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This document is considered to be public property of the Citzens of the United States of America, & is therefore not protected by any copyright laws which would prohibit its' reproduction.
March 23, 1983
My fellow Americans, thank you for sharing your time with me tonight.
The subject I want to discuss with you, peace and national security,
is both timely and important. Timely, because I've reached a decision
which offers anew hope for our children in the 21st century, a decision
I'll tell you about in a few minutes. And important because there's a
very big decision that you must make for yourselves. This subject involves
the most basic duty that any President and any people share, the duty
to protect and strengthen the peace.
At the beginning of this year, I submitted to the Congress a defense
budget which reflects my best judgement of the best understanding of the
experts and specialists who advise me about what we and our allies
must do to protect our people in the years ahead. That budget is much
more than a long list of numbers, for behind all the numbers lies America's
ability to prevent the greatest of human tragedies and preserve our free
way of life in a sometimes dangerous world. It is part of a careful,
long-term plan to make America strong again after too many years of neglect
and mistakes.
Our efforts to rebuild America's defenses and strengthen the peace
began 2 years ago when we requested a major increase in the defense program.
Since then, the amount of those increases we first proposed has been reduced
by half, through improvements in management and procurement and other
savings.
The budget request that is now before the Congress has been trimmed
to the limits of safety. Further deep cuts cannot be made without seriously
endangering the security of the Nation. The choice is up to the men
and women you've elected to the Congress, and that means the choice
is up to you.
Tonight, I want to explain to you what the defense debate is all about and why I'm convinced that the budget now before the Congress is necessary, responsible, and deserving of your support. And I want to offer hope for the future.
But first, let me say what the defense debate is not about. It is not about spending arithmetic. I know that in the last few weeks you've been bombarded with numbers and percentages. (...)
The defense policy of the United States is based on a simple premise:
The United States does not start fights. We will never be an aggressor.
We maintain our strength in order to deter and defend against aggression
-- to preserve freedom and peace.
Since the dawn of the atomic age, we've sought to reduce the risk
of war by maintaining a strong deterrent and by seeking genuine arms
control. "Deterrence" means simply this: making sure any adversary who
thinks about attacking the United States, or our allies, or our vital
interest, concludes that the risks to him outweigh any potential gains.
Once he understands that, he won't attack. We maintain the peace through
our strength; weakness only invites aggression.
This strategy of deterrence has not changed. It still works. But what
it takes to maintain deterrence has changed. It took one kind of military
force to deter an attack when, we had far more nuclear weapons than any
other power; it takes another kind now that the Soviets, for example,
have enough accurate and powerful nuclear weapons to destroy virtually
all of our missiles on the ground. Now, this is not to say that the Soviet
Union is planning to make war on us. Nor do I believe a war is inevitable
-- quite the contrary. But what must be recognized is that our security
is based on being prepared to meet all threats.
There was a time when we depended on coastal forts and artillery batteries,
because, with the weaponry of that day, any attack would have had to come
by sea. Well, this is a different world, and our defenses must be based
on recognition and awareness of the weaponry possessed by other nations
in the nuclear age.
We can't afford to believe that we will never be threatened. There have
been two world wars in my lifetime. We didn't start them and, indeed,
did everything we could to avoid being drawn into them. But we were ill-prepared
for both. Had we been better prepared, peace might have been preserved.
For 20 years the Soviet Union has been accumulating enormous military
might. They didn't stop when their forces exceeded all requirements of
a legitimate defensive capability. And they haven't stopped now. During
the past decade and a half, the Soviets have built up a massive arsenal
of new strategic nuclear weapons -- weapons that can strike directly
at the United States.
As an example, the United States introduced its last new intercontinental
ballistic missile, the Minute Man III, in 1969, and we're now dismantling
our even older Titan missiles. But what has the Soviet Union done in these
intervening years? Well, since 1969 the Soviet Union has built five new
classes of ICBM's, and upgraded these eight times. As a result, their
missiles are much more powerful and accurate than they were several years
ago, and they continue to develop more, while ours are increasingly obsolete.
