War & Peace Quote by Lawrence Eagleburger

Eagleburger’s line lands with the clipped urgency of a man who has sat in rooms where euphemisms are policy. “One nuclear war” is deliberately singular, almost banal in its phrasing, then it detonates into the correction: “the last nuclear - the last war, frankly.” That mid-sentence self-edit isn’t a stumble; it’s a rhetorical move that mimics dawning clarity. He drags the listener from a category (“nuclear war” as one option among others) to an endpoint (“the last war”), stripping away the strategic abstractions that let officials speak about escalation as if it were manageable.

The key phrase is “if it really gets out of hand.” In diplomatic language, that’s a loaded understatement. “Out of hand” usually refers to protests or negotiations; here it stands in for civilization-level collapse. He’s pointing at the terrifying truth of nuclear doctrine: the entire architecture of deterrence depends on controlling the uncontrollable. His “frankly” signals a break with the decorum that often masks moral judgment behind technical talk of yields, thresholds, and second-strike capabilities.

Then comes the quiet rebuke: “I just don’t think we ought to be prepared to accept that sort of thing.” The target isn’t only adversaries; it’s the normalization of the unthinkable inside national security culture. He’s challenging the bureaucratic habit of planning for catastrophe until it feels administratively plausible. In context, from a Cold War-era diplomat steeped in realpolitik, the statement reads less like idealism than like a hard-earned warning: once nuclear war becomes a scenario you can “accept,” you’ve already lost the argument that prevents it.