Nuclear Deterrence and Christian Vocation

Extract

If there is, as I believe, a temporal mission for the Christian, how would it be possible for the terrestrial hope by which such a mission is quickened not to have as its most comprehensive aim the ideal of building either a better or a new Christian civilization? ... At each new stage in human history ... it is normal that Christians hope for a new Christendom, and depict for themselves, in order to guide their effort, a concrete historical ideal appropriate to the particular climate of the age in question.

Lecturing On the Philosophy of History in the United States in 1955, Jacques Maritain thus restated a theme he had elaborated in Spain in the high summer of 1934, 23 months before Franco’s uprising. I shall argue that we should answer Maritain’s rhetorical question, No: it is a philosophical and theological mistake to suppose, as he did, that the temporal vocation of the Christian—or the Christian’s conscience in political matters—requires a ‘comprehensive aim’ such as the ‘concrete historical ideal’ of building a new or better Christendom.

In March 1955 the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons, used words which have survived as expressing the reality of the nuclear age, and the hope which has guided the masters of the age: ‘safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation’. The West’s new armaments, he said, would increase ‘the deterrent upon the Soviet Union by putting her ... scattered population on an equality or near-equality of vulnerability with our small densely-populated island’—a vulnerability matched by that of the West’s populations. The threat expressed by Churchill, to destroy Soviet populations by ‘a crushing weight of nuclear retaliation’, has remained the indispensable element in the deterrent threats and accompanying operational plans of the U.S., Britain, and France ever since.