Jesus’ nonviolent teachings aside, our church since Constantine has taught that indiscriminate killing in war is immoral. The world’s bishops at the Second Vatican Council wrote: “Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unhesitating condemnation.” The U.S. bishops repeated this core teaching in their 1983 pastoral, “The Challenge of Peace.”
Archbishop Edwin O’Brien of Baltimore, speaking to an audience of U.S. military and diplomatic officials in Omaha, Neb., last July, again reiterated the teaching: “Nuclear war-fighting is rejected in church teaching because it cannot ensure noncombatant immunity and the likely destruction and lingering radiation would violate the principle of proportionality. Even the limited use of so-called ‘mini-nukes’ would likely lower the barrier to future uses and could lead to indiscriminate and disproportionate harm. And there is the danger of escalation to nuclear exchanges of cataclysmic proportions.”
O’Brien’s message was unequivocal and he concluded that it is now a moral imperative for U.S. officials to urgently work for a world free of nuclear weapons. In making his plea, he joined President Obama, who has set the elimination of all nuclear weapons as a national goal.
Obama and other members of the U.S. Washington establishment are not naive. They recognize that holding on to nuclear weapons disallows the United States any high ground in demanding that other nations, such as Iran and North Korea, cease nuclear weapons development programs. And as long as the nuclear genie spreads, so too does the likelihood that someday a nuclear weapon will again be used with cataclysmic results.
The point: We are less safe -- not more safe -- maintaining our nation’s nuclear weapons.
In recent years, this notion has spread among figures viewed as traditional Washington establishment hawks. Writing in January 2008 in The Wall Street Journal, former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretary William Perry and former Sen. Sam Nunn called for a world free of nuclear weapons.
They wrote: “In some respects, the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons is like the top of a very tall mountain. From the vantage point of our troubled world today, we can’t even see the top of the mountain, and it is tempting and easy to say we can’t get there from here. But the risks from continuing to go down the mountain or standing pat are too real to ignore. We must chart a course to higher ground where the mountaintop becomes more visible.”
When writing “The Challenge of Peace,” the U.S. bishops were confronted with assessing the morality of a U.S. nuclear deterrent system that was inherently indiscriminate, as it is made up of thousands of strategic nuclear weapons many times larger than the one dropped over Hiroshima, Japan.
After several drafts they offered a “strictly conditioned moral acceptance” of the U.S. deterrence system -- as long as our nation was moving toward the elimination of the very weapons that make up the deterrent system.
The quarter of a century since has been characterized by the spread of nuclear weapons within India and Pakistan and nuclear development programs in Iran and North Korea. The need to radically change course becomes more urgent by the month.
Yet, despite Obama’s wishes and vision, powerful forces push the U.S. nuclear war industry forward. As NCR was going to press, the Kansas City, Mo., City Council was set to approve the construction of a new nuclear weapons plant, even throwing in a cushy $65 million tax abatement. Such is the power of the nuclear weapons lobby.
New nuclear weapons development projects are going forward in several locations across our country (see story). The intent of these projects goes beyond the mere upkeep of the current U.S. nuclear deterrent system. Our nation is moving ahead to construct a new generation of more precisely targeted nuclear weapons that will remain indiscriminate by the nature of their massive killing power.
A measure of the substantial influence of the nuclear weapons lobby -- made up of nuclear weapons contractors, those working in the nuclear weapons laboratories, and senators with nuclear weapons bases and laboratories in their states -- was underscored several weeks ago in a letter sent by all 40 Senate Republicans to Obama in which they warned that any further cuts to the U.S. nuclear arsenal must be linked to “modernizing” the arsenal. Forty senators are enough to block formal ratification of a new START treaty, needed to replace the one that expired last month. Today there is no formal treaty between the United States and Russia forcing cuts in the arsenals.
Eliminating nuclear weapons continues to be a moral imperative, one that goes well beyond arguments concerning national security to considerations of human survival. We need to hold our nation’s leaders accountable.
