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Kennedy would echo seventeen years later in his Peace Speech, when he declared that we seek “not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.”
    Churchill would rue the fact that “Sinews of Peace” was later remembered mainly as a call to the Cold War, as its principal effect in the United States was to warn the public about the new “iron curtain.” Yet the speech was vivid and unmistakable in its call for peace through strength:
    The safety of the world, ladies and gentlemen, requires a new unity in Europe, from which no nation should be permanently outcast. It is from the quarrels of the strong parent races in Europe that the world wars we have witnessed, or which occurred in former times, have sprung … Surely we should work with conscious purpose for a grand pacification of Europe, within the structure of the United Nations and in accordance with our Charter. That I feel opens a course of policy of very great importance.
    Even if the world would remember the speech mostly for its grim warning, Kennedy certainly would remember it also for the purposes that Churchill intended: as a call for peace through strength, resolve, and negotiation.
“Chance for Peace”
(April 16, 1953)

 
    Churchill’s speech was followed not by peace but by the Cold War, which began in earnest and rapidly spiraled into a series of crises: instability in Greece and Turkey and the Truman Doctrine in 1947; the Marshall Plan and its rejection by the Soviet Union thesame year; the Berlin crisis and airlift in 1948–1949; the Soviet atomic bomb in 1949; the Chinese Communist victory over the Nationalists in 1949; the Korean War from 1950 to 1953; and many more. The first major pause of that spiral came with Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953. Stalin’s ruthlessness, brutality, and paranoia had fueled much of the Cold War in its early years, in addition to terrorizing his own colleagues and nation. His death opened the possibility of a thaw, if not a new start entirely. Eisenhower took a step toward that thaw with an important speech one month after Stalin’s death, billed as the “Chance for Peace.” * 9
    The speech was unusual for Eisenhower: a relatively bold attempt to defuse the Cold War dynamics. Eisenhower made a bid for a new relationship with the Soviet Union, but it was circumscribed, reflecting the doubts and cautions of Eisenhower’s own hardline advisers, especially Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.
    The opening line is dramatic: “In this spring of 1953 the free world weighs one question above all others: the chance for a just peace for all peoples.” He recalled “the more hopeful spring of 1945, bright with the promise of victory and freedom,” a moment of hope that he himself had helped to make possible as the victorious supreme Allied commander of World War II.
    Eisenhower then went on to outline the “two distinct roads” charted by the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States, by Eisenhower’s light, charted a path that was faithful to the spirit of the UN: “to prohibit strife, to relieve tensions, to banish fears.” The Soviet Union, by contrast, pursued a goal of “power superiority at all cost,” in turn compelling the free nations to “remain armed, strong, and ready for the risk of war.” The result was a way of life “forged by eight years of fear and force.” On the current course, said Eisenhower, the best outcome is more fear and tension; the worst, atomic war.
    Eisenhower bemoaned the huge costs for both sides:
    Every 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. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
    It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
    The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
    It is two electric power plants, each