On June 10, 1963, Kennedy delivered the commencement address at American University in Washington, D.C., “to discuss a topic on which too often ignorance abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived – yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace…I speak of peace because of the new face of war…in an age when a singular nuclear weapon contains ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied forces in the Second World War…an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and air and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn…I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men…world peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor – it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance…our problems are man-made – therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants.”[114] The president also made two announcements – that the Soviets had expressed a desire to negotiate a nuclear test ban treaty and that the U.S had postponed planned atmospheric tests.
