Editor/Co-author, “Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of US Nuclear Weapons Since 1940” • Nonresident Senior Fellow, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists • Nuclear weapons expert (history, policy, costs, accidents) and tracker of the nuclear “Football.”
Stephen Schwartz
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“For 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. ... Confident and unafraid, we labor on—not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.”
P.T. Barnum on steroids.
Interestingly, after the Navy aide walks away from Marine One to wait while Trump blatantly lies to a gaggle of reporters about how great and wonderful everything is, he quickly returns to the helicopter (2:24-3:08) to retrieve a phone, then walks back again (3:58-4:20) to talk with another aide.
In a new article, @matthew-bunn.bsky.social argues that Kennedy’s visionary speech “carries urgent lessons for today’s world of competition among nuclear-armed powers. ... The US president should not be afraid to take informal, unilateral steps to reduce tensions and smooth the path for accords.”
OTD in 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered the commencement address at The American University:
“Too many of us think [peace] is impossible. … Our problems are manmade—therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.”
I mean, it’s a well known fact that basketball teams with the higher score at halftime, baseball teams that lead at the seventh inning stretch, and soccer teams that have the higher score with 10 minutes of regulation play remaining ALWAYS win. Any other outcome undermines the integrity of the game.
Watch the entire “A Strategy of Peace” speech—which was actually a major foreign policy initiative drafted by speechwriter Theodore Sorensen and often considered the finest, most powerful of Kennedy’s tragically short presidency—below, or read the full text here (www.jfklibrary.org/archives/oth...).
