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 serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. 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 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.
~ President Dwight D. Eisenhower, "Chance for Peace" speech, April 16, 1953
(Eisenhower delivered the address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C. - broadcast nationwide - shortly after Joseph Stalin’s death and early in his presidency. The passage highlights the human and economic costs of the arms race, comparing military spending to resources that could instead fund schools, power plants, hospitals, housing, and food.)
