War & Peace Quote by Omar N. Bradley

Bradley’s line lands like a confession from inside the machine. He’s not arguing that America (or the modern state) lacks intelligence; he’s saying its intelligence has been disastrously misallocated. “Nuclear giants” is a portrait of technical mastery swollen to mythic size, while “ethical infants” shrinks our moral development to something helpless, even pre-verbal. The sting is in the mismatch: civilization has grown muscles faster than it has grown a conscience.

The phrasing does quiet rhetorical work. “Ours is a world” universalizes blame, refusing the comfort of pointing at a single villain nation. Then the parallel clauses tighten like a vise: more about war than peace, more about killing than living. The repetition reads like an inventory of institutional priorities - budgets, research labs, military academies, news cycles - all training attention toward destruction because destruction is measurable, fundable, and politically legible. Peace and “living,” by contrast, are messy and slow, less glamorous, harder to quantify.

Context matters: Bradley was not a campus pacifist but a five-star general shaped by World War II and the early Cold War. That background gives the warning its edge. He’s speaking as someone who has seen competence and courage produce carnage at industrial scale, and who recognizes that nuclear weapons turn that scale into a species-level gamble. The subtext is a rebuke to policy culture: strategy without ethics becomes mere efficiency, and efficiency, in the nuclear age, is not progress - it’s acceleration toward catastrophe.