A Dream of Peace

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The battlefield at Gettysburg is primarily known for two things.

First, over three days, July 1st through July 3rd, 1863, the bloodiest battle of the Civil

War took place here.

Second, it was the site of the Gettysburg Address, the famous speech that President

Abraham Lincoln delivered four and a half months after the battle on November 19th.

Six other presidents, though, Rutherford B. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge,

Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and one vice president

who would later become president, Lyndon B. Johnson, have also delivered speeches at the

battlefield.

FDR spoke there at least twice.

His first address was on Memorial Day, May 30, 1934.

The second was an address for the dedication of the Eternal Light Peace Memorial on July

3, 1938, which also commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.

One Union and one Confederate veteran unveiled the 47-and-a-half-foot-tall memorial.

In Roosevelt's nine-minute speech, he shared,

"...all of them we honor, not asking under which flag they fought then, thankful that

they stand together under one flag now."

More than 250,000 people attended the 1938 dedication, including more than 1,800 Civil

War veterans, all of them at least in their 90s.

Fast forward to near the end of the Cold War, 50 years later, the 125th anniversary, which

took place over three days, July 1 through July 3, 1988.

I was seven years old.

Part of this three-day event included a 50th anniversary rededication of the Eternal Light

Peace Memorial.

However, for this one, there would be no presidential speech.

Rather, a famous scientist, Dr. Carl Sagan, would rededicate the memorial, albeit with

a smaller crowd, 30,000 this time.

Still might as well be a Taylor Swift concert.

The speech, co-written with his wife, Andrean, juxtaposed the weapons of the Battle of Gettysburg

with the weapons of subsequent wars, highlighting the increased potential for destruction with

each war.

Sagan used the platform he was given to call for nuclear disarmament, highlighting the

need to recognize our humanity as brothers and to work towards peace.

I'm Jason Epperson, and today on the America's National Parks Podcast, I'd like to play for

you that speech from the records of the National Archives.

Sadly, the audio is missing one paragraph of the speech toward the end, most likely

due to the tape ending and the lapsed time to get a new tape recording.

Otherwise, the entirety of the speech was captured.

Our principal speaker is a noted author, scientist, and teacher whose awards and honors are almost

beyond either counting or recitation.

They span both academic and popular areas, reflecting intellectual brilliance as well

as deep concern for the future of our race.

Born November 9, 1934, in New York City, he journeyed west for post-high school education,

winning honors at the University of Chicago.

Those early academic achievements presaged a brilliant career that has followed.

Dr. Carl Sagan is currently the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences

and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University.

Dr. Sagan has established his reputation not only in astronomy, but also in biology, physics,

the study of extraterrestrial life, and the advocacy of peace.

His scientific research has enhanced understanding of the greenhouse effect on Venus, dust storms

on Mars, the organic haze on Titan, and the origin of life itself in the search for life

off the planet Earth.

He has played a leading role in the Mariner, Viking, and Voyager expeditions to the planet,

and for this has received a NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, among

many other awards.

Dr. Sagan was responsible for the Pioneer 10 and 11 plaques and the Voyager 1 and 2

interstellar records, messages about the human race sent to possible future or other civilizations

in space.

He is perhaps best known for his Emmy and Peabody Award-winning public television series,

Cosmos.

His book by the same title is the best-selling science book ever published in the English

language.

In recent years, Dr. Sagan has devoted much of his time to writing and lecturing about

the long-term effects of nuclear warfare.

His vision as a scientist of the death and devastation that would be brought about by

the effects of radiation has made him a leading spokesman for nuclear disarmament.

He is currently President of the Planetary Society, which is a 100,000-member organization

and the largest space interest group in the world.

He is also serving as Distinguished Visiting Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

at the California Institute of Technology.

Please welcome with me Dr. Carl Sagan.

I am very moved and honored to be invited to join you in the celebration of this doleful

and instructive event.

There were 51,000 human beings who were casualties here, ancestors of some of us, but brothers

of us all.

This was the first full-fledged example of an industrialized war, machine-made arms,

railroad transport of men and material.

This was the first hint of an age yet to come, our age, of what technology bent to the purposes

of war might be capable of.

In May 1863, a reconnaissance balloon of the Army of the Potomac detected movement of Confederate

troops across the Rappahannock River, the beginning of the campaign that led to the

Battle of Gettysburg.

That balloon was the precursor of the reconnaissance satellite.

In all, there were a few hundred artillery pieces used in the three-day Battle of Gettysburg.

What could they do?

What was war like at that time?

Here is a brief comment by Frank Haskell of Wisconsin, who fought in the Union armies

here in a private letter to his brother.

