ACTION ALERT: Sign and Share the
Peace Petition to the US Congress
The JFK Peace Speech Committee

What if millions of Americans who truly want peace came together and voiced this desire to the United States Congress? If you want to find out, please carefully consider this online petition. If you agree with it, sign it, ask your organization to co-sponsor it and pass this message and the petition on to others.

Below is a petition that the JFK Peace Speech Committee will be putting up on the Internet in a few days.  It has been endorsed by Veterans for Peace (National) and Code Pink and other organizations.

PEACE PETITION TO
THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS

We, the undersigned, have carefully listened to and considered the June 10, 1963 American University Commencement Address of President John F. Kennedy on world peace. This speech, given at the height of the Cold War, so impressed Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that it was followed within months by a limited nuclear test ban treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union.  We are convinced that this speech embodies the true principles of world peace and the true security interests of the people of the United States and the people of the world.

Therefore:
We call on you, the people’s representatives in Congress, to study this speech in order to return the United States to the path of peace that President Kennedy outlined.  In do so we want you to recognize the following (President Kennedy’s words in italics):

1. Peace is the most important topic on Earth…..
2. Every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward — by examining their own attitude towards the possibilities of peace, towards other countries, towards the course of the Cold War, and towards freedom and peace here at home.
3. Genuinepeace is not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war…. but instead makes life on Earth worth living… and enables people and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children….
4. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each person   love their neighbor — it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement… If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can make the world save for diversity. 
5. The threats of nuclear war, the climate crisis, and pandemics are existential threats to humanity and require the concerted cooperation of all nations.  The major powers must become partners in survival, not enemies.
6. Peace requires not a revolution in human nature, but an evolution in human institutions.  …we must… seek to strengthen the United Nations,  to develop it into a genuine world security system — …capable of resolving disputes on the basis of law, of ensuring the security of the large and the small…
7. Pursuing peaceinvolves a series of concrete actions and agreements which are in the interest of all concerned.
8. …above all… nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.  To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy — or a collective death-wish for the world.
9. In the final analysis peace is a matter of human rights — the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation, the right to breathe air as nature provided it, and the right of future generations to a healthy existence 

As a result, we call on you to do the following:

1. Have President Kennedy’s speech widely distributed throughout the United States.   Have it shown to a joint session of Congress, to the Security Council of the United Nations, and to the UN General Assembly.
2. Have the US return to the various international arms control treaties that the US has abrogated in past decades, including the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and the Open Skies Treaty.
3. Have the US sign the UN Treaty on the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons and advance agreements on conventional disarmament that will encourage other nuclear weapons states to also sign the treaty.
4. Declare the US intention to seek an immediate ceasefire in the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and halt arms supplies to these conflicts.
5. Advance major cuts in the US military budget, fund programs to meet human needs and to protect the natural environment.