"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 in 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."

President Dwight D. Eisenhower "The Chance for Peace" speaking at the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16,1953. 

People my age tend to think of Eisenhower as a great General but not as a peacemaker. That's a mistake -- perhaps because we saw Eisenhower in his declining years. Eisenhower came to power promising to end the Korean War -- which he did -- and his great accomplishment was to end the Second World War -- which he certainly assisted in.

Eisenhower was not a militarist. He was a realist and believed in an army where needed. But he always saw military spending as inevitably wasted and at best a necessary evil.