Video: 'President John F. Kennedy Report to the Nation, Berlin Crisis, 25 July 1961'

(Tuesday, July 25, 1961, 10:00 p.m. EDT; during the Berlin Crisis of 1961, part of the Cold War) — During a nationwide address on American television and radio, U.S. President John F. Kennedy said tonight if the Soviet Union attempted to take control of West Berlin, then the United States would be prepared to go to war, even at the risk of nuclear annihilation. 

“We must have sea and air lift capable of moving our forces quickly and in large numbers to any part of the world,” said Kennedy, and announced that he was “ordering that our draft calls be doubled and tripled” to increase the U.S. Army from 875,000 to one million men.

Kennedy then announced, “We have another sober responsibility. To recognize the possibilities of nuclear war in the missile age, without our citizens knowing what they should do and where they should go if bombs begin to fall, would be a failure of responsibility.”

Video: '45 85 Part 8' (July 25, 1961, at 8:25)

To that end, Kennedy would ask Congress for funding to identify and stock “fallout shelters in case of attack” and upgrade an emergency warning system, adding that “In the event of an attack, the lives of those families which are not hit in a nuclear blast and fire can still be saved–if they can be warned to take shelter and if that shelter is available.”

“It was nearly a presidential proclamation of a national emergency,” one author would note later, “with the unmistakable implication that nuclear war might be imminent.”