We could not often see the shell before it burst, he said.

But sometimes, as we faced towards the enemy and looked above our heads, the approach would

be heralded by a prolonged hiss, which always seemed to me to be a line of something tangible,

terminating in a black globe, distinct to the eye as the sound had been to the ear.

The shell would seem to stop and hang suspended in the air an instant, and then vanish in

fire and smoke and noise.

Not ten yards away from us, a shell burst among some bushes, where sat three or four

orderlies holding horses.

Two of the men and one horse were killed.

A typical event from the Battle of Gettysburg, something like this was repeated tens of thousands

of times.

Those ballistic projectiles shot out of the cannons that you can see at the Gettysburg

Memorial had a range of one or a few miles.

The mass of explosive was about twenty pounds at most.

That is roughly one hundredth of a ton of TNT, enough to kill a few people.

The largest chemical explosives used in World War II were the blockbusters, so-called, because

they could destroy a city block.

They had in them about ten tons of TNT, a thousand times more than the most powerful

armament at the Battle of Gettysburg.

That was sufficient to kill a few dozen people.

At the very end of World War II, the United States used the first atomic bombs to annihilate

two Japanese cities.

In those days, those weapons had the equivalent power of ten thousand tons of TNT, enough

to kill a few hundred thousand people, one bomb.

And then a few years later, the United States and the Soviet Union developed the first thermonuclear

weapons, the first hydrogen bombs.

They had an explosive yield equivalent to ten million tons of TNT, enough to kill a

few million people, one bomb.

Each of these steps is a factor of a thousand.

From Gettysburg to the blockbuster, a thousand times more power.

From the blockbuster to the atomic bomb, a thousand times more yet.

From the atomic bomb to the hydrogen bomb, a thousand times more.

All in all, a billion times more explosive force from Gettysburg to today.

The souls that perished here would find such carnage, the carnage we are capable of today.

Unspeakable.

Today, the United States and the Soviet Union have booby-trapped our planet with sixty thousand

nuclear weapons, most of them hydrogen bombs.

Sixty thousand nuclear weapons.

The direct and long-term consequences of the use of even a third or a half of those nuclear

weapons would be, without question, to annihilate those two nations, to probably destroy the

global civilization, and perhaps to destroy the human species.

This is too much destructive force, it is too much power, it is foolish to have such

technology on this fragile planet.

Those 51,000 casualties here, they represented one-third of the Confederate Army, one-quarter

of the Union Army.

But all those deaths, with one exception, were all soldiers.

The only exception was one civilian who thought to bake some bread in her own house and was

shot through two doors.

Her name was Jenny Wade.

But in a global thermonuclear war, almost all the casualties, almost all the deaths

will be civilians, men, women, and children, including the citizens of nations that had

no part in the quarrel which led to the war, nations far away from the northern mid-latitude

target zone.

Everyone is now at risk.

In Washington, there is a memorial to the Americans who died in the most recent large

American war, the Vietnam War.

Some 58,000 Americans died, not a very different number from the number of casualties here

at Gettysburg.

I ignore, as we often do, the million Southeast Asians who were killed in that war.

But think of that dark, somber, beautiful, moving, touching memorial in Washington.

Think of how long it is.

It's not much longer than from the end of the row here to the end of the row there.

58,000 names.

Imagine now that we are so foolish as to permit a nuclear war to occur.

And imagine that somehow a similar memorial wall could be built.

How long would it be?

It would be about a thousand miles long.

It would extend from here to, I don't know, St. Louis.

But of course, there would be no one to build it and no one to read it.

It is time for us to learn from the sacrifice of those who fell here.

And it is time to act.

In 1945, at the close of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union were effectively

invulnerable.

Consider the United States, bounded east and west by vast, impassable oceans, north and

south by weak and friendly neighbors, the most powerful armed forces, the most powerful

economy on the planet.

We had nothing to fear.

So we built nuclear weapons and their delivery systems.

We engaged in an arms race with the Soviets.

And at the end of that time, everyone in the United States is exquisitely vulnerable to

a decision on our lives and deaths made in Moscow 20 minutes ago.

And likewise, in perfect symmetry, the Soviet Union, which had the largest standing army

in the world in 1945, no significant military threats it had to worry about, it also engaged

in this nuclear arms race with the United States.

And today, everyone in the Soviet Union is exquisitely vulnerable to a decision made

in Washington.

The lives and deaths of every Soviet citizen is in the hands of leaders in a foreign country.

I say we have done something immensely foolish.

We have spent 43 years in making ourselves vulnerable to instant annihilation.

All done in the name of patriotism and safety.

Now all that cost something.

