoke that was always a question: What happens next? I resisted for five years; my publisher, Tom Doherty, and his senior editor Bob Gleason dropping major “hints” that they wanted more. During those years I did give them a book which

But there was even more that Khrushchev knew and Kennedy didn’t—secrets that Khrushchev had chosen not to reveal at the time and that remained unknown to any Americans (including me) for twenty-five years or more. First, that the number of Soviet troops116 in Cuba was not seven thousand, as we had at first supposed, or seventeen thousand, as the CIA estimated at the end of the crisis, but forty-two thousand. And second, that along with SAMs and ballistic missiles, they had been secretly equipped with over a hundred tactical nuclear weapons, warheads included.

Hurricane Daisy delayed the continuing surveillance, however when they could resume flying on October 14th, the crystal-clear photos indicated that launch sites were being prepared for both mobile medium-sized missiles, and more extensive sites for the larger-sized ballistic missiles. Although the actual missiles were not yet in place, the CIA understood the enormity of the threat. Missiles that could reach 2,000 miles into the United States could not be ignored! With Cuba only 90 miles to the south of Key West, it posed an extreme threat to national security. On October 22, 1962, the discovery of these missiles was finally announced to the public, and a naval quarantine was implemented around Cuba. President Kennedy was careful not to call it a “blockade,” since use of the word would be considered an act of war! Regardless, U.S. warships were deployed that would intercept and board any ship heading to the island. Castro announced that Cuba had the right to defend itself from American aggression. He added that the decision to deploy missiles was a joint action on the part of both Cuba and the Soviet Union. Kennedy discounted Castro’s bluster but not the threat. The final decision to remove the missiles from Cuban soil would be between Khrushchev and Kennedy, without any Cuban involvement. Allowing Khrushchev to save face, Kennedy agreed to remove American missiles aimed at the Soviet Union from Italy and Turkey. It also included a commitment that the United States would not invade Cuba.

He pieced together incidents at intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) sites across the US, including Malmstrom, Minot, F.E. Warren, Ellsworth, Vandenberg and Walker air force bases. He also found evidence UAPs were taking an interest in nuclear weapons storage areas at the air force’s Wurtsmith and Loring bases, as well as the RAF Bentwaters base in England. ‘It’s clear they’re tampering with the weapons. Now is it because they have our best interests at heart?’ Hastings tells me. ‘Is that what’s going on? Or do they have a need for this planet and they don’t want us to screw it up with radioactivity. Do they plan to invade, and they don’t want to inherit a radioactive husk of a world? I

October 5, 1957, local time, an R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile lifted off from the Soviet Union’s top-secret launch complex at Baikonur, in Kazakhstan, and arced eastward into the predawn darkness over central Asia.

The West believed they had won. It was that belief that allowed them to let down their guard, focus inward, find the wrongs in their society, and exploit and even exacerbate them for political gain. It was a myopic strategy. He had expected more of his Cold War rival. That they did not study or learn from their history did not bode well for their future. The death of the West. The USSR hadn’t needed ballistic missile submarines or a nuclear arsenal larger than the United States’. All they had needed to defeat the Americans was patience.

If we could launch intercontinental ballistic missiles and walk on the moon, surely we could prevent two quarters of negative GDP growth.

Indian Ballistic Missile Defence Programme is an initiative to develop and deploy a multi-layered ballistic missile defence system to protect from ballistic missile attacks. Introduced in light of the ballistic missile threat from Pakistan and China, it is a double-tiered system consisting of two interceptor missiles, namely the Prithvi Air Defence (PAD) missile for high altitude interception, and the Advanced Air Defence (AAD) Missile for lower altitude interception. The two-tiered shield should be able to intercept any incoming missile launched 5,000 kilometres away. India became the fourth country to have

Germany’s production of the V-2, the world’s first long-range ballistic missile, represented both the soaring heights of the Nazi regime’s technological achievements and the barbaric depths of its inhumanity.

he will then deliver a totally redundant speech about all the things you’re not allowed to take inside: scissors, swords, knives, guns, bombs, ballistic missiles, tactical nuclear weapons, etc. Then you

