Mind if i give away the ending, which is that he concludes that by demonstrating the parallel between kennedys quest for peace and our generations quest for Sustainable Development. And that is why it is so fitting that we are hosting an here today at the world bank. In his book, professor sachs shows how president kennedys 1973 peace speech was up metal turning point in the cold war, but we should note that the time some critics dismissed it as rhetoric. But it showed that rhetoric mannered and could help us imaginative possible, help change counterproductive use such as the one at the time of his speech that the United States and the soviet union were on an inescapable path to war. The book makes a compelling case for the importance of translating rhetoric into action starting with your achievable goals, by dividing your goal more clearly, making it more manageable, and we can help all people to see it, draw hope from it, and move irresistibly toward it. I think we see todays leaders following kennedys lead in applying these lessons to be fatalistic view that poverty will always be with the spirit that is why president obama set a goal in his state of the union for the United States to join with our allies to eradicate extreme poverty in the next two decades. This building on this heat challenge to move to a concrete goal of eradicating extreme poverty by 2013. And a target of promoting share prosperity. And that is why experts from around the world as professor sachs who played a leading role in developing the Millennium Development goals now designing the Sustainable Development goals. Professor sachs has been a powerful and consistent advocate on behalf of the worlds poor and most tolerable. Given his decades of experience and academia and the field, his views on inclusive and Sustainable Development are respected across the board from top policymakers to Aspiring Development practitioners. We may disagree from time to time on how or when, but never why or what. Professor sachs is a director of the new york institute, Sustainable Development, and Health Policy and management. He is offering of the three New York Times bestseller, the end of poverty, commonwealth, economics for crowded planet, and the price of civilization. With this most recent book i expect you will be adding a fourth. Please join me in welcoming professor sachs to the world bank. Thank you so much. [applause] thank you so much for that a really warm welcome. Ladies and gentlemen, as always a wonderful for me to be here. Really thank you and admire you for the work you do. And as sara aviel just reminded us, the bank has taken on an even older timetable than in the past. We now have a countdown to 2030 to end the extreme poverty once and for all. And so all of our work is cut out for us, especially you in this institution that provides some much leadership. It is always gratifying to exchange views with you and to share some ideas. And so i am especially excited to do that today with a new book i hope, and our discussion, we will see some of the relevance from events 50 50 years ago for our absolute most current challenges today. We are going to run of video, if youll tell me how to do it. It is especially since it is not a macintosh. I dont know what im doing anymore. What kind of a peace to i mean and what kind of a peace to we seek . Not a pax americana. Enforced on the world by american weapons of war, not the piece of the grave, or the security of the state. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and build a better life for their children, not merely peas for americans, but peace for all men and women, not merely in our time but in all time. Our problems are manmade therefore they can be solved by man and man can be as big as you once, no problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Mans reason the spirit, often solve the seemingly unsolvable. We believe they can do it again. No government or social system is so evil that is people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant. And negation of personal freedom and dignity. We can still hale the russian people for their many achievements in science, space, economic and industrial growth, acts of courage. Finally, my fellow americans, that as examine our attitude toward peace and freedom here home. Equality and spirit of our own society must justify and support our efforts abroad. We must show it in the dedication of our own lives. As many of you are graduating today will have an opportunity to buy serving without pay in the peace corps abroad or in the proposed National Service corps here at home. Wherever we are we must all in our daily lives live up to the ageold that peace and freedom watch together. To many of our cities today that peace is not secure because freedom is incomplete. So let us not be blind to our differences but let us also direct attention to our common interest in the means by which those differences can be resolved and if we cannot and now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet we all breathe the same air. We all cherish our childrens futures, and we are all mortal. [applause] that was a speech delivered 50 years ago this week down the block at American University. It was the American University commencement address june june 101963. It is, in my view, the most wondrous, wonderful, powerful speech of the modern presidency. These are just short excerpts of a. I do encourage everybody to listen to it. Watch it on line. If you are like me it will be the first of 1,000 listings and more, and over the years i told my family and insisted, you have to sit down and hear it again because it is magnificent. It is obviously beautiful and moving to listen to, and some of the phrases and ideas have, of course, lasted for decades. I found in revisiting this speech in ways that i had not really anticipated fully when i decided to look back at these events, this speech is notable not only for its eloquence and its vision, which i think is extraordinarily powerful, but