Unrealistic. That, no doubt, was the not uncommon reaction to
Pope Francis’s November plea for nuclear disarmament, including an end to
nuclear deterrence. So let us consider who comes out on top in this argument — the
self-proclaimed realists, or idealists who agree with the Pope.
Francis had said these things before, but this time, during his
visit to Japan, he chose two
particularly poignant sites for saying them — Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the
cities devastated by American atomic bombs in 1945.
“The use of atomic energy for purposes of war is immoral, just as
the possessing of nuclear weapons is immoral. ... We will be judged on this,”
the pope declared. And on the plane home to Rome, he told reporters the
condemnation of nuclear weapons would be added to the Catechism of the Catholic
Church.
The church has been wrestling with these matters a long time.
In his 1963 encyclical “Pacem in Terris,”
published barely six months after the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the U.S.
and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war, Pope St. John XXIII said
this: “The stockpiles of armaments…must be reduced all around and
simultaneously by the parties concerned. Nuclear weapons must be banned. A
general agreement must be reached on a suitable disarmament program, with an
effective system of mutual control.”
And the Second Vatican Council in 1965, calling for a “completely
fresh reappraisal of war,” expressed “firm and unequivocal condemnation”
of “every act of war directed to the
indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their
inhabitants” which it called “a crime against God and man.”
But some were disappointed then that the council nevertheless had
stopped short of condemning nuclear deterrence. In a contemporary account,
Father Joseph Ratzinger, later known to the world as Pope Benedict XVI, said
this reflected an “emergency morality” in response to the “radical
unrighteousness” so tragically characteristic of modern times.
The U.S. bishops in their 1983 pastoral letter “The Challenge of
Peace” took a similar approach, citing Pope John Paul II to the effect that
deterrence was tolerable as a step on the way to the eventual elimination of
nuclear weapons.
That was 37 years ago, and there is no sign of anything of the
sort now happening. On the contrary, things appear to be headed in the opposite
direction, as the U.S. and Russia push ahead with modernization of their
nuclear forces and old nuclear arms control agreements are allowed to wither
and die.
As matters stand, who can imagine India and Pakistan trusting
each other enough to give up their nukes, the U.S. developing a similar degree
of trust in Russia and China — or vice versa, Israel abandoning its deterrent
and counting on the good will of Arab countries that have vowed its destruction,
North Korea surrendering its new membership in the nuclear club? The mind
reels. Surely nuclear deterrence is the only realistic response to this
cauldron of mutual antipathies and suspicions.
But there’s a problem. If, God forbid, largescale nuclear war
ever does occur — perhaps as a result of miscalculation arising from a
technological glitch in somebody’s warning system — the survivors, if any, will
bitterly conclude that those who rationalized nuclear deterrence as a
cornerstone of peace were the most disastrously unrealistic of all.
A final thought. The killing of an Iranian general by a U.S.
drone strike has reignited criticism of assassination via drone. Perhaps it
should. But where is the debate over the vastly larger moral issues raised by
nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence?
Shaw writes from Washington.