Christians and Nuclear Weapons Designed for the Destruction of Cities*
It is anciently human to speak of loving your friends and hating your enemies; also, of giving them their due. The due is good things for the friends and evil for the enemies. Now friendship can mean many things; from the intimate love of people who love one another for their own sakes, who know one another and like to be together, who have unanimity and are good; for if they are not good they will only like one another for advantage or pleasure. This personal friendship is the most important kind for individuals generally but there are lesser friendships: there are friendships of advantage or pleasure, the friendships of fellows in an association, of fellow workers and of fellow citizens - and also of fellow men, as would make its appearance if fear did not when two humans alone find one another in the desert. And between states it is the same except that there may be an hostility to strangers who are felt to threaten the society that they approach; and if not hostility, at least caution in case they should turn into enemies. As, upon the whole, people are not good, it comes about that friendship between states is only friendship of advantage and so it changes very easily.
This feature of hostility between states and between societies is fostered by something in corrupt human nature which lies at the base of the following story. A party of German academics was visiting a university in New Zealand. They were discussing human rights, for these were Germans of the post-war era and those of them who were young enough had been brought up on a human rights ethic. They were debating what was the first human right and coming to the statement that it was the right to life. Suddenly one of their hosts, an aged Maori professor, said ‘What nonsense! It is for a man to kill!’ (When told this story I understood that what he meant by ‘man’ was ‘Mann’, not ‘Mensch’, ‘vir’ not ‘homo’, i.e. male human being, not human being.) The Germans were rather thrown by this utterance, being accustomed to the purveying of unchallenged human rights theory, and they couldn’t think what to say. I asked the teller of the story ‘To kill whom? Not just anyone, anytime, I suppose?’ He replied that presumably it was to kill strangers, not members of your own family, for example; but it sounded as if the Maori were coming out with his native ethos, perhaps comparable - well, certainly comparable, and perhaps quite like - that of ancient Macedon, where you emerged from boyhood and assumed the status of a man once you had killed your first wild boar and your first man. This wasn’t a license for casual domestic or civic murder; but quarrels on the road are things that readily happen, and I suppose the spirited youth would feel that his pride was at stake on such an occasion, and find in it the opportunity to attain to manhood. If there is this streak in human nature (for though it would not be natural to women to have such a rule for themselves, presumably they approved and applauded it) then we may see in it something that fosters an inclination to quarrels, to finding enemies in strangers, and to regarding the enemies of your society in warfare as suitable objects of hate. In ancient times a common rule was for the victorious side to kill all the men and enslave the women and children; but in extreme pride and confidence you might kill the whole lot, as the Athenians killed the people of Melos. Or, even in not so ancient times there might be the feeling that these people are so atrocious they must all be wiped out, down to the children themselves. This was done, according to the story, when the cause of disappearance of travellers was found, somewhere in Scotland under James VI. There was a family, a tribe of several generations, living in a cave or caves, and waylaying travellers, whom they killed and ate. Not all at once; human hams were found preserved and hanging up in their cave. When found they were all seized and slaughtered without any suggestion of a trial.
And similarly in warfare where we have the means of destroying cities; the sentiment is around that all are enemies, all are participants, just by being members of that hated society. There is, I surmise, an appetite for massacre, not itself based on that sentiment. Witness the saying of Simon de Montfort when he stormed and captured an Albigensian city and ordered that everyone should be slaughtered. His war was against the Albigensians and no doubt also stimulated by the stories of their wickedness. But it was pointed out to him that the city, though in the hands of the Albigenses, was not by any means exclusively Albigensian; there were plenty of Catholics there. What did he say? He stuck to the order he had given. As to the Catholics - ‘The Lord will know his own’. This is clearly the story of a man who is out for massacre, and so are his troops.
This appetite for massacre is with us still, though only occasionally is it quite blatantly expressed in what is said. It was so expressed by the U.S. people who spoke up favouring Calley when he was found guilty in respect of a little massacre - by hand - of Vietnamese villagers. It was because he did it by hand that it was thought an atrocity. Massacre by advanced technology would never get you into trouble in modern warfare - unless you fell into the hands of the population you were bombing.
