Conscience and Nuclear Weapons

Part 2 in a Series on Catholics, Conscience, and Immigration Enforcement

At a parish men’s retreat several years ago, a dear friend was pontificating about the pernicious influence of the military-industrial complex on American society and wondering how it was possible that more Catholics did not adopt a stance of nonviolence. My friend didn’t realize, however, that the man sitting next to him, another retreat participant, worked at Rockwell Collins, at the time a major supplier of aircraft communication systems to the US military, part of the very military-industrial complex my friend was railing against. An awkward moment, but the conversation turned to other things, and an argument was avoided.

In their 1983 pastoral letter The Challenge of Peace, the US Catholic bishops teach that Catholics can take a variety of moral stances toward war and the concrete ethical and professional questions arising from it. On the other hand, there are certain binding principles that Catholics must draw on in forming their consciences on these issues, and there are moral absolutes that cannot be violated, even when adherence to these absolutes leads to serious personal and professional consequences. The scene I just described illustrates these teachings of the bishops quite well. My friend had become convinced that, as a matter of conscience, Catholics should adopt a stance of Gospel nonviolence and reject war and all its trappings, and he almost certainly would have insisted that a Catholic should not, in good conscience, seek employment in the defense industry. Our fellow retreatant, however, had concluded that working in the defense industry could be justified in support of the military’s legitimate responsibility “to protect the welfare of the people entrusted to their care,” in the words of the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes (#79).

Last month, in the first of a series of articles on conscience, I highlighted a handful of officials in the second Trump administration who have already resigned from their positions as a matter of conscience, in protest against policies they were expected to implement but which they concluded were unethical or even illegal. Each person is responsible for their own conscience, but in The Challenge of Peace, the bishops teach that the Church should be a “Community of Conscience” which educates the faithful about the moral teachings of the Gospel, fosters the spiritual conversion needed to live according to one’s conscience, encourages prayer and worship as a way to promote discipleship, and offers penance for the attitudes and structures that contribute to violence and the violation of human dignity.

In this article, I want to summarize how, in The Challenge of Peace, the bishops asked the faithful in the US to undertake an examination of conscience regarding the possession and potential use of nuclear weapons. Besides addressing the nation as a whole in terms of nuclear policy, the letter also calls on individual Catholics whose livelihoods in some way relate to nuclear weapons, including soldiers, government officials, and those who work in the defense industry, to consider how they will live out their faith in those roles and what moral absolutes they should be unwilling to violate.

Then, in a final installment I’ll publish sometime in the next few weeks, I want to explore how the treatment of conscience in The Challenge of Peace could be applied to those employed in positions that involve them in the enforcement or implementation of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. I’ll also focus on how the US Catholic Church today could serve as a Community of Conscience in this context.

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In The Challenge of Peace, the US bishops insist that Catholics have a fundamental responsibility to promote and defend peace. In a world broken by sin, bearing arms through military service can be a legitimate way of defending peace, particularly when other means of securing peace have failed (#73). To be just, however, war must be at the service of peace and must be conducted according to moral standards. The bishops therefore appeal to the Christian just-war tradition, a set of moral principles that govern the decision to go to war (jus ad bellum) and the conduct of war (jus in bello) (#84). Governments are called on to make decisions about war by means of these principles, and citizens likewise ought to evaluate their government’s actions in their light.

Recognizing that many Catholics have concluded that their faith requires them to give up bearing arms and to embrace nonviolence (#73), the bishops controversially claim that both the just-war and pacifist responses are legitimate and share a “complementary relationship” with each other (#74). The bishops further state:

[I]n an age of technological warfare, analysis from the viewpoint of non-violence and analysis from the viewpoint of the just-war teaching often converge and agree in their opposition to methods of warfare which are in fact indistinguishable from total warfare. (#121)

This, then, points to one of the central purposes of the pastoral letter, to provide moral guidance on US nuclear policy, a crucial issue during the early 1980s as Cold War tensions between the US and the Soviet Union flared up. Some of the moral questions considered by the bishops in The Challenge of Peace have lost much of their salience in the decades after the end of the Cold War, although their insistence that ultimately nuclear weapons pose an intolerable risk to human (and non-human) life and that the international community should work toward their disarmament remains highly relevant. Indeed, as Pope Francis warned, the end of the Cold War leaves no good reason for holding on to nuclear stockpiles, making disarmament all the more urgent.

After outlining the principles of just-war reasoning, the bishops then discuss a number of key questions of nuclear policy and provide their moral conclusions.

1. No nuclear strikes targeted at civilian populations.

The bishops state unequivocally that nuclear weapons should never be used to directly target civilian populations or indiscriminately used against military and civilian targets (#147). The just-war principle of discrimination or non-combatant immunity states that civilians cannot be deliberately targeted during war. During the Second World War, the American moral theologian John C. Ford, SJ argued that so-called “obliteration bombing,” the indiscriminate bombing of cities conducted by both sides during the war, was morally wrong. Although Ford produced this argument before the US had dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his argument clearly applied in those cases, as well. The bishops gathered at the Second Vatican Council affirmed this argument in Gaudium et Spes:

Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation. (#80)

In The Challenge of Peace, the US bishops add that such indiscriminate use of force could also not be used in retaliation against a similar attack from an enemy (#148).

2. No first use of nuclear weapons.

Even if nuclear weapons cannot be used to target civilian populations, could they be used against military targets? At the time, the most commonly considered scenario was one in which Soviet conventional forces had invaded Western Europe and were engaged in conventional warfare against NATO forces (i.e., the militaries of the US, Canada, and the nations of Western Europe). If the situation looked dire for NATO, could the US resort to using nuclear weapons against Soviet military targets? (#151)

The bishops conclude: “We do not perceive any situation in which the deliberate initiation of nuclear warfare, on however restricted a scale, can be morally justified” (#150). They appeal to two principal arguments. First, even a limited tactical nuclear strike would likely lead to unacceptable levels of civilian casualties. The just-war principle of proportionality states that any unintended civilian casualties resulting from an attack on a legitimate military target must be “proportionate” to the importance of the attack for successfully achieving key war aims. Second, the bishops argue that the tactical use of nuclear weapons is unlikely to remain limited and instead would likely precipitate an escalation with catastrophic consequences (#152).