...but highly placed sources within the Kennedy Administration disagreed: "[T]he assumption that the strategic nuclear balance mattered in any way was wrong... As far as I am concerned, it made no difference... If my memory serves me correctly, we had some five thousand strategic nuclear warheads as against t heir three hundred. Can anyone seriously tell me that their having three hundred and forty would have made any difference? The military balance wasn't changed. I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now..."

There are many ways to make the death rate increase.

One cannot fashion a credible deterrent out of an incredible action.

Short of nuclear war itself, population growth is the gravest issue the world faces. If we do not act, the problem will be solved by famine, riots, insurrection and war.

It is true that at the time [1962] we had a strategic nuclear force of approximately five thousand warheads compared to the Soviet's three hundred.

Action should be founded on contemplation, and those of us who act don't put enough time, don't give enough emphasis, to contemplation.

Neither conscience nor sanity itself suggests that the United States is, should or could be the global gendarme.