German A9 and A10 long range missiles. We designed a ballistic missile and mobile launch system, the

attack and denying involvement. It will take weeks for the remnants of the US intelligence community to assess that one of these three governments is probably lying, but even then the US government won’t have irrefutable evidence of complicity. Unlike a ballistic missile or bomb delivered by enemy land-, air-, or seacraft, the origin of what analysts will call a “container-based improvised nuclear device” is difficult to determine and impossible to prove. Nuclear forensics will ultimately provide strong evidence that the fissile material used in the device originated from the country under suspicion. Signals intelligence will record celebrations and praise of the attack by midlevel officials in that country’s military and intelligence establishment. However, the intelligence reporting taken as a whole will

fact, there was no such thing at that time—or later—as a "missile gap," a phrase that Democrats and others flung at the GOP during the 1958 and 1960 election campaigns. The Sputnik launches indeed demonstrated that the Soviets had an edge in capacity for thrust—the ability to boost satellites into orbit. But in fact the Soviets lagged badly in the production of usable warheads and did not deploy an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) during the Eisenhower years.

We had tens of thousands of ballistic missiles we could pop into low-earth orbit in the blink of an eye so we could obliterate each other on some future day when that perfect mix of nationalism, enmity, and stupidity convinced our kleptocrats that a dead planet was preferable to living under the yoke of some other culture’s facade of good governance.

The China National Space Agency (created in 1993) may be the formal NASA equivalent, facilitating international agreements and cooperation, but it still operates in tandem with the PLA and is involved in the defense industry.12 The China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, a state-owned company, specializes in tactical ballistic missiles, anti-ship missiles, land-attack cruise missiles, anti-satellite interceptors, and small tactical satellites. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation produces launch vehicles and large satellites. Both of these organizations operate closely together.

I didn’t cry, because, actually, I was an intercontinental ballistic missile, with an atomic warhead; they don’t cry. Why

They are also increasing at unprecedented speeds. In 2021, the U.S. Space Force tracked 1,968 missile launches around the globe, a number that “increased more than over three and a half times in 2022,” says Space Systems Command’s Colonel Brian Denaro. As of September 2023, Russia continues to notify the U.S. of its ballistic missile test launches. No one wants to start a nuclear war by accident

All forms of passive defense, however, were irrelevant to wire-guided missiles or aimed ballistic projectiles, whether anti-tank missiles or rocket-propelled grenades.

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.

As of 2023, there are five nations known to have a full “triad” of nuclear weapons (intercontinental ballistic missiles, air-delivery bombs, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles): the United States (5,244 warheads), Russia (5,889), China (410), Pakistan (170), and India (164).[8] Three other nations are known to have a more limited form of delivery system: France (290), the United Kingdom (225), and North Korea (around 30).

That conclusion can be substantiated by their actions in office; the abrogation of the anti-ballistic missile treaty, the vast buildup in military expenditures at the expense of other priorities that the majority might consider more important; the installation of a world-wide system of regional defense commands, and the insistence on developing weapons of incredible destruction for use in space.

Government sales constituted 100 percent of the market for integrated circuits until 1964, and the federal government remained the largest buyer of chips for several years after that. The military had started funding research on new types of electric circuits in the early 1950s, when the tyranny of numbers first emerged. The problems inherent in complex circuits containing large numbers of individual components were particularly severe in defense applications. Such circuits tended to be big and heavy, but the services needed equipment that was light and portable. “The general rule of thumb in a missile was that one extra pound of payload cost $100,000 worth of extra fuel,” Noyce recalled. “The shipping cost of sending up a 50-pound computer was too high even for the Pentagon.” Further, space-age weapons had to be absolutely reliable—a goal that was inordinately difficult to achieve in a circuit with several thousand components and several thousand hand-soldered connections. When the Air Force ordered electronic equipment for the Minuteman I, the first modern intercontinental ballistic missile, specifications called for every single component—not just every radio but every transistor and every resistor in every radio—to have its own individual progress chart on which production, installation, checking, and rechecking could be recorded. Testing, retesting, and re-retesting more than doubled the cost of each electronic part.

