https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/forgotten-epidemic
The Forgotten Epidemic
Can the Church help put nuclear disarmament
back on the table?
Alexander Stern
December 21, 2024
nuclear weapons war and peace bishops
Please email comments to letters@commonwealmagazine.org.
Recent geopolitical events have brought nuclear weapons back to the
fore (Victority/Alamy Stock Photo).
In a memo for Ronald Reagan composed ahead
of a May 1982 meeting with Pope John Paul II,
Secretary of State Alexander Haig advised the
president to emphasize his commitment to
eradicating nuclear weapons, “the last great epidemic
of our civilization.”
The last great epidemic? It’s hard to read Haig’s words
today without a twinge of disbelief, if not jealousy.
We’re now living through what might be termed an
age of epidemics, both literal and otherwise. Haig’s
“last great epidemic” has become our forgotten
epidemic, falling to the back of the line behind climate
change, gun violence, obesity, loneliness, addiction,
and, of course, the Covid pandemic and its potential
successors.
Nonetheless, recent geopolitical events may be forcing
nuclear weapons back to the front of the queue. Since
Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in
February 2022, President Vladimir Putin has
repeatedly threatened nuclear escalation in response to
Western support for Ukraine. President Biden’s recent
decision to approve the use of American missiles
within Russia’s borders has prompted the strongest
threats yet.
In the years leading up to the invasion, agreements
between the United States and Russia (and, earlier,
the Soviet Union) had repeatedly expired or been
violated or terminated. In response to Russia’s alleged
noncompliance with the 1987 Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty—one of Reagan’s
signature accomplishments—the Trump
administration withdrew from the treaty in 2019. In
addition to helping further dismantle the arms-control
system in his first term, Trump reportedly
demonstrated extreme ignorance about nuclear policy,
at one point prompting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff Mark Milley to assure our adversaries we
wouldn’t attack. Trump also engaged in his own
nuclear saber-rattling, helping further weaken the so-
called “nuclear taboo.” His second term will likely
deliver new shocks to an already unstable situation.
The sole remaining nuclear-arms agreement in force
between Russia and the United States is New START
(Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), which limits each
of the two countries to 1,550 deployed warheads. The
treaty is supposed to last until 2026, but Russia, in
response to the United States’ arming of Ukraine, has
already suspended its full participation, though it
claims it will continue to abide by its limitations. In
part to rally support for New START’s ratification in
2010, the Obama administration agreed to a
modernization program that has been mirrored in
Moscow. Both programs include tactical nuclear
weapons not covered by New START, which may
make nuclear war more likely by helping convince
decisionmakers that a limited and winnable nuclear
exchange is now possible.
Of course, in this multipolar era, Russia is not the only
foreign nuclear power the United States has to worry
about. North Korea recently signed a mutual-defense
treaty with Russia that could expand its own nuclear
program. Israel’s unacknowledged nuclear program
poses risks as its war in Gaza continues and spreads.
And after the Trump administration’s withdrawal
from the Iran nuclear deal, Israel’s chief adversary may
soon attain nuclear weapons of its own (possibly with
Russian support). Most alarming of all is China’s
rapidly expanding program, which appears to be
aiming for eventual parity with Russia and the United
States. China’s nuclear advancement has overturned
much of the established wisdom around bipolar
deterrence and could lead to a new, supercharged
three-state arms race.
It was with many of these developments in mind and
on the heels of a visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki that
the archbishop of Santa Fe, John Charles Wester,
released the pastoral letter “Living in the Light of
Christ’s Peace” in January 2022. Building on Pope
Francis’s urgent remarks on the nuclear question,
Archbishop Wester called for a new commitment to
building a world without nuclear weapons. His letter
warns against a dangerous “second arms race”, documents the harms wrought by the nuclear-arms
industry, including testing fallout, mining, and waste;
rehearses the disturbing history of nuclear near-
misses; and pleads for more dialogue about the issue.
