Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Soviet Union

  • Remembering Eisenhower’s Farewell Address

    President Eisenhower's farewell addressJanuary 17, 2011 marked the 50th anniversary of President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the nation in which he warned of the dangers of the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex.  I think he would be shocked to see how this influence has grown over the past half century and how it has manifested in the country’s immense military budgets, the nuclear arms race, our permanent war footing, the failure to achieve meaningful disarmament, and the illegal wars the US has initiated.  In addition to all of this, there is the influence of the military-industrial complex on the media, academia, the Congress and the citizenry.  It has also ensnared US allies, like those in NATO, in its net.  Eisenhower believed that the only way to assure that the military-industrial complex can be meshed “with our peaceful methods and goals” is through “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry.”


    Eisenhower was 70 years old when his term as president came to an end.  He had been a General of the Army and hero of World War II, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces Europe, and for eight years the president of the United States.  His Farewell Address was, above all else, a warning to his fellow Americans.  He stated, “The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.”  He worried about what this conjunction would mean in the future, famously stating, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.  The potential for misplaced power exists and will persist.”


    Eisenhower feared that this powerful complex would weaken democracy.  “We must never,” he said, “let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”  He felt there was only one force that could control this powerful military-industrial complex, and that was the power of the people.  In Eisenhower’s view it was only “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” that was capable of defending the republic “so that security and liberty prosper together.”


    What kind of report card would President Eisenhower give our country today if he could come back and observe what has transpired over the past 50 years?  For starters, I believe he would be appalled by the enormous increase in influence of the military-industrial complex.  Today the military receives over half of the discretionary funds that Congress allocates, over $500 billion a year for the Department of Defense, plus the special allocations for the two wars in which the country is currently engaged.  The Department of Defense budget does not take into account the interest on the national debt attributable to past wars, or the tens of billions of dollars in the Energy Department budget for nuclear arms, or the funds allocated for veterans benefits.  When it is totaled, the US is spending over a trillion dollars annually on “defense.”


    Surely Eisenhower would be dismayed to see how many national institutions have been drawn into and made subservient to the military-industrial complex, which some would now refer to as the military-industrial-Congressional-academic-media complex.  Every district in Congress seems to have links to the complex through jobs provided by defense contractors, putting pressure on Congressional representatives to assure that public funds flow to private defense contractors.  At the same time, academia and the mainstream media provide support and cover to keep public funds flowing for wars and their preparations.


    Near the end of his speech, Eisenhower lamented that he had not made greater progress toward disarmament during his time in office.  He said, “Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative.”  It was true then, and remains so today.  He continued, “Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.  Because this need is so sharp and apparent, I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment.”  Indeed, there was reason for his disappointment, since the number of nuclear weapons in the US arsenal increased under his watch from approximately 1,400 in 1953 to over 20,000 in 1960.  I suspect that he would be even more disappointed today to find that the US has not been more proactive in leading the way toward disarmament and particularly nuclear disarmament since the end of the Cold War.


    Fifty years ago, Eisenhower feared the threat that nuclear war posed to the world and to our country, and expressed his desire for peace: “As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war – as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years – I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.”  He recognized that much remains to be done to “reach the goal of peace with justice.”  That was true when Eisenhower made his Farewell Address and it remains true today.


    We would do well to reflect upon the deeply felt concerns of this military and political leader as he retired from public service.  He prayed “that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.”  That was his vision, and he passed the baton to us to overcome the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex.   Our challenge is to exercise our power as citizens of a democracy and to use that power to attain a more peaceful and nuclear weapons-free world.

  • John F. Kennedy Speaks of Peace

    On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated.  Nearly every American who is old enough can remember where he was when he heard the news of Kennedy’s death.  In my case, I was on a train platform in Japan when I was told of the assassination.  A Japanese man came up to me and said, “I’m very sorry to tell you, but your president has been shot and killed.”  I remember being stunned by the news and by a sense of loss. 

    On June 10, 1963, just six months before his life was cut short, Kennedy gave the Commencement Address at American University.  His topic was peace.  He called it “the most important topic on earth.”  As a decorated officer who served in combat during World War II, he knew about war.

