Today we face a new arms race. Given the multiple nuclear actors involved, the new cyber weapons under development, and the role to be played by artificial intelligence, it is arguably more dangerous than that of the Cold War. To confront its challenges, we need to break free of deeply ingrained human patterns of thinking—our so-called “lizard brains,” the tit-for-tat feuding that risks escalating the arms race and further imperiling everyone.
This work is made all the more difficult by a geopolitical landscape that is becoming more and more contentious by the day. As the archbishop of Santa Fe, with the birthplace of nuclear weapons within the boundaries of my archdiocese, I feel a special responsibility to address this threat. That is why, in January 2022, I published a pastoral letter entitled Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace: A Conversation Toward Nuclear Disarmament. Since we now possess the ability to destroy human civilization many times over, nuclear disarmament is a pro-life issue.
Most of all, I am committed to nuclear disarmament because of the demands made by the Gospel. Jesus Christ preached a gospel of peace. When asked if he would call down fire from heaven to exact revenge on those who had rejected him, he responded with a resounding “No!” (Luke 9:54–55). We must never forget that the United States was the first and only country so far to “call down fire from heaven” when we used atomic weapons to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This means Americans have a responsibility to take a leadership position in eliminating the threat of nuclear warfare once and for all, as we pledged in the 1970 nonproliferation treaty (a commitment we have yet to honor). To do so is to proclaim the Gospel message of peace loudly and clearly. We must apply the lessons of the first arms race to help avert the perils of the new, rapidly accelerating one.
My brother Joseph Takami, archbishop emeritus of Nagasaki, who traveled from Japan to be with us at the University of New Mexico conference, the “Forum on Nuclear Strategy: Disarmament & Deterrence in a Dangerous World,” is a living example of the need to avert another arms race and abolish nuclear weapons. He was in his mother’s womb on August 9, 1945, when a plutonium bomb from Los Alamos, New Mexico, flattened Nagasaki, destroying the largest Catholic community in Japan and making the archbishop a hibakusha, a nuclear-bomb survivor. His maternal grandmother and great-aunt were killed. When he speaks out against the horrors of nuclear weapons, he does so from his heart and his life experience. In Nagasaki, on August 9, 2023, the seventy-eighth anniversary of its bombing, Archbishop Takami and I, along with the bishops of Seattle, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima, formed the Partnership for a World Without Nuclear Weapons to work on nuclear disarmament.
New Mexico offers more examples of the harm the nuclear-weapons industry can cause. In fiscal year 2024, the Department of Energy spent $10 billion in the state, including $7 billion for core nuclear-weapons research and production programs and nearly half a billion for dumping resulting radioactive waste in our state. It is spending six percent more in New Mexico than the state government’s entire operating budget. Yet the Land of Enchantment remains dead last in public education and in the well-being of our children. Meanwhile, the victims of the world’s first atomic blast, the Trinity Test Downwinders, have been denied justice and are yet to be compensated. Despite all the money being spent within our borders, the nuclear-weapons industry does not do the average New Mexican any good.
In my pastoral letter, which has now been translated into Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Italian, I traced how the Catholic Church evolved from conditional acceptance of “deterrence” in the 1980s to Pope Francis’s declaration, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the atomic bombing, that the possession of nuclear weapons is immoral. The question of deterrence is crucial to the development of an ethical and strategic framework for nuclear disarmament. We need to examine whether deterrence as currently implemented is a legitimate strategy.
Prior to the UNM conference, reports said that President Biden had signed a new nuclear-strategy policy tailored for China. The document, an updated version of U.S. “Nuclear Employment Guidance,” is currently classified. But a senior director at the National Security Council reportedly said the new strategy focuses on “the need to deter Russia, the [People’s Republic of China] and North Korea simultaneously.” He also added that the day may come when the United States must numerically expand its nuclear-weapons stockpile. As of September 2023, the U.S. had 3,748 warheads and had only dismantled sixty-nine that year, the lowest number in thirty years. .
In a recent article, MIT Professor Ted Postol, drawing on an earlier article coauthored with Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists, writes:
Biden’s approval of this strategy is no more than a tacit acknowledgment of a two-decade-long U.S. technical program that has been more than just a “slight modernization” of weapons components, but a dramatic step towards the capability to fight and win nuclear wars with both China and Russia. In other words, there is nothing really “new” here at all, save the very public nature of the strategy’s acknowledgement.