Give the kid a bucket of Legos—come back in an hour, and he’s made a functioning long-range ballistic missile.

The modern magic, like the old, has its boastful practitioners: "I can write programs that control air traffic, intercept ballistic missiles, reconcile bank accounts, control production lines." To which the answer comes, "So can I, and so can any man, but do they work when you do write them?

As the Nazi persecution of the Jews began in Germany in 1933, preparing the ground for the horrors of the Second World War, both the United States and Britain benefitted from the arrival on their shores of philosophers and scientists fleeing for their lives. Eventually, the United States would be the first nation to develop a nuclear weapon using the science brought there by German refugees, including Albert Einstein (1879–1955). When the war was over and the US and Soviet victors moved in to cherry pick the best Nazi scientists to come and work for them, the United States got Wernhervon Braun (1912–77). Braun was the physicist and rocket designer who created the deadly long-range V-2 rocket that rained death and destruction on London. But he was not merely a rocket designer; he was also a member of the Nazi Party and an SS officer. The Americans grabbed him before the Soviets could, giving them the edge in ballistic missiles with which to project thermonuclear weapons at targets several thousand miles away. Braun was responsible for the rocket science that made the United States the first nation to put a man on the moon.

ballistic missile.” Eventually, the Nazis’ research efforts would culminate in the creation of the Vergeltungswaffe (in English, “Vengeance weapon”) or “V-2 Rocket.” The V-2 was a liquid alcohol and oxygen-fueled, long-range ballistic rocket equipped with a guidance system. It was also the first rocket to enter space, as evidenced by a Nazi test in 1944.[414] At 47 feet long and a weight of 28,000-29,000 pounds (12,701 kg-13,154 kg), the V-2 carried 1,600 pounds (725 kg) of high explosives and could travel 200 miles (320 km) at a peak altitude of 50 miles (80 km).[415]

With skills falling out of demand in less time than it takes to acquire and master them, with educational credentials losing value against their cost of purchase by the year or even turning into ‘negative equity’ long before their allegedly lifelong ‘sell-by’ date, with places of work disappearing with little or no warning, and with the course of life sliced into a series of ever shorter one-off projects, life prospects look increasingly like the haphazard convolutions of smart rockets in search of elusive, ephemeral and restless targets, rather than a predesigned and predetermined, predictable trajectory of a ballistic missile.

When he heard the news, Luftwaffe General Walter Dornberg, the director of the Peenemünde center, exultantly crowed to his staff, “This afternoon, the spaceship was born.” But, as Dornberg knew, this first successful test flight of the V-2 rocket—the world’s first long-range ballistic missile—had a much more immediate importance

I felt something rub against my leg. I looked down and almost shot out of the water like a ballistic missile. Sliding along beside me was a five-foot-long mako shark.

What if technological species pop up all the time, in all appropriate locations, everywhere in the universe, and when they do evolve, they change the conditions of their own planet so drastically that they obliterate themselves and perhaps all life on that planet within a century or two, leaving little or no trace of their own existence, beyond the fossilised rubble they created and then destroyed? The notion that humans could in some way destroy the living conditions that encouraged the evolution of a contemplative and curious bipedal mammal with a gift for malevolence, metalwork and ballistic missiles has been around for a long time.

On August 10, John McCone, Robert Kennedy, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara met in Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s ornate conference room on the seventh floor of the State Department. The subject was Cuba. McCone remembered “a suggestion being made to liquidate top people in the Castro regime,” including Castro and his brother Raul, the Cuban defense minister, who had just returned from a weapons-buying trip to Moscow. He found the idea abhorrent. The director saw a greater danger ahead. He predicted that the Soviet Union was going to give Castro nuclear weapons—medium-range ballistic missiles capable of striking the United States. He had been worrying about that possibility for more than four months. He had no intelligence, nothing to go on save gut instinct. McCone was the only one who saw the threat clearly. “If I were Khrushchev,” he said, “I’d put offensive missiles in Cuba. Then I’d bang my shoe on the desk and say to the United States, ‘How do you like looking down the end of a gun barrel for a change? Now, let’s talk about Berlin and any other subject that I choose.’” No one seems to have believed him. “The experts unanimously and adamantly agreed that this was beyond the realm of possibility,” notes an agency history of McCone’s years. “He stood absolutely alone.

