Brandt Lectures at MIT On World Change, Peace

"The work for the objective of world peace will never end," Willy Brandt, former chancellor of West Germany, said last night to an overflow crowd of more than 1800 in Kresge Auditorium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Brandt spoke on "World Change and World Security" as part of MIT's Bicentennial lecture series, and discussed how to cope more satisfactorily with the "rapidly changing world that the United States and European nations will face in the coming century."

"The tasks are too great to be solved by one individual nation," Brandt, a Nobel laureate, said, emphasizing the need for close cooperation in economic, social, and political spheres.

This is "one world," Brandt said, and "nations have to remember their mutual interdependence or they won't survive."

Brandt urged a pragmatic appraisal of the world situation, and "a sense of reality" rather than "a sense of crisis."

"Men will be faced by more problems than they can solve in their own time," Brandt said, so they must limit the problems they attempt to deal with and "concentrate on a few concrete tasks."

Supporting closer relations between West and East, Brandt said, "I believe there is no reasonable alternative to the policy of detente. Detente is not a dirty word."

Brandt also said that the prosperous nations of the world "must make material concessions" to the third world countries to decrease "strains in the international network."

"Justice demands, and reason will tell us, there will never be a lasting coexistence of prosperity and misery," Brandt said.

The existing role of the United States in the world order should be maintained and strengthened, Brandt said. "The cooperation between America and the uniting states of Europe in principle requires no change."