The Gift Of Time: The Case For Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 6, 1998 by Thomas C. Fox

Nuclear weapons are not the cause of peace, and there are ways to get rid of them

THE GIFT OF TIME: THE CASE FOR ABOLISHING NUCLEAR WEAPONS NOW

By Jonathan Schell

Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 223 pages, $25

The first nuclear era, which began with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, ended with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. We live in the second nuclear era, the post-Cold War nuclear era.

At first glance, this may appear a more benign, less threatening moment. It may also be humanity's last fleeting chance to save itself from cataclysmic nuclear destruction. With 35,000 nuclear weapons remaining in the world, The Gift of Time presses the question: Are these weapons of mass destruction remnant products of the first nuclear era or are they permanent fixtures in the world landscape?

Humanity, facing its most important decision in recorded history, must now decide. Yet we have done little to understand the dimensions of the choice we face.

Jonathan Schell's latest work aims to change that situation. It comes none to soon.

Complicating the matter, we lack perspective. Since the nuclear age and the Cold War were born at almost the same time and enveloped each other, few observers troubled to distinguish clearly between the two. Once the Soviets had the bomb, in 1949, sound proposals for nuclear disarmament -- to reverse the growing threat to humanity -- were routinely rejected on the grounds that the character of the Soviet regime posed insurmountable obstacles.

Nuclear disarmament, the Cold War catechism had it, was possible only if the disarmament arrangements could be fully inspected; but the Soviet Union, being a closed society, would never permit such inspections; hence, nuclear disarmament was impossible. Nuclear critics were silenced.

In other words, the totalitarian nature of the Soviet regime became both the justification for building nuclear arsenals and the hard rock explanation for the impossibility of ever eliminating them.

The arms race followed, assaulting both reason and morality. The 1950s witnessed the rise in the West of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. It taught that safety from nuclear terror was possible only by threatening that same terror. It also taught that, to maintain credibility, threats had to grow and entail ever greater risk.

Legitimacy and momentum

Official acceptance of the doctrine, as an essential element of U.S. policy, gave the nuclear buildup, however potentially destructive, a legitimacy and momentum. It was now acceptable, even soothing to some, that great benefits could be extracted from nuclear arms. Those who protested the insanity of the march toward genocide were seen not for the healthy awareness they brought forth, but rather as agents of threat to the state and were marginalized as a result. The curious result was that psychological health was punished and sickness was rewarded. And still is.

Schell does not specifically cover the moral issues faced by the religious communities during the Cold War. They had their own problems dealing with the arms race. The advent of nuclear weapons and the policy of nuclear deterrence eventually posed serious moral conflicts for religious institutions that professed the sacredness of life. They had to face the moral issues raised by threats of indiscriminate destruction. They had to confront the moral vacuum that stems from abandoning the rudimentary principle that one must never, even in "retaliation," threaten to kill millions of innocent people. The Roman Catholic church was only one of many religions that found themselves confronted by growing nuclear armaments and their justifications.

The first serious effort by the Catholic church to deal with the nuclear issue came as a result of lobbying done by Catholic activists, including New York pacifist Eileen Egan, during the Vatican Council in the mid-1960s in Rome. As the result of their actions, the world's bishops, in 1965, issued the council's only condemnation of weapons of mass destruction.

The council offered a chilling assessment of the threat of modern warfare, when it wrote: "The Whole human race faces a moment of supreme crisis in its advance toward maturity" requiring "a completely fresh reappraisal of war" ("Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World"). The council fathers called the arms race "one of the greatest curses on the human race," inflicting "on the poor ... more than can be endured."

The Catholic church, in responding to nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence, had two Christian traditions to draw on, the nonviolent tradition and the just war position. Neither offered a good answer to issues raised by nuclear weapons.

Just-war teaching holds that a person may participate in war, and by extension, war preparations, only if certain requirements are first met. The most perplexing, as far as nuclear war is concerned, involve the principles of proportionality and discrimination.

Proportionality demands that a moral response to an act of aggression cannot exceed the nature of the aggression. Discrimination requires that the lives of innocent persons may never be taken directly. On this later point the council wrote: "Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation" ("Pastoral Constitution").