The CIA had been covering Cuba with U-2 flights for years. And then, in August 1962, they hit pay dirt and came up with the pictures that showed the Russians were planting ballistic missiles right next door, SS-4s and SS-5s. When Kennedy was shown the site constructions, he asked, “How do we know these sites are being manned?” They showed Kennedy a picture taken from 72,000 feet, showing a worker taking a dump in an outdoor latrine. The picture was so clear you could see that guy reading a newspaper.

president, Kerry, Moniz, Sherman, and many others, we obtained more than the necessary support. The congressional review period expired without a vote of disapproval. The deal was done! The Iran agreement is proof of the value of tough sanctions, when combined with skillful, relentless diplomacy, to accomplish the seemingly unachievable in international affairs. The JCPOA was a finely detailed agreement that effectively closed all pathways to Iran developing a nuclear weapon and ensured Iran would face the most rigorous, intrusive international inspections regime ever established. It was never able, nor was it intended, to halt all of Iran’s nefarious behavior—its support for terrorism, its destabilization of neighboring states, its hostility toward Israel, or its ballistic missile program. Still, it effectively addressed our biggest concern and that of the international community—preventing Iran from posing a far more dangerous threat to the region and the world through its acquisition of nuclear weapons. Understandably, Israel always said it viewed Iran’s nuclear program as an existential threat. So, surely, the removal of that threat would be welcome news to Israel, our Gulf partners, and their backers. In reality, we discovered that removing the nuclear threat was not in fact their principal motivation. Rather, Israel and the Gulf Arab countries aimed to put permanent and crippling economic and military pressure on Iran such that either the regime collapsed, or it was too weak to wield meaningful influence in the region. The nuclear deal, which allowed Iran to access much of its own frozen assets held abroad under sanctions, in exchange for full and verifiable compliance with the terms of the agreement, was deemed worse than no deal at all by those who prioritized keeping the international community’s boot on Iran’s neck above halting its

Many foreign policy leaders had said that Trump gave Kim (Kim Jong Un, dictator of North Korea) too much by agreeing to meet without formal, written conditions. "So, have you given Kim too much power?" I asked. Kim had said he wouldn't shoot more ICBMs (Intercontinental ballistic missiles)."Because if he's defiant, if he shoots one of those ICBMs, what are you going to do sir?" "If he shoots, he shoots," Trump said.

Theoretical and experimental physicists, working on problems of esoteric intellectual interest, provided the knowledge that eventually was pulled together to make the H-bomb, while mathematicians, geophysicists, and metallurgists, wittingly or unwittingly, made the discoveries necessary to construct intercontinental ballistic missiles. Physicists doing basic work in optics and infrared spectroscopy may have been shocked to find that their research would help government and corporate engineers build detection and surveillance devices for use in Indochina. The basic research of molecular biologists, biochemists, cellular biologists, neuropsychologists, and physicians was necessary for CBW (chemical-biological warfare) agents, herbicides, and gaseous crowd-control devices… Anthropologists studying social systems of mountain tribes in Indochina were surprised when the CIA collected their information for use in counterinsurgency operations. Psychologists explored the parameters of human intelligence-testing instruments which, once developed, passed out of their hands and now help the draft boards conscript men for Vietnam and the U.S. Army allocate manpower more effectively. Further, these same intelligence-testing instruments are now an integral part of the public school tracking systems that, beginning at an early age, reduce opportunities of working-class children for higher education and social mobility

First, that the number of Soviet troops116 in Cuba was not seven thousand, as we had at first supposed, or seventeen thousand, as the CIA estimated at the end of the crisis, but forty-two thousand. And second, that along with SAMs and ballistic missiles, they had been secretly equipped with over a hundred tactical nuclear weapons, warheads included. So

First, a review of the SOSUS network printouts showed that the Navy had tracked and periodically lost contact with a Soviet ballistic missile submarine that had left Kamchatka late in February. The last SOSUS recordings placed the boat outside its normal mission box and much closer to Hawaii than the usual patrol of this type. Second, the NORAD satellites’ late-night recordings on March 7 revealed flashes of radiant light that could have been caused only by burning missile fuel. Third, around the fifteenth or sixteenth of March, the University of Hawaii research ship Teritu reported finding an irradiated oil slick drifting off the Hawaiian Leewards. Tests showed the oil slick was composed of diesel fuel of a type used by Chinese and Soviet submarines and fissile material of a type used in Soviet, and possibly Chinese, nuclear warheads.

