Patrick Moynihan: “In the brief period that I will be speaking, I would like to concentrate on the central issue: the dangers of nuclear…”

“In the brief period that I will be speaking, I would like to concentrate on the central issue: the dangers of nuclear war in the years ahead. Earlier, in an address to the 150th anniversary gathering of the Associated Press, I cited a comment made last autumn by Richard Holbrooke, the American diplomat, now temporarily in private life. Richard Holbrooke, who negotiated the Dayton agreement regarding the former Yugoslavia, commented that ``almost a decade has gone by since the Berlin Wall fell and, instead of reaching out to Central Europe, the European Union turned toward a bizarre search for a common currency. So NATO enlargement had to fill the void.'' As if this were an accidental policy that derives from the unwillingness of our European friends--some of them our NATO allies--to engage in the more serious work of bringing the once more independent republics of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland into the European Union, a common market from which their economic development can grow, that being clearly the single most pressing concern they have in the aftermath of the half century of a Stalinist economy imposed upon them with the same results for them--not quite so bad, but bad enough--that Russia itself experienced. The disaster of this era for the Russians cannot be exaggerated.…”