Dear President Bush,

November 22 marks the 40th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. In his historic speech “A Strategy for Peace,” Kennedy speaks of genuine peace through multilateral diplomacy and international law.

Contrary to Kennedy’s vision, your administration has delivered little hope of peace for our nation and the international community. You are blatantly disregarding international law in pursuit of an aggressive military doctrine. You are exercising double standards by insisting that other nations forgo their arms while you continue to develop the US nuclear arsenal. You are generating international resentment through the adoption of a policy of pre-emption and the advancement of the missile defense project. You are provoking a global arms race through your plans to develop new generations of nuclear weapons and shorten the time to resume nuclear testing.

These arrogant and isolating policies make the world a more dangerous place, and in Kennedy’s words, “America and the world have had enough – more than enough – of war and hate and oppression.”

I urge you to learn from Kennedy’s vision for building a world of peace.

Sincerely,

 

“Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age where a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the Allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.”

- John F. Kennedy, “A Strategy for Peace”, June 10, 1963.