The Cold War didn't come for free.

How much did the Cold War cost?

The American cost we can easily tabulate.

The Soviet cost is more difficult to tabulate, but almost certainly is roughly the same number.

By the time the present administration leaves office next January, the United States will

have spent, in 1987 dollars, how much money on the Cold War?

The answer is 10 trillion dollars.

That's the one with the big T. Trillion.

Of this sum, more than a third has been spent by the Reagan administration, which has added

more to the national debt than all previous administrations back to the presidency of

George Washington combined.

How much is 10 trillion dollars?

What could you buy for 10 trillion dollars?

The answer is everything.

You could buy everything in the United States except the land for 10 trillion dollars.

Everything.

All the houses, airplanes, factories, skyscrapers, highways, railroads, stores, homes, food,

clothing, medicine, furniture, toys, games, babies diapers.

Everything but the land in the United States could be bought for what we have spent on

the Cold War.

A business that spent its capital so recklessly and with so little effect would have been

bankrupt long ago.

Executives who could not recognize so clear a failure of corporate policy would long before

now have been dismissed by the stockholders.

What else could the United States have done with that money?

Not all of it, because prudent defense is of course necessary.

But some fraction of it, a third or a quarter, something like that.

We could have made major progress towards eliminating hunger, homelessness, infectious

disease, illiteracy, ignorance, poverty, not just in the United States but worldwide.

We could have helped make the planet agriculturally self-sufficient and removed many of the causes

of violence and war.

And this could have been done with enormous benefit to the American economy.

Think what prodigies of human inventiveness in art, architecture, medicine, science and

technology could have been supported for decades with the tiniest fraction of that money.

I say we have done something immensely foolish.

We have been locked in a deadly embrace with the Soviet Union, always propelled each side

by the malefactions of the other, always looking in the short term to the next congressional

election, to the next presidential election, to narrow local politics and never seeing

the big picture.

A man associated with this community, Dwight Eisenhower, said the following about this

very situation.

He said, the problem in defense spending is to figure out how far you should go without

destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.

It would be very good to pay some attention to what President Eisenhower said.

What is clearly needed is a comprehensive test ban treaty to stop all future nuclear

weapons tests because they are the technological driver that propels on both sides the nuclear

arms race.

We need to abandon the utter and ruinously expensive foolishness of Star Wars which detracts

not adds to the national security of the United States.

And we need to make safe, massive, bilateral, thoroughly inspected reductions in the strategic

and tactical nuclear arsenals of the United States, the Soviet Union, and all other nations.

That's obviously what we should be doing.

Because nuclear weapons are comparatively cheap, the big ticket item is conventional

weapons.

There is an extraordinary opportunity that faces us right now.

A miracle has happened in the Soviet Union.

There is somebody not just reasonable, but smart with a long-term vision with concern

for precisely the same problems in his nation that we should be concerned with in ours.

And therefore, there is a clear commonality of purpose.

Mr. Gorbachev has proposed massive conventional force reductions in Europe.

He's willing to do it asymmetrically in which the Soviets reduce their forces more than

the Americans do.

And I say that is in the interest of peace and it is in the interest of a sane and hearty

American economy, we ought to meet him halfway.

The world spends today $1 trillion a year on armaments, most of it conventional arms.

Much of that money is spent only because the nations are unable to reconcile one to another.

That money is taken out of the mouths of poor people.

It is taken out of effective economies.

It is a scandalous waste and we ought not to countenance it.

It is time to learn from those who fell here.

And it is time to act.

In part, this Civil War was about liberty, about extending the benefits of the American

Revolution to all Americans, to every American, to make true to everyone the promise of liberty

and justice for all.

I'm concerned about a lack of historical pattern recognition.

Today, the fighters for freedom do not necessarily wear three-cornered hats and play the fife

and drum.

They come in other costumes.

The creed of liberty means nothing if it is only our liberty being so proudly proclaimed.

People elsewhere are crying, no taxation without representation.

And in South Africa, for example, or the West Bank, or Central America, in increasing numbers

they are crying, give me liberty or give me death.

Why are we unable to hear them?

We have powerful, nonviolent means of persuasion available to us, we Americans.

Why are we not using these means?

It is time to learn from those who fell here.

It is time to learn and to act.

This war was mainly about union, union in the face of differences.

You know, a million years ago, there were no nations on the planet.

There were no tribes.

The humans who were here were divided into small family groups of a few dozen people

who wandered.

That was the horizon of our identification.

Since then, the horizons have expanded from such a wandering hunter-gatherer group to

a tribe, to a horde, to a small city-state, to a nation, and today to immense nation-states.

