Nukes, Irony and Catholics
I’m a college student in the early 1980s. Despite lacking the activist gene, I attend several meetings on the subject of the Nuclear Freeze. I purchase ill-fitting t-shirts and hang a (rather dramatic black) poster endorsing the nuclear freeze in my bedroom. I oppose in my feeble way the placement of Pershing Missiles in Europe. I even edge toward the left wing of the already left-wing freeze movement by endorsing a “unilateral” freeze in the production of nuclear weapons by the United States.
Meanwhile, a national conservative movement is in the ascendancy and Ronald Reagan, scornful of the nuclear freeze in all its variants is elected president. Reagan ramps up defense spending, pours billions into a failed “Star Wars” initiative, endorses all sorts of dirty tricks by the CIA in Latin America and other places and proclaims the Soviet Union the “evil empire.” I can’t stand Reagan.
So who will history remember as the most important figure in the deceleration of the cold war arms race? Ronald Reagan (along with Mikhail Gorbachev.) Reagan and Gorbachev managed to end the nuclear freeze movement, effectively, by negotiating the first actual reduction in nuclear weapons in 1987 at a memorable summit meeting in Iceland. Reagan’s dreamy vision of eliminating nuclear weapons was in fact more bold, more effective, than dickering about a freeze.
Now I read that Sam Nunn, George Schultz and Henry Kissinger, of all people, are urging the elimination of all nuclear weapons since nuclear proliferation means the risk of a catastrophic explosion is far greater than any cold-war era deterrent value.
Presumably the American bishops assaulted for their naivete for urging a reduction in nuclear weapons during the 1980s will appreciate the irony. (As will the ghosts of Catholic activists — ranging from “arch-conservative” Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani to Dorothy Day — who worked on this issue in the immediate postwar era.) It’s yet another marker of how the line between realism and naivete is never as solid as it appears.
The American right has never understood consequentialism, and I think that stems from the fact that they have never really appreciated that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were evil. Instead, Americans bought into the very un-Catholic notion that it is licit to kill some people today so that many more may be saved tomorrow. Funnily, the right tends to ignore even the conservative moralists on this issue. Elizabeth Anscombe stood practically alone when she branded Truman a war criminal. And this is not just an interesting historical event. We are seeing exactly the same logic on the right today using consequentialist arguments to defend torture (“ticking bomb scenarios”). We have gone from the clarity of Anscombe to the expediency of Jimmy Akin of Catholic Answers, who suggested that waterboarding need not really constitute torture in ticking bomb scanarios.
Morning’s Minion should go back and read a little history. The use of atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not “evil” unless one feels that all war is evil–in which case you condemn yourself and future generations to domination by the truly evil of this world–the governments that launch wars of conquest, as did Imperial Japan. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to end the war and save the lives of thousands of US soldiers (as well as Japanese civilians) who would have died in an all-out, D-Day style invasion of Japan. And don’t suggest that Japan was already defeated or about to surrender–even after the second atomic bomb had been dropped, when Hirohito had decided to surrender and even recorded his surrender announcement, Japanese militarists attacked the imperial palace and killed an imperial aide in an attempt to find and destroy the recording. Fortunately, the destructuve power of the two atomic bombs and the threat of more to come helped wiser heads prevail in Tokyo.
Robert Reid could not be more wrong. Sadly, many Americans, even Catholics, follow this kind of deluded logic.
Let’s get back to basics. There are two core principals at stake. First, it is never licit to do evil so that good may come of it. Second, the use of nuclear weapons on a city (thus deliberately targeting civilians) is instrinsically evil.
Robert notes that “Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to end the war and save the lives of thousands of US soldiers (as well as Japanese civilians) who would have died in an all-out, D-Day style invasion of Japan”. He may be right. But this is also irrelevant, for it would still be evil.
We still see this logic being used today. Torture is OK, as long as it is in the context of a “ticking bomb scenario” that can save lives. Abortion is OK if it improves the welfare of the mother. Incidentally, I find it hard to see how those on the right can be truly pro-life when they embrace consequentialism in the domain of war and torture.
Here in the Atomic City, then closed, the A Bombs were developed. That history is still celebrated here by the vast majority of citizens, some of whom had profound expeiences im the Japenese concentartion camps and the liberation that happened.
It should further be noted that the local parish laity group were distressed by the bishop’s peace pastoral and wrote a lengthy “rebuttal” back then that they still refer to proudly.
In recent times, the local pastor had peace activist John Dear S.J. banned by the Bishop from speaking here -though apparently that ban has been lifted. The head of the local Right to Life wrote a long screed in the local paper explaining how Pax Christi was misinformed and naive.
On the peace side there is a rather unfortunate lab figure who, in his mid 80′s ,sometimes dresses up as a Bishop and punlishes long rants against the nuclear actions here – much to the pleasure of Santa Fe peace groups
A small serious group continues to study nuclear peaceful usage and non-proliferation, but they have no real power. Discussion in this community is thus highly polarized .
Such it seems to me, unfortunately, is most of the discourse on such political matters in the US and often politics drives the religious utterings of many average citizens. Recent actions by Iran and Norh Korea will then drive, I fear, most of the values debate about the topic.
Pedro Arrupe, the former Superior General of the Jesuits, was a missionary in Japan when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. He had a unique vantage point to the explosion and its aftermath. He was living just a half dozen miles or so from the center of the blast, and he had received some medical training before becoming a priest.
In his writings, Arrupe describes the bombing of Hiroshima as a “permanent experience outside of history, engraved on my memory.” He saw the blast itself, and seconds later felt its concussive effect as it threw him across a room and heavily damaged the building he and other Jesuits were living in. In what seems like the replaying of a visual recording of the event, he describes the immediate aftermath in words such as these:
“I will never forget my first sight of what was the result of the atomic bomb: a group of young women, eighteen or twenty years old, clinging to one another as they dragged themselves along the road. One had a blister that almost covered her chest; she had burns across half her face, and a cut in her scalp caused probably by a falling tile, while great quantities of blood coursed freely down her face. On and on they came, a sterady procession numbering some 150,000.”
While I have some sympathy for the argument that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki likely saved American lives, I have to agree with Morning’s Minion that the end can never justify the means.
And the blinding flash at Hiroshima seems to me even more of an abomantion because it took place on the Feast of the Transfiguration. Christ’s blinding radiance in the company of Moses and Elijah could not have a more diametrically opposed meaning.