    Kennedy spoke of a generous and broad peace: “What kind of peace do I mean?  What kind of peace do we seek?” he asked.  “Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons or war.  Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave.  I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children – not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women – not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”

    He recognized that nuclear weapons had created “a new face of war.”  He argued, “Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces.  It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War.  It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.”

    Just eight months before giving this speech, Kennedy had been face to face with the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis.  He knew that it was possible for powerful, nuclear-armed nations to come to the brink of nuclear war, and he knew what nuclear war would mean for the future of humanity.  “I speak of peace,” he said, “as the necessary rational end of rational men.”

    Kennedy asked us to examine our attitudes toward peace.  “Too many of us think it is impossible,” he said.  “Too many think it unreal.   But that is a dangerous defeatist belief.  It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable – that mankind is doomed – that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.”

    He understood that there was no “magic formula” to achieve peace.  “Genuine peace,” he argued, “must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts.  It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation.  For peace is a process – a way of solving problems.”  He also recognized that peace requires perseverance. 

    Kennedy gave wise counsel in his speech.  In the midst of the Cold War, he called for reexamining our attitude toward the Soviet Union.  “Among the traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war.”  He pointed out the achievements of the Soviet people and the suffering they endured during World War II. 

    In the speech, Kennedy announced two important decisions.  First, he pledged to begin negotiations on a comprehensive nuclear test ban.  Second, he initiated a moratorium on atmospheric nuclear testing.  The Partial Test Ban Treaty would be signed that August, ratified by the Senate in September and would go into effect on October 10, 1963.  The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was not reached until 1996, and the United States Senate rejected ratification of this treaty in 1999.  The treaty still has not entered into force.

    In his insightful and inspiring speech, Kennedy did get one thing wrong.  He said that “[t]he United States, as the world knows, will never start a war.”  One can only imagine Kennedy’s severe disappointment had he lived to see the escalation of the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War and many other costly and illegal wars the U.S. has started and engaged in since his death. 

    Every American should read Kennedy’s Commencement Address at American University and be reminded that peace is a possibility that is worth the struggle.  As Kennedy understood, war does not bring peace.  Peace itself is the only path to peace.  Kennedy believed, “No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.  Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable – and we believe they can do it again.”  Peace is attainable.  It is within our reach, if only we will learn from the past, stretch ourselves and believe that this is our destiny.

  • Zero Nuclear Weapons for a Sane and Sustainable World

    This is a transcript of the 2010 Frank K. Kelly Lecture on Humanity’s Future, delivered by Max Kampelman on February 25, 2010 at Santa Barbara City College.

    It will take time, patience, pain and good fortune, but our welfare as human beings, indeed the survival for many, must be based on more than the threat of nuclear retaliation.  A balance of nuclear terror is not an adequate basis for our survival as human beings or as a country, or for our country’s strategic policy, although it did recently serve to permit the United States and Russia to substantially reduce the number of our strategic nuclear weapons.  What does remain and cannot be ignored, however, is the existence of active rogue and terrorist forces in the world seeking nuclear capabilities for their dangerous purposes.  I am convinced that zero nuclear weapons, urged by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and others, must be our immediate civilized goal.

    Where are we heading?  Are democracy and liberty our human destiny, as suggested by Francis Fukiyama?  Or do we face an inevitable violent clash of civilizations on perhaps a worldwide scale, as suggested by Samuel Huntington?  

    Let me point out that during my childhood, one lifetime, strange as it may appear to the young among us, there were no vitamin tablets, no antibiotics, no televisions, no dial telephones, no refrigerators, no FM radios, no synthetic fibers, no dishwashers, no electric blankets, no airmail, no transatlantic airlines, no instant coffee, no Xerox, no air conditioning, no frozen foods, no contact lenses, no birth control pills, no ballpoint pens, no transistors.  The list can go on.

    In my lifetime, medical knowledge available to physicians has increased perhaps more than tenfold.  I am told that more than 80 percent of all scientists who ever lived are alive today.  The average life span of the human being keeps steadily increasing.  We now have complicated computers, new materials, new biotechnological processes and more, which are altering every phase of our lives, deaths, and even reproduction.  

