Each Member of the Congress has a role to play in modernizing our defenses, thus supporting our chances for a meaningful arms agreement.  Your vote this spring on the Peacekeeper missile will be a critical test of our resolve to maintain the strength we need and move toward mutual and verifiable arms reductions.

For the past 20 years we’ve believed that no war will be launched as long as each side knows it can retaliate with a deadly counterstrike.  Well, I believe there’s a better way of eliminating the threat of nuclear war.  It is a Strategic Defense Initiative aimed ultimately at finding a nonnuclear defense against ballistic missiles.  It’s the most hopeful possibility of the nuclear age.  But it’s not very well understood.

Some say it will bring war to the heavens, but its purpose is to deter war in the heavens and on Earth.  Now, some say the research would be expensive.  Perhaps, but it could save millions of lives, indeed humanity itself.  And some say if we build such a system, the Soviets will build a defense system of their own.  Well, they already have strategic defenses that surpass ours; a civil defense system, where we have almost none; and a research program covering roughly the same areas of technology that we’re now exploring.  And finally some say the research will take a long time.  Well, the answer to that is:  Let’s get started.

Harry Truman once said that, ultimately, our security and the world’s hopes for peace and human progress “lie not in measures of defense or in the control of weapons, but in the growth and expansion of freedom and self-government.”

And tonight, we declare anew to our fellow citizens of the world:  Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a chosen few; it is the universal right of all God’s children.  Look to where peace and prosperity flourish today.  It is in homes that freedom built.  Victories against poverty are greatest and peace most secure where people live by laws that ensure free press, free speech, and freedom to worship, vote, and create wealth.

Our mission is to nourish and defend freedom and democracy, and to communicate these ideals everywhere we can.  America’s economic success is freedom’s success; it can be repeated a hundred times in a hundred different nations.  Many countries in east Asia and the Pacific have few resources other than the enterprise of their own people.  But through low tax rates and free markets they’ve soared ahead of centralized economies.  And now China is opening up its economy to meet its needs.

We need a stronger and simpler approach to the process of making and implementing trade policy, and we’ll be studying potential changes in that process in the next few weeks.  We’ve seen the benefits of free trade and lived through the disasters of protectionism.  Tonight I ask all our trading partners, developed and developing alike, to join us in a new round of trade negotiations to expand trade and competition and strengthen the global economy—­and to begin it in this next year.