Foreword The thirty-ninth President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, in- herits a nuclear arms race that started during the administration of the tl~-third President, Harry S. Truman. Addressing himself to that problem at a press conference two months before his inauguration, Carter expressed the hope that the United States and the Soviet Union would be able \"to freeze pres- ent developments and then to lower, step by step, the quantity, at least the quantity, of atomic weapons on which we presently de- pend, with an ultimate goal of reducing dependence on atomic weapons to zero.\" Encouraging as this may sound to those who seek a termination of the nuclear race, the fact is that every President since World War II has made similar statements, and usually more forcefully. The Bamch Plan, presented to the United Nations in 1946 under the sponsorship of President Truman, provided that: \"1. Manufacture of atomic bombs shall stop. \"2. Existing bombs shall be disposed of...\" President Eisenhower, in his address to the United Nations (December 8, 1953) on \"atomic power for peace,\" called on the superpowers to \"begin to diminish the potential destructive power of the world s atomic stockpiles.\" President Kennedy, in the course of proposing a \"Program for General and Complete Disarmament\" to the United Nations in the fall of 1961, pictured the horror of \"a nuclear disaster, spread by wind and water and fear,\" and asserted that \"mankind must put an end to war-or war will put an end to mankind.\" \"The risks in- herent in disarmament,\" he continued, \"pale in comparison to the risks inherent in an un/imited arms race.\" President Johnson, during his first year in office, proposed the
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