Political Decisions Quotes - Page 2

• A political decision has been made not to irritate the intelligence community. The spy agencies are really embarrassed, they're really sore - the revelations really hurt their mystique. The last ten years, they were getting the Zero Dark Thirty treatment - they're the heroes. The surveillance revelations bring them back to Big Brother kind of narratives, and they don't like that at all.

  Edward Snowden

  Hurt, Brother, Zero

  "Edward Snowden: A 'Nation' Interview". Interview with Katrina vanden Heuvel, Stephen F. Cohen, www.thenation.com. October 28, 2014.

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• 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

  Race, Command And Control, Decision

  Interview with Amitabh Pal, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. November 12, 2003.

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