    We are living in a period of information power with the telefax, electronic mail, the super computer, high definition television, the laser printer, the cellular phone, the optical disc, video conferences, the satellite dish – instruments which still appear to my eyes to be near miracles.  No generation since the beginning of the human race has experienced or absorbed so much change so rapidly – and it is probably only the beginning.  As an indication of that, more than 100,000 scientific journals annually publish the flood of new knowledge that pours out of the world’s laboratories.

    These developments are stretching our minds and our grasp of reality to the outermost dimensions of our capacity to understand them.  Moreover, as we look ahead we must agree that we have only the minutest glimpse of what our universe really is.  We also barely understand the human brain and its energy; and the endless horizons of space and the mysteries found in the great depths of our seas are still virtually unknown to us.  Our science today is indeed still a drop, and our ignorance remains an ocean.

    It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention.  I suggest the corollary is also true; invention is the mother of necessity.  Technology and communication are necessitating basic changes in our lives.  Information has become more accessible in all parts of our globe, putting authoritarian governments at a serious disadvantage.  The world is very much smaller.  There is no escaping the fact that the sound of a whisper or a whimper in one part of the world can immediately be heard in all parts of the world – and consequences follow.  And yet, the world body politic has not kept pace with the world of scientific and technological achievements.  Just as the individual human body must adjust to the climate in which it lives, so is it necessary for governments and administrations to examine the atmosphere in which they live as new directions and changes become apparent.

    It is important for the human race to seek security without associating it with destruction.  Nuclear terror is not an adequate foundation for strategic policy.  President Obama has made that clear during his political campaign and in his later appearances at the United Nations where he and President Medvedev of Russia called for zero nuclear weapons.

    It is increasingly evident that the developing constructive relationship between the United States and Russia should realistically reduce our reliance on nuclear weapons.  Indeed it provides the opportunity for more than prudent and even deep reductions.  The developing constructive relationship between the United States and Russia permits both of us to lead the world toward an enforceable United Nations General Assembly agreement that the development and possession of nuclear weapons is considered to be an international punishable crime.  The UN Security Council should then be charged by the UN General Assembly with the responsibility to eliminate nuclear cheating.  This could be accomplished by the creation of a UN Bank to purchase all active nuclear military materials and convert that material into civilian nuclear power for energy starved areas.  Violations of zero should result in political, economic and social world isolation.  

    The task of the UN General Assembly is to establish a civilized “ought” for the world and the task of the UN Security Council is to create the machinery of civilization necessary to achieve the goal of zero, to prevent cheating and to provide for political, economic and social isolation as a price for cheating.  

    The United Nations has been understandably disappointing to many, but it is alive and should be utilized.  At the opening session that created the United Nations, President Truman welcomed its presence in the United States, and in his formal greeting called for the abolition of nuclear weapons on behalf of the United States government.  He greeted the delegates from around the world and said that “there is nothing more urgent confronting the people of all nations than the banning of all nuclear weapons under a foolproof system of international control.”  It is time to remember that goal.

    It is time once again for the United States to lead the world towards that goal and sanity.  It is also time to achieve that goal of zero and to demonstrate that the United Nations is alive, that its goals are civilized and clear and that it can begin to earn civilized respect.  

    President Obama recently reminded us of the historic Truman message to the United Nations.  He was joined by our Russian colleague, President Medvedev, as they both declared a commitment to a nuclear free world.  In addressing the UN delegates from around the world, our President said: “there is nothing more urgent confronting the people of all nations than the banning of all nuclear weapons under an international set of agreements. . . .”

    The President’s message is clear.  And yet we all appreciate that until that zero goal is reached, problems must be met and resolved.  This reality should not be permitted to replace or postpone the goal we have set for ourselves as a nation.  I note this here because of understandable reactions by our highly trained and committed officials who are inclined to emphasize reductions in nuclear weapons more clearly than those of us who aspire and call for zero nuclear weapons.  

    The time for us to achieve our goal of zero is now!