To Move the World Read Online Free PDF

serving a town of 60,000 population.
    It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway …
    This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
    Eisenhower posed the key question that “stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live?” And he asked the question of the new Soviet leadership. Will it “awaken, with the rest of the world, to the point of peril reached and help turn the tide of history”? He acknowledged that “[w]e do not yet know.” Eisenhower said that only deeds would tell, giving the list: an Austrian peace treaty; the release of prisoners held since World War II; an honorable armistice in Korea; an end to the direct andindirect attacks on the security of Indochina and Malaya (the colonial possessions of Southeast Asia); and the fostering of a broader European community with a free and united Germany and the full independence of the East European nations.
    All of this would make possible vast rewards, including an agreement on arms reduction and the enormous savings that would result. The possibilities of such an agreement would present the world “with the greatest task, and the greatest opportunity, of all. It is this: the dedication of the energies, the resources, and the imaginations of all peaceful nations to a new kind of war. This would be a declared total war, not upon any human enemy but upon the brute forces of poverty and need.”
    Eisenhower made a pledge:
    This government is ready to ask its people to join with all nations in devoting a substantial percentage of the savings achieved by disarmament to a fund for world aid and reconstruction. The purposes of this great work would be to help other peoples to develop the undeveloped areas of the world, to stimulate profitable and fair world trade, to assist all peoples to know the blessings of productive freedom.
    The offer was bold, but also limited in a basic way that Kennedy’s offer ten years later would not be. As Eisenhower himself put it, he was offering the Soviet Union a test of good faith through a list of measures the Soviet Union must enact. “The test is clear,” he said of Soviet actions. Kennedy, by contrast, would bid Americans to reexamine their own attitudes to peace, the better to meet the Soviet Union on common ground.
    Eisenhower regarded this speech as one of his most important. In his 1961 memoirs, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, declared it to be the greatest speech of Eisenhower’s career. Unusually, the Soviet Union allowed its publication in full inthe newspaper
Pravda
, showing the high regard that it gave to Eisenhower’s peace gesture. 10
    The optimism lasted through the end of the year, when Eisenhower spoke to the UN General Assembly, offering “atoms for peace.” † 11 There, Eisenhower spoke of the horrors of nuclear war and the horrendous consequences of the nuclear arms race. Both sides can inflict hideous damage on the other. And the nuclear stalemate was little reprieve, said Eisenhower: “To pause there [with devastating weapons pointed at each side] would be to confirm the hopeless finality of a belief that two atomic colossi are doomed malevolently to eye each other indefinitely across a trembling world.” Kennedy would echo these words a decade later when he also challenged the view that we are “doomed,” condemned to war.
    Eisenhower called for patience in moving the world “out of the dark chamber of horrors into the light.” He called for a step-by-step process of agreements on disarmament. And specifically, he suggested that both sides allocate a fraction of their fissionable material “to serve the peaceful purposes of mankind,” for agriculture, medicine, and electrical power.
    Yet the hopes of 1953 proved evanescent. The Soviet Union was torn by an internal power struggle, pitting Khrushchev against his competitors for