Christianity's Vocation in the Nuclear Age

Extract

If the question whether it is better to be red than dead or vice versa is stultifying, the reason is not so much that it poses a false alternative as that it masks what may be the true nature of the critical problem that mankind, and Christians specifically, face at the present moment of man’s time. When the atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, the magnitude of the explosive power or the extent of personal and property damage did not materially change the nature of modem war, though its magnitude and that of even more powerful, later weapons has served to bring to consciousness the qualitative difference between modem and traditional war. Of course, no one will argue that it makes no difference whether to the arsenals of World War II we add the refinements of fusion warheads and ballistic missiles, not to speak of the bacteriological and chemical weapons to which we pay little attention in our fascination with the quantity of heat liberated by a nuclear firestorm. But one could become so entranced with the terrors of nuclear war that one might spend all one’s efforts in the de-nuclearization of war; just as one could become so pragmatic about legitimate spiritual values that one might squander all one’s conscience in the justification of an unjustifiable war. I would suggest, against both, that nuclear weapons are the effect of nuclear war and, in sum, that nuclear war is not evil because it is nuclear but, on the contrary, that nuclear war is nuclear because it is evil in the first place.

Less epigrammatically, the point is that we might consider very seriously whether any modern war can be just. One may grant that, in principle, defensive war can be justified and yet question whether any total war, nuclear or conventional, can be but essentially offensive.