The preparation for massacre is reckoned a necessary part of defence policy. This preparation is of course both ways - it is preparation against attempted and in part successful massacres of our own people by an enemy - or, rather, the enemy; and preparation to massacre their people. A vast amount is spent - and this emerged years ago, in the time of Harold Wilson’s government, I think - on the sophisticated system of weaponry which we are prepared to deploy to countervail against the sophisticated system of defence of the city of Moscow. And presumably they are in a like position in relation to London and other cities.
There is long and much argument about whether we should or should not go in for unilateral nuclear disarmament. Those who are against this say it is crazy, for obvious reasons. You don’t throw your gun out of the window when your enemy is at your door with a gun. Those who are for it say that the obvious reasons aren’t as good as they seem - we in the UK at least have a merely token force de frappe with such weapons, for example; we insist on having them in order to strut among the Great Powers, thinking perhaps to have an influence on policy.
I wouldn’t have the knowledge to enter such an argument. I note that it doesn’t touch the soundness of U.S. policy in trying to be equal or superior to Russia. I don’t know how U.S. people argue when they wish to maintain that it’s not good policy, apart from rhetoric about the craziness of the arms race. What seems to me quite certain is that the governments will go on as they have been going on, short of some great and unimaginable cause of change.
The question for us, if I am right, is not: to make up our minds about the right policy for our government. That I incline to regard as a waste of time.
To take that seriously - I mean, to take seriously the thesis that that is a waste of time - is to make what ought to seem a pretty big decision. We have assumed for a long time, we Catholics, that if we are allowed to, we ought to be participators in government and its policies. At least, so far as we can compatibly with our religion; we can’t so participate in its abortion policies, for example. But defence policy, war policy, what’s involved in decisions which may lead to your being called up to fight for your country - in all that sort of thing we have assumed that if we aren’t cut off by the country from participation in public life, we, or some of us at any rate, should be participating. Particular decisions may indeed be mistaken or wrongful, but that doesn’t mean that we should be cut off from participation in decision making, or in the formation of public policy.
But now - if the essential decision about public policy has been taken and won’t be reversed - won’t any Catholic who is involved be implementing and maintaining that decision? Just like a Catholic who was engaged in giving directives about the employment of gynaecologists, anaesthetists and psychiatrists in the National Health Service?
It may be argued that it is not necessarily wicked to threaten what it would be wicked to do. And that I do not deny. If you are an individual threatening the like to someone who has his guns sighted on your family, and this can make him desist, maybe you are justified in making your threat, even though it would be wicked to carry it out. But then you can - perhaps - know that you do not mean to carry it out.
If it’s a government and not an individual that is in question, the threat can only be made in reliance on there being a lot of people who are prepared to carry it out. So in our analogy we have to change the individual into one who has a lot of plug-uglies at his command who are perfectly prepared to kill his enemy’s family. His position begins to look a bit more dubious. Could we argue that it is all right? or: that it is all right if he knows the plug-uglies will only shoot on his orders, and he is not going to give that order? (He isn’t going to affect their being plug-uglies, anyway.)
I do not know the answer to that question.
But what it’s supposed to be an analogue of is rather different. What corresponds to the plug-uglies is going to be a large number of highly respectable people who think it is all right actually to engage in massacre, and who are necessarily sustained and strengthened in that conviction by their role in the preparedness which is part of making the threat. You can’t pretend the threat is not meant. In those circumstances you might say: Well, as far as government - i.e. the top deciders - are concerned, it’s rather like Russian roulette. The man who plays Russian roulette doesn’t mean to shoot himself, only to incur the risk of doing so. But remember that in the analogue the machinery he doesn’t positively mean to set off - or only conditionally means to set off - is a machinery of people who mean to play their part as much as the hammer in the pistol is set to operate. And, anyway, is it all right ‘conditionally to mean’ to commit massacres?
These considerations lead me to think that Christians have to regard themselves as not contributing to the debate on policy, and as people who mustn’t get into the position of having to be willing to set off certain sorts of destructive apparatus; just as they ought to regard themselves as excluded from dropping bombs on cities.