As part of such dialogue, in September, the University
of New Mexico in Albuquerque hosted the “Forum
on Nuclear Strategy: Disarmament & Deterrence in a
Dangerous World”—convened in cooperation with the
archbishop by the University of Southern California’s
Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies. The forum
included a public session but consisted mainly of
private dialogue between Church leaders—including
Cardinal Robert McElroy, an ethicist and political
scientist—and gov
The meeting revealed some common ground among
its participants but also a significant gulf between the
kind of moral reasoning that balks at the existence of
nuclear weapons and the strategic thinking behind
their deployment. At the center of this gulf lies
deterrence. For the nuclear establishment, the
concept, which has governed U.S. nuclear policy since
the 1960s, remains indispensable. But its critics in the
Church and elsewhere allege that deterrence, at least
as it is currently articulated and implemented, now
stands firmly in the way of disarmament.
Since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, Church leaders have repeatedly emphasized
the horror of nuclear war and the necessity of
at least as it is currently articulated and implemented,
now stands firmly in the
way of disarmament.’
In Pacem in terris, Pope John XXIII,
who helped de-escalate tensions during the Cuban
Missile Crisis, questioned the premise of deterrence:
“The true and solid peace of nations consists not in
equality of arms, but in mutual trust alone.”
Nonetheless, the document suggested that the
possession of nuclear weapons as a deterrent was
permissible as long as progress was being made
toward disarmament. Pope John Paul II made this
position explicit in a 1982 address to the United
Nations: “Not as an end in itself but as a step on the
way toward a progressive disarmament, [deterrence]
may still be judged morally acceptable.”
But, as Archbishop Wester documents in his letter, the
Church and Pope Francis have in recent years begun
to turn away from this “interim ethic.” In 2014, as
part of the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian
Impact of Nuclear Weapons, the Holy See published
“Nuclear Disarmament: Time for Abolition,” which
found that the “very possession of nuclear weapons,
even for purposes of deterrence, is morally
problematic.” Francis echoed that verdict in a 2017
address: “Weapons of mass destruction, particularly
nuclear weapons, create nothing but a false sense of
security. They cannot constitute the basis for peaceful
coexistence between members of the human family,
which must rather be inspired by an ethics of
solidarity.” In 2019, at the Peace Memorial in
Hiroshima, he stated bluntly that the “use of atomic
energy for purposes of war is immoral, just as the
possessing of nuclear weapons is immoral.”
Archbishop Wester situates Francis’s comments on
nuclear weapons within the Vatican’s more general
shift toward nonviolence and stronger antiwar
sentiment. Although just-war theory hasn’t been
explicitly rejected by the Vatican, Francis and others
have argued that it has often been misused as a mere
list of conditions to check off before going to war. As
Cardinal McElroy put it at the inauguration of
the Catholic Institute for Nonviolence, “It was not
meant to be a justification of war but a restraint on
war, and it has lost a lot of that capacity.”
Like just-war theory, deterrence theory admits of
ambiguities that can easily be exploited to justify aims
outside the concept’s strictest bounds. Nuclear doves
have long advocated a more minimal and restrained
version of deterrence in the United States’ nuclear
posture, such as a no-first-use (NFU) policy—an
affirmation that we would use nuclear weapons only in
response to an attack. In keeping with President
Obama’s rhetorical support for a reduced reliance on
nuclear weapons, Biden’s 2020 campaign came out in
support of a tempered version of NFU, a “sole-
purpose” policy that would declare that the United
States possesses nuclear weapons only to deter or
retaliate against nuclear attacks—though without
explicitly constraining their use. But, as Gottemoeller
told me in an interview, “The nuclear priesthood
reared its head,” and sole-purpose was rejected in the
2022 Nuclear Posture Review.
Opponents of NFU argue that reserving the option of
first use enhances the deterrent effect of nuclear
weapons against both nuclear and major non-nuclear
(biological or chemical-weapons) attacks. NFU might
also leave allies protected by our nuclear umbrella
feeling less safe and incentivize them to seek
alternative alliances or even develop their own nuclear
weapons. Finally, Christopher Ford, assistant secretary
of state for international security and nonproliferation
during the Trump administration, has argued that
NFU is simply “not particularly credible” and likely to
be taken as a “cynical ploy” by our adversaries.