(...)
There was a time when we were able to offset superior Soviet numbers with higher quality, but today they are building weapons as sophisticated and modern as our own.
As the Soviets have increased their military power, they've been emboldened to extend that power. They're spreading their military influence in ways that can directly challenge our vital interests and those of our allies. (...)
Some people may still ask: Would the Soviets ever use their formidable
military power? Well, again, can we afford to believe they won't? There
is Afghanistan. And in Poland, the Soviets denied the will of the
people and in so doing demonstrated to the world how their military power
could also be used to intimidate.
...The Soviet Union is acquiring what can only be considered an offensive
military force. They have continued to build far more intercontinental
ballistic missiles than they could possible need simply to deter an attack.
Their conventional forces are trained and equipped not so much to defend
against an attack as they are to permit sudden, surprise offensives of
their own.
Our NATO allies have assumed a great defense burden, including the
military draft in most countries. We're working with them and our other
friends around the world to do more. Our defensive strategy means we need
military forces that can move very quickly, forces that are trained and
ready to respond to any emergency.
Every item in our defense program -- our ships, our tanks, our planes,
our funds for training and spare parts -- is intended for one all-important
purpose: to keep the peace. Unfortunately, a decade of neglecting our
military forces has called into question our ability to do that.
When I took office in January 1981, I was appalled by what I found:
American planes that couldn't fly and American ships that couldn't sail
for lack of spare parts and trained personnel and insufficient fuel and
ammunition for essential training. The inevitable result of all this was
poor morale in our Armed Forces, difficulty in recruiting the brightest
young Americans to wear the uniform, and difficulty in convincing our
most experienced military personnel to stay on.
There was a real question then about how well we could meet a crisis. And it was obvious that we had to begin a major modernization program to ensure we could deter aggression and preserve the peace in the years ahead.
We had to move immediately to improve the basic readiness and staying power of our conventional forces, so they could meet -- and therefore help deter -- a crisis. We had to make up for lost years of investment by moving forward with a long-term plan to prepare our forces to counter the military capabilities our adversaries were developing for the future.
I know that all of you want peace, and so do I. I know too that many of you seriously believe that a nuclear freeze would further the cause of peace. But a freeze now would make us less, not more, secure and would raise, not reduce, the risk of war. It would be largely unverifiable and would seriously undercut our negotiations on arms reduction. It would reward the Soviets for their massive military build up while preventing us from modernizing our aging and increasingly vulnerable forces. With their present margin of superiority, why should they agree to arms reductions knowing that we were prohibited from catching up?
Believe me, it wasn't pleasant for someone who had come to Washington
determined to reduce government spending, but we had to move forward with
the task of repairing our defenses or we would lose our ability to deter
conflict now and in the future. We had to demonstrate to any adversary
that aggression could not succeed, and that the only real solution was
substantial, equitable, and effectively verifiable arms reduction -- the
kind we're working for right now in Geneva.
The calls for cutting back the defense budget come in nice, simple arithmetic.
They're the same kind of talk that led the democracies to neglect their
defenses in the 1930's and invited the tragedy of World War II. We must
not let that grim chapter of history repeat itself through apathy or
neglect.
This is why I'm speaking to you tonight -- to urge you to tell your
Senators and Congressmen that you know we must continue to restore
our military strength. If we stop in midstream, we will send a signal
of decline, of lessened will, to friends and adversaries alike. Free people
must voluntarily, through open debate and democratic means, meet the challenge
that totalitarians pose by compulsion. It's up to us, in our time, to
choose and choose wisely between the hard but necessary task of preserving
peace and freedom and the temptation to ignore our duty and blindly hope
for the best while the enemies of freedom grow stronger day by day.
