Speech

Controlling the spread of nuclear weapons

June 23, 1965

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United States Senate, Washington, D.C

I rise today to urge action on the most vital issue now facing this nation and the world. This issue is not in the headlines. It is not Vietnam, or the Dominican Republic, or Berlin. It is the question of nuclear proliferation—of the mounting threat posed by the spread of nuclear weapons…

Nuclear capability…will now lie within the grasp of many. And it is all too likely that if events continue on their present course, tnis technical capability will be used to produce nuclear weapons…

Once nuclear war were to start, even between small, remote countries, it would be exceedingly difficult to stop a step-by-step progression of local war into a general conflagration.

Eighty million Americans, and hundreds of millions of other people, would die within the first twenty-four hours of a full-scale nuclear exchange. And as Chairman Khrushchev once said, the survivors would envy the dead.

This is not an acceptable future. We owe it to ourselves, to our children, to our forebears and our posterity, to prevent such holocaust. But the proliferation of nuclear weapons immensely increases the chances that the world might stumble into catastrophe.

Present Kennedy saw this clearly. He said, in 1963, “I ask you to stop and think what it would mean to have nuclear weapons in so many hands, in the hands of countries large and small, stable and unstable, responsible and irresponsible, scattered throughout the world. There would be no rest for anyone then, no stability, no real security, and no chance of effective disarmament.”…

There could be no security—when a decision to use these weapons might be made by an unstable demagogue, or by the head of one of the innumerable two-month governments that plague so many countries, or by an irresponsible military commander, or even by an individual pilot. But if nuclear weapons spread, they may be thus set off, for it is far more difficult and expensive to construct an adequate system of control and custody than to develop the weapons themselves…

Think just of the unparalleled opportunities for mischief: A bomb obliterates the capital city of a nation in Latin America, or Africa, or Asia—or even the Soviet Union, or the United States. How was it delivered: By plane? By missile? By car or ship? There is no evidence. From where did it come: A jealous neighbor? An internal dissident? A great power bent on stirring up trouble? Or an anonymous madman? There is only speculation. And what can be the response—what but a reprisal grounded on suspicion, leading in an ever-widening circle to the utter destruction of the world we know.

The need to halt the spread of nuclear weapons must be a central priority of American policy. Of all our major interests, this now deserves and demands the greatest additional effort. This is a broad statement, for our interests are broad…And the crises of the moment often pose urgent questions, of grave importance for national security. But these immediate problems, and others like them, have been with us constantly for twenty years—and will be with us far into the future. Should nuclear weapons become generally available to the world, however, each such crisis of the moment might well become the last crisis for all mankind.

Thus none of the momentary crises are more than small parts of the larger question of whether our politics can grow up to our technology. The nuclear weapon, as Henry Stimson said, “constitutes merely a first step in a new control by man over forces of nature too revolutionary and dangerous to fit into the old concepts…It really caps the climax of the race between man’s growing technical power for destructiveness and his psychological power of self-control and group control—his moral power.”…

We cannot allow the demands of day-to-day policy to obstruct our efforts to solve the problem of nuclear spread. We cannot wait for peace in Southeast Asia, which will not come until nuclear weapons have spread beyond recall. We cannot wait for a general European settlement, which has not existed since 1914. We cannot wait until all nations learn to behave, for bad behavior armed with nuclear weapons is the danger we must try to prevent.

Rather, we must begin to move now, on as many fronts as possible, to meet the problem…

I therefore urge immediate action along the following lines.

First: We should initiate at once negotiations with the Soviet Union and other nations with nuclear capability or potential, looking toward a nonproliferation treaty. This treaty would bind the major nuclear powers not to transfer weapons or weapons capability to nations not now in possession of them, And it would pledge nations without nuclear arms, on their part, not to acquire or develop these weapons…

Second: We should immediately explore the creation of formal nuclear-free zones of the world…[where] the nuclear powers pledge not to introduce any nuclear weapons into these areas, the nations of the areas pledge not to acquire them, and appropriate machinery for the verification of these pledges is set up…

Third: We should complete the partial test-ban agreement of 1963 by extending it to underground as well as above-ground tests…

Fourth: We should act to halt and reverse the growth of the nuclear capabilities of the United States and the Soviet Union, both as to fissionable material for military weapons purposes and as to the strategic devices to deliver such material. Freezing these weapons at their present levels—which, as we all know, are more than adequate to destroy all human life on this earth—is a prerequisite to lowering these levels in the future.

Moreover, as [Defense] Secretary [Robert] McNamara has shown, it would be in the direct self-interest of the United States and the Soviet Union to cut back our nuclear forces. For we each have more than enough to destroy the other nations, yet can never acquire enough to prevent our own destruction…

Fifth: We should move to strengthen and support the International Atomic Energy Agency…

Sixth: It is vital that we continue present efforts to lessen our own reliance on nuclear weapons. Since 1961, we have worked to build up our nonnuclear forces, and those of our allies, so that if conflict comes, we need not choose between defeat and mutual annihilation…

As to all of these points—in all our efforts—we will have to deal with one of the most perplexing and difficult questions affecting American foreign policy: China. It is difficult to negotiate on any question with the intransigent leaders of Communist China. And it is doubly difficult when we are engaged in South Vietnam. China is profoundly suspicious of and hostile to us—as we are highly suspicious of her. But China is there. China will have nuclear weapons. And without her participation it will be infinitely more difficult, perhaps impossible in the long run, to prevent nuclear proliferation…

At an appropriate time and manner, therefore, we should vigorously pursue negotiations on this subject with China. But if we must ultimately have the cooperation of China, and the Soviet Union, and France, and all other nations with any nuclear capability whatever, it does not follow that we should wait for that cooperation before beginning our efforts. We are stronger, and therefore have more responsibility, than any nation on earth; we should make the first effort—the greatest effort, and the last effort—to control nuclear weapons. We can and must begin immediately…

And we can and must continue to reexamine our own attitudes, to ensure that we do not lapse back into the fatalistic and defeatist belief that was is inevitable, or that our course is too fixed to be affected by what we do—to remember, as President Kennedy said, that “no government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue,” and to remember that “in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

Above all, we must recognize what is at stake. We must face realities—however unpleasant the sigh, however difficult the challenge they pose us. And we must realize that peace is not inaction, nor the mere absence of war. “Peace,” said President Kennedy, “is a process—a way of solving problems.” It is only as we devote our every effort to the solution of these problems that we are at peace; it is only if we succeed that there will be peace for our children.