for its remarkable historical role as well because i want to suggest, and the book tries to explain this point of view, that this is a speech that truly move the world, that truly changed history, that truly made it is far more likely that we could be here today with the planet that survived what was the core of Nuclear Peril and that in the very times that kennedy, of course, live and in the moments that he gave that speech was up arrow that had two superpowers, each with thousands of Nuclear Warheads primed for instance attack pointed at each other and just one stupid accident away from annihilating the planet. And we came, of course, that close just a few months before this speech was given in october 1962 at the cuban missile crisis when we know better now than even the participants knew then just how close to disaster we were. Of course, and that showdown in october of 62 both sides knew of the dangers, but neither side fully knew of the dangers of commanders who had Nuclear Codes , of accidents, of ms. Readings on radar, of nearly pulling the trigger, pilots going off course, of all of the shockingly mundane things that could have ended all of civilization. And this speech has to be understood as a remarkable moment that helps to pull the world back from that press this. And that by itself means that it is one of the decisive moments and teachable moments of modern history. I did not know much about it, i have to admit. Ten years ago in fact, i barely knew about the speech itself, but i did stumble upon it and listening to a tape of a compilation of kennedys speeches and fell in love with the basic idea in this speech. The idea in his speech is that it was possible, even at the height of the cold war and just months after the cuban missile crisis to find a path to peace with the other side. And this was not a popular view of the time. Indeed, among kennedys advisers it was far and away a small minority who felt that this was possible. This was a time in which the no way on both sides of the iron curtain felt that the only path was through strength, through escalation, indeed through targeted destabilization of the other side, and that we were almost inevitably aiming toward a path of that would lead to of final conflict, of you that was very widely shared. Very, very few people believed that there was another way. I will relate that to our current crises in a moment. There was one very important, wonderful scholar of the day who absolutely understood that there was a different way. He is here with us today. In my view americas great a sociologists, if you would to stand up for one moment because he wrote a book [applause] he wrote a book in 1962 called the hard way to peace, which is an absolutely remarkable volume, especially remarkable in the context of the time. He said that there was a way to peace and that it involved understanding the psychology and the human values on both sides of a conflict. Interestingly he called it the hard way to peace. One might have thought the hard way to peace was a greater armament, technological breakthroughs, the decisive battle, but the professor knew that there really hard way to peace was to envision the possibility of peace with an enemy, with the other side. That, indeed, was extraordinarily hard and is what president kennedy pulled off nearly miraculously in 1963. Now, of course what is so striking about this episode in my view, which i will describe briefly, is how it reminds us ultimately how there is nothing certain in history and one should never trust on the the normal flow of events and the belief that somehow the deep trance get us through rather than through active and ultimately moral that gets us through our survival, one of the big mistakes in judging history. And what is fascinating for me is that kennedy came into office knowing that, determined actually from the first day that he would find a way to peace with the soviet union. Yet less than two years later he found himself almost at the edge of destroying the world. Profoundly poignant and also eliminating for what happened and a powerful message for us today. If you go back to kennedys arrival and power in january 20th, 1961, 1 of his most striking statements, it proved to be an important harbinger for his own administration, is a statement let us never negotiate out of fear but let us never fear to negotiate. He came into office determined to negotiate with the soviet union. You believe that there was mutual gain to be had in finding a way to appear diminish what was the profound and daytoday monthtomonth and year to year tensions of the cold war. And then this he was following perhaps his historical mentor in one sense, Winston Churchill, who was, through the cold war and often despite our flawed memory or our memory of Winston Churchill mainly for his defense of britain against hitler and his introducing into the global parlance, the phrase the iron curtain was an assistant from 1945 onward that there could be a way to pull back from the cold war. And churchill said repeatedly that it was better to read john john vento or more. And if we negotiate with the soviet union there would be a way to find a partner on the other side. And it was striking, however, how dangerous the world was and how increasingly dangerous it became for the 15 years from the end of world war ii until the arrival of president kennedy in power. Of course it was dangerous for many reasons, which i need not review in detail of faugh. The first danger was stalin himself, of vicious and dangerous killer on a mass scale to depressed oppressed Eastern Europe broadly and in my view on questionably instigated the cold war through the actions of the ferry brutal crackdown some of the soviet union on the occupied territories of central and Eastern Europe and the occupation zone of germany itself. The cold war persisted after stalins death in 1953, and it persisted after khrushchev in his famous speech of the 20th Party Congress in 1956 had revealed to the soviet