The solution is well within our grasp. But to reach it, there is simply no alternative but to continue this year, in this budget, to provide the resources we need to preserve the peace and guarantee our freedom.
Now, thus far tonight I've shared with you my thoughts on the problems
of national security we must face together. My predecessors in the Oval
Office have appeared before you on other occasions to describe the threat
posed by Soviet power and have proposed steps to address that threat.
But since the advent of nuclear weapons, those steps have been increasingly
directed toward deterrence of aggression through the promise of retaliation.
This approach to stability through offensive threat has worked. We and
our allies have succeeded in preventing nuclear war for more than three
decades. In recent months, however, my advisers, including in particular
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have underscored the necessity to break out
of a future that relies solely on offensive retaliation for our security.
Over the course of these discussions, I've become more and more deeply convinced that the human spirit must be capable of rising above dealing with other nations and human beings by threatening their existence. Feeling this way, I believe we must thoroughly examine every opportunity for reducing tensions and for introducing greater stability into the strategic calculus on both sides.
One of the most important contributions we can make is, of course, to lower the level of all arms, and particularly nuclear arms. We're engaged right now in several negotiations with the Soviet Union to bring about a mutual reduction of weapons. I will report to you a week from tomorrow my thoughts on that score. But let me just say, I'm totally committed to this course.
If the Soviet Union will join with us in our effort to achieve major arms reduction, we will have succeeded in stabilizing the nuclear balance. Nevertheless, it will still be necessary to rely on the specter of retaliation, on mutual threat. And that's a sad commentary on the human condition. Wouldn't it be better to save lives than to avenge them? Are we not capable of demonstrating our peaceful intentions by applying all our abilities and our ingenuity to achieving a truly lasting stability? I think we are indeed. Indeed, we must.
After careful consultation with my advisers, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I believe there is a way. Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope. It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive. Let us turn to the very strengths in technology that spawned our great industrial base and that have given us the quality of life we enjoy today.
What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security
did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a
Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic
missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?
I know this is a formidable, technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of the century. Yet, current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it's reasonable for us to begin this effort. It will take years, probably decades of efforts on many fronts. There will be failures and setbacks, just as there will be successes and breakthroughs. And as we proceed, we must remain constant in preserving the nuclear deterrent and maintaining a solid capability for flexible response. But isn't it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is.
In the meantime, we will continue to pursue real reductions in nuclear arms, negotiating from a position of strength that can be ensured only by modernizing our strategic forces. At the same time, we must take steps to reduce the risk of a conventional military conflict escalating to nuclear war by improving our non-nuclear capabilities.
America does possess -- now -- the technologies to attain very significant
improvements in the effectiveness of our conventional, non-nuclear forces.
Proceeding boldly with these new technologies, we can significantly reduce
any incentive that the Soviet Union may have to threaten attack against
the United States or its allies.
As we pursue our goal of defensive technologies, we recognize that our allies rely upon our strategic offensive power to deter attacks against them. Their vital interests and ours are inextricably linked. Their safety and ours are one. And no change in technology can or will alter that reality. We must and shall continue to honor our commitments.
I clearly recognize that defensive systems have limitations and raise certain problems and ambiguities. If paired with offensive systems, they can be viewed as fostering an aggressive policy, and no one wants that. But with these considerations firmly in mind, I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.
Tonight, consistent with our obligations of the ABM treaty and recognizing
the need for closer consultation with our allies, I'm taking an important
first step. I am directing a comprehensive and intensive effort to define
a long-term research and development program to begin to achieve our ultimate
goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles. This
could pave the way for arms control measures to eliminate the weapons
themselves. We seek neither military superiority nor political advantage.
Our only purpose -- one all people share -- is to search for ways to reduce
the danger of nuclear war.
My fellow Americans, tonight we're launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history. There will be risks, and results take time. But I believe we can do it. As we cross this threshold, I ask for your prayers and your support.
Thank you, good night, and God bless you.