Averting the Tragedy of Nuclear War Today: JFK and the lesson for today’s U.S. Presidency

Dennis Speed delivered this address to the Sare for Senate meeting on June 2, 2023 in Jamaica Queens. Register for the Schiller Institute conference on June 10, “The World Needs JFK’s Vision of Peace!“ Watch JFK’s June 10, 1963 “Peace Speech“ at American University: On June 10, 1963, eight months after the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and peering into the abyss of thermonuclear self-destruction, President John F. Kennedy gave a world-historical speech at American University. He said: “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 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.” Nearly 60 years later, the Russian Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov said, “Whereas the consequence of the Cuban Missile Crisis was the recognition of the possibility of peaceful co-existence of two great powers, now, over the past decades, Washington has set out to subvert Russia, bring it to its knees, or even better—to dismember it into several separate principalities.” Further, China and other nations’ Ukraine peace proposals have been rejected by London and Washington. Worse, China/Taiwan is to be the next theater in which world war is to be provoked. In the last month, mad drone attacks have been launched directly into Russia, including on the Kremlin itself. These attacks are coming, either from an unhinged Zelensky regime, or from NATO special forces masquerading as “anti-Putin freedom fighters” who are being “passively supported” by the London-Washington military-intelligence establishment. Whatever their origin, they are criminally insane, and must be stopped. No nation has the right to bring the world to the brink of annihilation; every citizen of the world has not only the right, but the obligation to act against such madness. This cannot be done through war. As Martin Luther King in his opposition to the Vietnam War put it, “The choice is no longer between violence and non-violence. The choice is between non-violence and non-existence.” Helga Zepp-LaRouche wrote an “Urgent Appeal by Citizens and Institutions from all over the world, including the U.S., to the (next) President of the United States!” which says: “Today we are faced with a strategic situation which is much more dangerous than that at the height of the Cuban missile crisis; offensive NATO weapon systems are much closer to the border of Russia than Cuba was to the U.S., the destructive power of the weapons even greater, the warning time before their launch shorter, and the trust between the leaders of the big nuclear powers much below that between Kennedy and Khrushchev. The doomsday clock is set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at 90 seconds before midnight, and that may be overly optimistic.” The Schiller Institute therefore calls upon all sane forces either already proposing pathways to immediate peace, or inclined to do so, to convene on June 10, the 60th anniversary of the JFK American University “Peace Speech,” an international assembly of the people of the world to deliberate on what Zepp-LaRouche has called “Ten Principles for a New Security and Development Architecture’’ and what we must each and all do, to bring that about. As JFK said at American University: “Our problems are man made—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. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again.” #nuclearwar #worldwar3 #larouche