It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This world in arms is not spending money alone. The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.Įvery gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies-in the final sense-a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. United States Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated.īodies of Confederate dead gathered for burial after the Battle of Antietam, Sharpsburg, Maryland, 1862. What can the world-or any nation in it-hope for if no turning is found on this dread road? This has been the way of life forged by eight years of fear and force. Soviet leaders, however, have seemed to persuade themselves-or tried to persuade their people-otherwise.Īnd so came to pass that the Soviet Union itself has shared and suffered the very fears it has fostered in the rest of the world.
The free nations, most solemnly and repeatedly, have assured the Soviet Union that their firm association has never had any aggressive purpose whatsoever. The leaders of the Soviet Union chose another. The United States and our valued friends, the other free nations, chose one road.
The nations of the world divided to follow two distinct roads. This common purpose lasted an instant-and perished. All these war-weary peoples shared, too, this concrete, decent purpose: to guard vigilantly against the domination ever again of the world by a single, unbridled aggressive power. They were triumphant of building, in honor of their dead, the only fitting monument-an age of just peace. In the spring of victory, the soldiers of the Western Allies met the soldiers of Russia in the center of Europe. It weighs the chance for peace with sure, clear knowledge of what happened to the vain hope of 1945. It shuns not only all crude counsel of despair, but also the self-deceit of easy illusion. Today the hope of free men remains stubborn and brave, but it is sternly disciplined by experience.