Panic Switch

“How can you call yourself a well-rounded engineer if you’ve never read Shakespeare? Get out. Get out! GET THE HELL OUT OF MY OFFICE!”

Admiral Hyman G. Rickover to then-Midshipman Michael DiMercurio

Nuclear program interview, 1980

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”

Luke 1:28, Luke 1:42

“The KGB is more than a secret police organization, more than an intelligence and counter-intelligence organization. It is an instrument for subversion, manipulation, and violence, for secret intervention in the affairs of other countries.”

Allen Dulles

USA’s first CIA director

The Craft of Intelligence: America’s Legendary Spy Master on the Fundamentals of Intelligence Gathering for a Free World, 1962

“Confrontation between intelligence organs never ended but with the end of the Cold War, contrary to expectations, actually intensified.”

Vyacheslav Ivanovich Trubnikov

Former Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service (KGB First Chief Directorate, now the SVR) and currently First Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia

“When in October 1991 Gorbachev decided to break up the KGB, his intention was to de-fang it. The most radical change was the severing of counterintelligence (Second Chief Directorate) from foreign intelligence (First Chief Directorate). The Second would eventually be renamed the FSB and the First the SVR. On paper, the KGB should have been cut down to size, a shadow of its former self. But it’s not the way things turned out.”

Robert Baer, The Fourth Man: The Hunt for a KGB Spy at the Top of the CIA and the Rise of Putin’s Russia, 2022

“I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo

Addressing Texas A&M University, April 2019

“Pompeo’s ‘confession’ is only a glimpse of the gigantic U.S. intelligence system’s ingloriousness, from the production of unsubstantiated intelligence that gave Washington pretexts to invade others to the engagement of assassinations, abuse of prisoners, wiretapping, and public opinion manipulation, among other things. The shameful and deplorable record, while having long since shattered the credibility of the intelligence community a long time ago, has also laid bare its nature of serving at the pleasure of U.S. decision makers, regardless of truth, facts, and human conscience, as Washington plays power politics and seeks to preserve a hegemonic position in the world.”

Xinhua Global Service

August 2021

“Endless revelations concerning warrantless wiretapping, the use of torture, and extrajudicial killing have done little to enhance the prestige or the moral standing of America’s defense and intelligence establishment.”

Patrick Radden Keefe, “The Surreal Case of a CIA Hacker’s Revenge,”

The New Yorker, 2022

“The emergence of autonomous weapons systems and the prospect of losing meaningful human control over the use of force are grave threats that demand urgent action.”

Report by Human Rights Watch and the Harvard Law School

International Human Rights Clinic, 2021

“The prospect of a future where the decision to take a human life is delegated to machines is abhorrent.”

Phil Twyford, New Zealand Minister of Disarmament and Arms Control

“Pentagon Confirms Russia Has a Submarine Nuke Delivery Drone.

This is very bad news.

The existence of Status-6 was originally greeted with some skepticism — the weapon sounds so horrible, so devastating, so completely over the top it is difficult to process that someone would actually want to build such a thing. Unfortunately for all of mankind, it appears that it is very real.”

Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, December 2016

“You find a leak. Flooding finds you.”

Submarine Force wisdom

“Save the mission, save the ship, save the reactor, then save the crew — in that order.”

Submarine Force directive

“I still have one torpedo and two main engines.”

Commander Michael Pacino, Captain of SSN-21 USS Seawolf

Operation Jailbreak

Bo Hai Bay, surrounded by attacking Red Chinese destroyers and aircraft

“If I have to die on this mission, I intend to die with an empty torpedo room.”

Lieutenant Anthony Pacino, Arabian Sea, Operation Panther