Warren Buffett says nuclear weapons pose the ultimate threat to humanity. Here are his 7 gravest warnings about them.

• Warren Buffett has been sounding the alarm on nuclear weapons for decades.
• The billionaire investor views a nuclear attack as the ultimate threat to humankind.
• Buffett has committed time and money to reducing the risk of a catastrophic attack.

Warren Buffett has repeatedly underlined the catastrophic threat posed by nuclear weapons, and urged governments to prevent their proliferation and minimize the risk of devastating attacks.

The billionaire investor considers a nuclear attack to be inevitable, and views it as the greatest risk for his Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate, the US, and the world. 

Buffett serves as an adviser to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, and he financed the nonprofit organization’s $100 million contribution to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) creation of a low-enriched uranium fuel bank. The effort is intended to discourage countries from pursuing their own uranium enrichment.

Here are Buffett’s 7 gravest warnings about nuclear weapons:

1. “The greatest danger facing our nation and the world is the global threat from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.” (2002)

2. “It is the ultimate problem of mankind. And it will happen someday. We’ve always had people who wish evil on others. Thousands of years ago, if you were psychotic or a religious fanatic or a malcontent, and you wished evil on your neighbor, you picked up a rock and threw it at them, and that was about the damage you could do. We went on to bows and arrows and cannons. But since 1945, the potential for inflicting enormous harm on incredible numbers of people has increased at a geometric pace.” (2006)

3. “The genie is out of the bottle on nuclear knowledge, and more and more people are going to know how to do enormous damage to the rest of the human race as the years go by. Whether it’s Iran or a terrorist organization, we live in a very, very, very dangerous world that is getting more dangerous as we go along. It should be paramount to minimize the risk that we really get into something that involves deaths on a scale that nobody’s ever contemplated before.” (2008)

4. “There is no problem remotely like the problem of what I call C-N-B-C, cyber, nuclear, chemical, and biological attacks. It’s the only external threat to Berkshire’s economic wellbeing over time. And I just hope when it happens that it’s minimized. In 1945, we unleashed something like the world had never seen, and that is a pop gun compared to what can be done now.” (2016)

5. “If I knew how to reduce the probabilities of the C-N-B-C-type mass attack, if I knew how to reduce the probability by 5%, all my money would go to that, no question. Maybe 1%.” (2016)

6. “You can win the game 99.99% of the time, but eventually anything that has any probability of happening, will happen.” (2016)

7. “I’ve been concerned since 1945 when the first atomic bomb was used. We have developed over these 72 years, since August of 1945, the ability around the world to almost destroy civilization. It’s the only real cloud on the horizon.” (2017)