Winston Churchill: “Iron Curtain” Speech

Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” Speech, officially titled “The Sinews of Peace,” was one of the former British prime minister’s greatest speeches. The address was delivered at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, just ten months after the end of World War II in Europe and seven months after the peace in the Pacific. As soldiers returned home from Europe and the Pacific in 1945 and 1946, often to devastation in their own home countries, there seemed to be even more hope than in 1919, after World War I, that a lasting world peace was at hand. Most of Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech outlined his own hopes for the future of the United Nations and the “special relationship” he defined as existing between Britain and the United States. But the speech became famous for its proclamation that an “iron curtain” had settled between Western capitalist democracies and Eastern European Communist dictatorships. Although many people questioned Churchill’s judgment in 1946, he proved to be right in the end, even as many more ignored the rest of his message of international cooperation.