The average person on the earth today owes his or her primary allegiance to a group of

something like 100 million people.

It seems very clear that if we do not destroy ourselves first, the unit of primary identification

of human beings will before long be the entire planet and the entire human species.

And to my mind, that is the key question, whether that fundamental unit of identification

happens before we destroy ourselves.

The identification horizons have been broadened in this place 125 years ago at great cost,

at cost to the North and the South, at cost to blacks and whites.

But we recognize that that expansion of identification horizons was just.

Today, there is an urgent practical necessity to work together in arms control, in the world

economy, in the global environment.

It is clear that the nations of the world now can only rise and fall together.

It is not a question of one nation winning at the expense of another.

We must all help one another.

On occasions like this, it's customary to quote homilies, phrases by great men and women

we've all heard before and we tend not to hear.

Let me mention one, a phrase that was said here just a little less than 125 years ago

by President Lincoln, with malice toward none, with charity for all.

We tend not to hear.

With malice toward none, with charity for all.

That's what is expected of us.

Not just because our ethics commend it, our religious teaching preaches it, but because

it is necessary for human survival.

Here's another one.

A house divided against itself cannot stand.

Let me vary it a little.

A species divided against itself cannot stand.

A planet divided against itself cannot stand.

Can we hear?

To be inscribed on this monument is a lovely phrase.

On this eternal light peace memorial, which is about to be rekindled and rededicated,

the phrase is, a world united in the search for peace.

A world united in the search for peace.

We need more than anniversary sentimentalism and holiday piety.

We must confront the conventional wisdom where necessary.

We must act where necessary.

The real triumph of Gettysburg was not, I think, in 1863, but 50 years later, when the

veterans came to the front.

It is time now for us to emulate them.

NATO and the Warsaw Pact, Israelis and Palestinians, whites and blacks, Americans and Iranians,

the developed and the underdeveloped worlds.

The challenge for us is to do it not after the carnage and the mass murder, but instead

of the carnage and the mass murder.

It is time to learn from those who fell here.

It is time to act.

Thank you very much.

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By the late 1980s, the Harpers Ferry Center, which is where much of the National Park Service's

interpretive material and programs originate from, was creating materials in a number of

different media, including audio recordings for listening stations, slideshows and videos,

and films for broadcasts, loans, and exhibitions in visitor centers.

Initially, it appeared that the records relating to the 125th anniversary of the Battle of

Gettysburg were limited to 12 ¼-inch sound recordings.

However, as the processing proceeded, it was discovered that there were, indeed, moving

image film rolls that accompanied the ¼-inch sound, which were incorrectly identified on

the shipping list.

Original recordings could be used in multiple productions, which may be the reason these

records were incorrectly identified, and it can take some research to bring them together.

Preserved in the holdings at the National Archives are 12 ¼-inch audio reel-to-reel

tapes and 11 16mm silent-color film reels.

Two of the 12 audio tapes contain most of Sagan's 1988 speech, as well as recordings

of the activities of the three-day event, while three of the 11 film reels contain just

parts of Sagan's speech.

The fact that we have these records in multiple formats highlights one of the challenges facing

a special media archivist.

One of the difficulties in trying to synchronize motion picture film and separate audio on

¼-inch magnetic tape is that the recording equipment runs at different rates.

Motion picture film is captured at 24 frames per second, while ¼-inch audio is generally

captured at 7.5 inches per second.

36 feet of 16mm film is the equivalent to one minute of running time, and 37.5 feet

of ¼-inch audio is the equivalent to one minute of running time, so they don't quite

match up.

Over the course of time, the audio begins to drift so that the audio occurs ahead of

the image.

In order to rectify this, they can try to remove snippets of dead air to try to make

the image and the audio synchronize, but if the event is a continuous speech with little

or no breaks and pauses, they are unable to faithfully sync the two together.

Which is why we do have some film of what you just heard, but it's best listened to

in a podcast.

Gettysburg, as the site of one of the most crucial battles of the American Civil War,

stands as a reminder of the costs of division and conflict.

It can be seen as a symbol of the tragedy that ensues when a nation is divided against

itself, and it serves as a historical lesson on the importance of unity and the dangers

of unresolved conflicts.

The sacrifice of thousands at Gettysburg can be seen as a testament to the high price of

war, but this place also symbolizes hope.

Hope that out of such devastating conflict, a stronger, more united nation could emerge.

It can inspire us to work towards a world where such sacrifices are no longer necessary.

Gettysburg, if anything to me, will always be a place that inspires us to pursue peace.

This episode of the America's National Parks podcast was hosted by me, Jason Epperson,

and written with tons of help from the National Archives.

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