Our program is to open to all the opportunity for steady and productive employment, to remove from all the handicap of arbitrary or irrational exclusion, to offer to all the facilities for education and health and welfare, to make society the servant of the individual and the individual the source of progress, and thus to realize for all the full promise of American life.

IV.  OUR GOALS ABROAD

All of these efforts at home give meaning to our efforts abroad.  Since the close of the Second World War, a global civil war has divided and tormented mankind.  But it is not our military might, or our higher standard of living, that has most distinguished us from our adversaries.  It is our belief that the state is the servant of the citizen and not his master.

This basic clash of ideas and wills is but one of the forces reshaping our globe—­swept as it is by the tides of hope and fear, by crises in the headlines today that become mere footnotes tomorrow.  Both the successes and the setbacks of the past year remain on our agenda of unfinished business.  For every apparent blessing contains the seeds of danger—­every area of trouble gives out a ray of hope—­and the one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable.

Yet our basic goal remains the same:  a peaceful world community of free and independent states—­free to choose their own future and their own system, so long as it does not threaten the freedom of others.

Some may choose forms and ways that we would not choose for ourselves—­but it is not for us that they are choosing.  We can welcome diversity—­the Communists cannot.  For we offer a world of choice—­they offer the world of coercion.  And the way of the past shows clearly that freedom, not coercion, is the wave of the future.  At times our goal has been obscured by crisis or endangered by conflict—­but it draws sustenance from five basic sources of strength: 

—­the moral and physical strength of the United States;

—­the united strength of the Atlantic Community;

—­the regional strength of our Hemispheric relations;

—­the creative strength of our efforts in the new and developing nations; and

—­the peace-keeping strength of the United Nations.

V. OUR MILITARY STRENGTH

Our moral and physical strength begins at home as already discussed.  But it includes our military strength as well.  So long as fanaticism and fear brood over the affairs of men, we must arm to deter others from aggression.

In the past 12 months our military posture has steadily improved.  We increased the previous defense budget by 15 percent—­not in the expectation of war but for the preservation of peace.  We more than doubled our acquisition rate of Polaris submarines—­we doubled the production capacity for Minuteman missiles—­and increased by 50 percent the number of manned bombers standing ready on a 15 minute alert.  This year the combined force levels planned under our new Defense budget—­including nearly three hundred additional Polaris and Minuteman missiles—­have been precisely calculated to insure the continuing strength of our nuclear deterrent.