"Nuclear weapons repel all thought, perhaps because they can end all thought"

Alex Wellerstein provides a number of poignant quotes from Matt Amis on the absurdity of nuclear weapons:

What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening to use nuclear weapons. And we can’t get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves.

(This blog was a recommendation in my list of readings on atomic weapons.)

the arms race is a race between nuclear weapons and ourselves. It is them or us. What do nukes do? What are they for?...Nuclear weapons deter a nuclear holocaust by threatening a nuclear holocaust, and if things go wrong then that is what you get: a nuclear holocaust. If things don’t go wrong, and continue not going wrong for the next millennium of millennia (the boasted forty years being no more than forty winks in cosmic time), you get . . . What do you get? What are we getting?