This post from Mike on LaneBus.org about the US planning to sell $20 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia, really got me thinking (and depressed). How will spreading more ways of killing people help increase the peace? It made me remember a speech given by Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 called “CHANCE FOR PEACE”. Amazing that well over 50 years ago one of our leaders had the right idea. It is too bad very few leaders have learned or listened to that message since. Even in 1953 his words still apply today:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.
Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

…aspire to this: the lifting, from the backs and from the hearts of men, of their burden of arms and of fears, so that they may find before them a golden age of freedom and of peace.