Our measures of economic policy have already had a tremendous effect on the course of events.  Eight years ago, the Kremlin thought post-war collapse in Western Europe and Japan—­with economic dislocation in America—­might give them the signal to advance.  We demonstrated they were wrong.  Now they wait with hope that the economic recovery of the free world has set the stage for violent and disastrous rivalry among the economically developed nations, struggling for each other’s markets and a greater share of trade.  Here is another test that we shall have to meet and master in the years immediately ahead.  And it will take great ingenuity and effort—­and much time—­before we prove the Kremlin wrong again.  But we can do it.  It is true that economic recovery presents its problems, as does economic decline, but they are problems of another order.  They are the problems of distributing abundance fairly, and they can be solved by the process of international cooperation that has already brought us so far.

These are the measures we must continue.  This is the path we must follow.  We must go on, working with our free associates, building an international structure for military defense, and for economic, social, and political progress.  We must be prepared for war, because war may be thrust upon us.  But the stakes in our search for peace are immensely higher than they have ever been before.

For now we have entered the atomic age, and war has undergone a technological change which makes it a very different thing from what it used to be.  War today between the Soviet empire and the free nations might dig the grave not only of our Stalinist opponents, but of our own society, our world as well as theirs.

This transformation has been brought to pass in the seven years from Alamogordo to Eniwetok.  It is only seven years, but the new force of atomic energy has turned the world into a very different kind of place.

Science and technology have worked so fast that war’s new meaning may not yet be grasped by all the .peoples who would be its victims; nor, perhaps, by the rulers in the Kremlin.  But I have been President of the United States, these seven years, responsible for the decisions which have brought our science and our engineering to their present place.  I know what this development means now.  I know something of what it will come to mean in the future.

We in this Government realized, even before the first successful atomic explosion, that this new force spelled terrible danger for all mankind unless it were brought under international control.  We promptly advanced proposals in the United Nations to take this new source of energy out of the arena of national rivalries, to make it impossible to use it as a weapon of war.  These proposals, so pregnant with benefit for all humanity, were rebuffed by the rulers of the Soviet Union.

The language of science is universal, the movement of science is always forward into the unknown.  We could not assume that the Soviet Union would not develop the same weapon, regardless of all our precautions, nor that there were not other and even more terrible means of destruction lying in the unexplored field of atomic energy.