During the 2022 Ukrainian-Russia Crisis: Robert F. Kennedy on Controlling the Spread of Nuclear Weapons (1965)

 Robert F. Kennedy on Controlling the Spread of Nuclear Weapons

United States Senate

June 23, 1965

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

     Nuclear capability...will soon lies within the grasp of many. And it is too likely that if events continue on their present course, this 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 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 Kruschev (of Soviet Union) 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 prosperity, to prevent such holocaust. But the proliferation of nuclear weapons immensely increases the chances that the world might stumble into catastrophe. 

     ...And we can and must continue to reexamine our own attitudes, to ensure that we do not lapse into the fatalistic and defeatist belief that war 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 sight, 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; and it is only if we succeed that there will be peace for our children. 

Excerpted from: 

Guthman, Edwin O. & Allen C. Richard. (2018). RFK: His Words in Our Times. (pp. 243-247). NY, NY: William Morrow, imprint of Harper Collins Publishers. 

Entered by:

Julie Ann Racino, June 2, 2022 post Robert F. Kennedy, US Attorney General (in Public Administration and Disability, p.56)