people the heinous crimes of stalin, which were not properly understood and certainly not a public understanding or party understanding very clearly until then. Still, the cold war continued to unfold and with both sides having Nuclear Weapons and arsenals that were growing became ever more unstable. Those were the early days of game theory, of course. Von neumann and the invention of the prisoners dilemma as a concept. And it the understanding of the difficulties of cooperation. But there came to be an idea, partly through the game theorists that one could find a kind of stable balance of terror on both sides where the Nuclear Armaments would be a kind of deterrent that would force stall for. And this, i think, is often taken by has loosely has over of description of the time of the cold war itself. Absolutely wrong because there was no equilibrium. There is no balance in real life. There is no stability in anything in our societies or in a global change, inherently we live in the midst of change and especially in a technological age. Whether it is the technology of war or other technologies, there is no such thing as proposed and balance. And the events of the 1950s proved that to be the case because the armaments kept building up on both sides. The u. S. During the massive conventional army of the soviet union in your will and ever more heavily on nuclearweapons on the u. S. Side. The eisenhower doctrine in those years was a massive retaliation meaning that a conventional attack by the soviet union would be matched by a Massive Nuclear response by the u. S. Side. From the soviet side in a way that an excellent political scientist of our time made clear , what was viewed as defense from the u. S. Position was absolutely viewed as offense when viewed from the soviet side because they saw the growing nuclear arsenal, and they said that is the u. S. Preparing for a first strike against the soviet union. And, of course, that ratcheted up the tensions and ratcheted up the arms race on the other side which led no small number of u. S. Generals to say dont you think that with the growing soviet arsenal and early first strike might be just what we need before is too late . If we wait we lose the advantage. We have the nuclear vantage now. And so you can see, there was no equilibrium. There was an array of increasingly dangerous use, tripwires, potential for not only accident but for ultimate disaster. Toward the end of the 1950s eisenhower made it one more attempt to find some reconciliation with khrushchev who was now strongly in power. And khrushchev also believed and was trying to introduce the doctrine of peaceful coexistence and so there was what looked like a potential partnership. And yet the two sides could not make it come to pass. On the one side, eisenhower continued with and a clear philosophy, which looked terrified from the russian perspective. Even more terrifying because eisenhower rather casually floated the idea of what was called nuclear sharing at the time, with nato which included germany, which was viewed understandably by the soviet union having lost 20 Million People to german violence as the mortal threat to the survival of the country. Eisenhower was rather casual in not understanding how u. S. Actions were perceived as mortal dangers by the counterparts. But another thing happened that i think is pertinent and poignant because it continued to happen and it continues to happen to this very morning. And that was another kind of blundered. Eisenhower and khrushchev had tried to build some level of trust. The spirit of camp david when khrushchev came to the United States in his visit. And this was to be followed by a summit in paris in 1960. And many have you will recall the outcome of that, but the antecedent of the summit immediately was a mr. Richard bissell, a name that should be held in higher property and an american history, a senior cia official that did as much damage as just about any individual can do in our complicated system hatching one bizarre and destructive cia scheme after another whispered in eisenhowers year that youre going to the summit soon, mr. President , but just before that, how about one more spy mission over the soviet union with the cias spy plane. Eisenhower thought that was a little bit provocative and dangerous and thought that maybe it would be a risk in view of the summit just weeks away. And bissell assured him, mr. President , they dont know what were doing. A you to is a safe mission. Besides, if it happens to be scrambled or shot down, its designed to disintegrate. The pilot has a poison hypodermic needle to kill himself in the event that he might be captured. There is no way that anything can go wrong, says the cia until this morning. And i will come back to that. And eisenhower apparently reluctantly said, okay. We will have one more mission. You recall what happened. What he had not told eisenhower was that the preceding plane had already been picked up on soviet radar and jets had been scrambled but could not reach the high altitude. The cia already knew that it was not a safe operation but did not mention that to the president. Of course gary powers, the youtube pilot was detected on entering soviet airspace, shot down. Something did not disintegrate in the plan. All of the wreckage was found. Somehow mr. Powers did not inject itself with the famous french. He was captured. All of this was on known to the as states, and the soviet union reported a spy mission had been shot down and demanded an immediate explanation. The weather plane from turkey had gone off course. And mr. Christopher said, excuse me, that cant be right. We had a spy mission. We know it. Again, the u. S. This time with the president s lead said, no, there was no spy mission. This was a weather plane. Dont make anything of it, at which point the Television Cameras came out and mr. Powers was brought before the world stage with the wreckage right there for all the world to see. And it, of course, broke up the paris summit