Sixty years after Hiroshima, Vatican censures nuclear deterrence

Sixty years after U.S. atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, vaporizing 140,000 civilians, Pax Christi USA held its national assembly Aug. 4-7 near the Nevada nuclear test sites, and were joined by other peace groups mourning those events which Pope Paul VI called “a butchery of untold magnitude.”

Yet, as Pax Christi executive director Dave Robinson wrote in the NCR July 29, under the Bush administration the U.S. is not only spending billions on more sophisticated nuclear weapons, but “has integrated nuclear weapons into what it calls its ‘Global Strike’ option. A plan is already drawn up to attack both North Korea and Iran with a combination of conventional and nuclear weapons.” The Pentagon’s public website says that “the integration of conventional and nuclear forces is crucial to the success of any comprehensive strategy.”

During the Cold War, the Vatican expressed only limited moral acceptance of nuclear weapons, only for deterrence and only as a step toward progressive nuclear disarmament. The U.S. Bishops taught the same conditional acceptance in The Challenge of Peace (1983), and repeated it in 1993 when the Cold War was over and the U.S. was the lone superpower. But the U.S. did not move toward nuclear disarmament. In fact, by 1998, 100 American bishops in Pax Christi declared that the U.S. had institutionalized its permanent reliance on nuclear weapons — even against nonnuclear threats — and was deeply immoral to do so.

Now the Vatican has come out with a similar censure. In May the Vatican U.N. ambassador told a U.N. conference on the nuclear nonproliferation treaty that “the Holy See has never countenanced nuclear deterrence as a permanent measure, nor does it today when it is evident that nuclear deterrence drives the development of ever newer nuclear arms, thus preventing genuine nuclear disarmament.”

Dave Robinson and Pax Christi USA are calling on all the bishops and the whole Catholic Church in the U.S. to join the Vatican’s position and “directly challenge the Bush administration plans.” Robinson, who represents Pax Christi International on disarmament issues at the U.N, will speak at CTA in November about the new militarism that drives U.S. foreign policy.