Antinuclear advocates point out that the logic of these
arguments contradicts a statement first made by
Gorbachev and Reagan in 1985 and frequently
repeated by government officials ever since: “Nuclear
war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
Furthermore, as long as a first-use policy remains in
place, an adversary like Russia may have a greater
incentive to beat us to the punch. The rejection of
NFU shows how easily deterrence can be turned from
a defensive principle into one requiring “a bomb for
every occasion,” as one former nuclear official put it.
Critics say that aggressive nuclear policy uses the
rhetoric of deterrence as cover for more expansive
aims, such as cementing strategic alliances or
projecting power around the world. Ira Helfand, a
conference participant and past president of the
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear
War, told me that the U.S. nuclear posture and its
position on first use “gives the lie to the whole idea
that the U.S. nuclear program is only about
deterrence.” As Bishop Wester notes in his letter, the
nuclear postures of both the United States and the
USSR/Russia have always been a “hybrid of
deterrence and nuclear war fighting ability.” The lack
of clarity about the precise scope of deterrence—
further complicated by China’s emergence as a
nuclear threat—reveals not only its limitations as an
‘An approach of “prophetic indictment”—a
simple condemnation of
any policy of deterrence—is
likely to alienate “interim ethic” but also uncertainty about the very
purpose of nuclear weapons.
During the Albuquerque conference’s public session,
Helfand contended that the U.S. nuclear posture
makes clear that we are not living up to our
obligations under the 1968 Treaty on the Non-
Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Signed by
the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council
—China, France, Russia, the UK, and the United
States—the NPT is the main international treaty
governing nonproliferation and disarmament. Its
Article VI states that parties to the treaty will
“undertake to pursue negotiations in good faith on
effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear
arms race at an early date and to nuclear
disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete
disarmament under strict and effective international
control.”
In response to Helfand, current and former
American officials present at the conference claimed
that the United States has tried to live up to its
obligations by requesting arms-control talks with
Russia and China—they simply refuse to talk.
But Helfand argued that American pledges of fealty to
the NPT are belied by its resistance to the recent
Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
(TPNW). That treaty, which entered into force with
its fiftieth signatory in early 2021, bans nuclear
weapons for current non-nuclear states and commits
its nuclear-armed signatories to a process that would
lead to the elimination of their nuclear arsenal. The
Vatican was among the initial signatories of the treaty
and has advocated for its wider adoption. But the
United States, along with other nuclear-armed states
policymakers and, therefore, to fail.’and NATO, has refused to have anything to do with it.
Gottemoeller, a Catholic who attempted to dissuade
the Vatican from its support for the TPNW, said that
the treaty “interferes with NATO’s extended
deterrence mission.” Critics of the treaty also allege
that it undermines the NPT’s authority as the primary
vehicle for nonproliferation and disarmament. The
treaty’s advocates, meanwhile, see it as a wholly
consistent development of the NPT’s Article VI.
Gottemoeller has also expressed concern over the
moral burden the Vatican’s position places on
Catholics working within the deterrence paradigm. At
the conference, Cardinal McElroy insisted the
Church’s position that nuclear weapons are immoral is
“not a judgment on individual action”; it’s meant to
apply to states and institutions.
Resistance to the TPNW points to the potential
limitations of anti-nuclear advocacy by institutions like
the Church. In these pages and elsewhere, Bernard G.
Prusak has framed the Church’s potential role in this
debate in terms that Cathleen Kaveny lays out in her
2018 book, Prophecy Without Contempt. Prusak argues
that an approach of “prophetic indictment”—a simple
condemnation of any policy of deterrence—is likely to
alienate policymakers and, therefore, to fail. That
doesn’t mean that those who are morally opposed to
nuclear weapons should refrain from open and blunt
criticism of such policies, but they “must also engage
in the debate about what can be done now, starting
from where we are.”