One thing is clear, however. In the tightly controlled hierarchy of Soviet ballistic submarine forces, no deviation from standard procedures happened in a vacuum. A missile submarine would never have been assigned an extended mission except by very high authority. The orders that arrived at Rybachiy Naval Base to dispatch the submarine under such unusual circumstances could only have originated in Moscow. The inexplicable order to rush K-129 back to sea was only one of several mysterious events that occurred before the boat’s departure. The order to sail early was so odious that some of the sub’s officers and sailors risked stern disciplinary action to make their opinions known. In the Soviet navy, with political officers throughout the ranks, there was usually far less open complaining than in most of the world’s military establishments.

This new mission would be their third in less than a year, meaning that most of the regular K-129 crew would have spent almost eight months of service submerged in their submarine in a little more than a twelve-month period. Such a rigorous schedule was highly unusual, except in an emergency or time of war. In peacetime, Soviet ballistic missile submarines, because their entire extended missions were spent underwater, were never turned around so suddenly for another arduous assignment. K-129’s crew was long overdue for a rest and the boat needed refurbishing and repairs from the most recent mission.

This vital piece of intelligence proved that the K-129 sank far closer to Hawaii than the government was ever to reveal. The oil slick sample returned by the Teritu proved that the source of the radiation could only have been from a smashed Soviet ballistic missile warhead. Thus, the boat’s logs had to be suppressed, and its crew sworn to secrecy. More than thirty years after the incident, spokespersons for the University of Hawaii claim they have no idea what happened to the ship’s deck logs. The Teritu’s crew and scientists who were aboard at the time refused to be interviewed about their discovery. The crew members of the research ship were compelled by federal agents to sign confidentiality agreements, never to discuss the voyage that discovered the radiated oil slick off the Hawaiian Islands.

Drastic, and heretofore unexplained, changes in naval procedures also support the theory that Brezhnev and the Soviet military were alarmed by intelligence that K-129’s sinking might have been the result of a rogue attempt to launch a nuclear missile. A significant new procedure was adopted early in 1970, requiring the launch codes for all ballistic missile submarines to be held by General Staff headquarters. This change in long-standing procedures thereby denied any rogue or mutinous crew the ability to arm and aim its missiles without direct orders, accompanied by arming codes, from a central command. The submarine missile launch codes were also removed from the operational fleet and returned to supreme Soviet navy headquarters. Before this change, the captain kept most of the necessary targeting and launch codes, and awaited only a confirmation code from fleet headquarters to be delivered with the final order to attack. That additional code, when added to the captain’s code, unlocked the fail-safe system. Under the new procedures, submarine commanders were no longer entrusted with the firing codes before they sailed on missions; no codes were kept in the ships’ safe in the captain’s quarters. All instructions necessary to arm the mechanisms and set the target courses would henceforth be radioed to submarine commanders only after a red alert condition was declared. Shortly after the launch procedures were changed, the Soviet military took another step to safeguard deployment of nuclear weapons. The KGB was stripped of its key role as custodian of nuclear warheads. Control of nuclear devices was given to the Soviet army, navy, and air force units that deployed these weapons. Up until the end of 1969, the KGB had physical possession of all nuclear warheads for land, sea, and air delivery. Military commanders had to requisition nuclear weaponry from the KGB.

The Space-Based Infrared System is America’s twenty-first-century version of Paul Revere. But it’s not the British who are coming, not on foot or on horseback. It is a nuclear-armed, intercontinental ballistic missile. The all-powerful, unstoppable, civilization-threatening ICBM.