Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
We have recently lost a great public servant who was leading this effort to
bring opportunity and hope to the people of half the world. Dr. Henry
Bennett and his associates died in line of duty on a point 4 mission. It is
up to us to carry on the great work for which they gave their lives.
During the coming year we must not forget the suffering of the people who
live behind the Iron Curtain. In those areas minorities are being
oppressed, human rights violated, religions persecuted. We should continue
to expose those wrongs. We should continue and expand the activities of the
Voice of America, which brings our message of hope and truth to those
peoples and other peoples throughout the world.
I have just had an opportunity to discuss many of these world problems with
Prime Minister Churchill. We have had a most satisfactory series of
meetings. We thoroughly reviewed the situation in Europe, the Middle East,
and the Far East. We both look forward to steady progress toward peace
through the cooperative action and teamwork of the free nations.
Turning from our foreign policies, let us consider the jobs we have here at
home as a part of our program for peace.
The first of these jobs is to move ahead full steam on the defense
program.
Our objective is to have a well-equipped active defense force large
enough--in concert with the forces of our allies--to deter aggression and
to inflict punishing losses on the enemy immediately if we should be
attacked. This active force must be backed by adequate reserves, and by the
plants and tools to turn out the tremendous quantities of new weapons that
would be needed if war came. We are not building an active force adequate
to carry on full scale war, but we are putting ourselves in a position to
mobilize very rapidly if we have to.
This year I shall recommend some increases in the size of the active force
we are building, with particular emphasis on air power. This means we shall
have to continue large-scale production of planes and other equipment for a
longer period of time than we had originally planned.
Planes and tanks and other weapons-what the military call "hard goods"--are
now beginning to come off the production lines in volume. Deliveries of
hard goods now amount to about a billion and a half dollars worth a month.
A year from now, we expect that rate to be doubled.
We shall have to hold to a high rate of military output for about a year
after that. In 1954 we hope to have enough equipment so that we can reduce
the production of most military items substantially. The next 2 years
should therefore be the peak period of defense production.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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