Fifty years ago

I came across this speech by a very roundabout route, but found that this excerpt from it to be fantastic…

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 serving a town of 60,000 population.
• It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
• It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

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.

And when was it written? Not now, nor any time recently.

It came from President Eisenhower’s speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. In April, 1953.

The only thing that’s changed between now and then is that the costs have gone up.