This “modernization” includes the retrofitting of U.S. submarine-launched ballistic missiles with a new fuse, a so-called “super-fuze.” The fuse increases three-dimensional targeting accuracy, including height of burst. Postol claims that it will more than double the ability of U.S. Trident submarines to destroy both Russian and Chinese intercontinental-ballistic-missile silos. “Although any technically accurate assessment of the physical consequences of the large-scale use of nuclear weapons instantly shows that ‘winning’ a nuclear war has no meaning,” he writes, “the United States has strenuously emphasized the development of nuclear weapons technologies that could only make sense if their intended purpose is for fighting and winning nuclear wars.”
The $2 trillion “modernization” program to maintain “deterrence” entails an extreme makeover of the American nuclear-weapons stockpile. It includes extending the service lives of existing nuclear weapons; manufacturing newly designed nuclear weapons, which hasn’t been done since the 1980s; building new weapons-production facilities not expected to be operational until around 2080; and procuring new submarines, missiles, and bombers to deliver nuclear weapons. The rationale for these advances—“enhancing deterrence”—Postol writes, “does not fool the military and political leadership of Russia and China.” It drives them instead “to consider new ways of deterring a dangerous...nation that is constantly striving for better ways to ‘disarm’ large parts of their nuclear forces.”
This build-up is all taking place despite the U.S. government’s official position in favor of nuclear disarmament, pledged in the 1970 nonproliferation treaty. Its Article VI mandated “negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” So-called “modernization” directly contradicts that mandate. Instead of “cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date” we now have a new nuclear arms race. It’s hard to see this as anything other than a massive failure.
Is all this really just for the sake of deterrence, or is the United States simply committed to maintaining nuclear dominance forever? Part of the problem is that deterrence is not strictly defined in official documents. The Pentagon’s 2020 Nuclear Employment Strategy, which followed Trump’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, states, “The requirements for effective nuclear deterrence vary given the need to address different potential adversaries under very different circumstances.” These varying requirements can lead to endless permutations of the stockpile, new nuclear-weapons designs, and, in turn, to an endless nuclear arms race that degrades national and global security, despite its stated aims.
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev declared long ago that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. This was reaffirmed by Presidents Biden, Putin, and Xi in 2021. Nevertheless the 2020 Nuclear Implementation Plan goes on to say: “Until nuclear weapons can be prudently eliminated from the world, the United States will maintain safe, secure, and effective nuclear forces that...enable us to achieve our objectives if deterrence fails.” But when will the moment when these weapons can be prudently eliminated come? Why didn’t it happen in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War? If deterrence fails, all “our objectives” will be moot. The essential objective should be to eliminate the nuclear threat by eliminating nuclear weapons.
The 2020 Nuclear Employment Strategy explicitly reinforces the position of earlier documents, including the 2013 Nuclear Employment Strategy, that mere deterrence is not the only rationale for possessing nuclear weapons. The 2013 strategy states that “the new guidance does not rely on a ‘counter-value’ or ‘minimum deterrence’ strategy,” but rather “requires the United States to maintain significant counterforce capabilities against potential adversaries.”
This makes clear what was already evident to close observers: the United States and Russia (and the USSR before it) have never relied on deterrence alone. Instead, their policies have always been driven by a mix of deterrence and nuclear-war-fighting capabilities that can end human civilization overnight. This explains why both countries have thousands more nuclear weapons than the few hundred needed for minimum deterrence. It explains why the United States has a $2 trillion “modernization” program that envisions no end to the possession of nuclear weapons. And it explains why the Los Alamos National Laboratory is expanding the production of plutonium pits (bomb cores) for new nuclear weapons, which are not needed to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing stockpile.
The 2013 Nuclear Employment Strategy declared that “U.S. nuclear weapons employment guidance directs minimizing civilian damage to the extent possible.” But if launched, these weapons will inevitably harm and kill civilians, noncombatants, babies, the young, the old, and the infirm. This is why Pope Francis has declared the possession of nuclear weapons is itself immoral—because their intrinsic nature is to kill indiscriminately.
I want to conclude by making a modest proposal. As a major step toward a world free of nuclear weapons, let us move toward genuine deterrence and only deterrence. “Deterrence” is constantly pitched to the American taxpayer as the rationale for an exorbitant nuclear-weapons stockpile. Let us give the American taxpayer what they’ve been told they’re getting: the few hundred nuclear weapons needed for minimal deterrence. Another significant step would be for the nuclear-weapons states to begin to observe the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, now ratified by seventy-three countries.
Of course, I do not mean that the U.S. should unilaterally reduce its stockpile. What I advocate is that the United States finally take a leadership role in honoring the 1970 nonproliferation treaty’s Article VI mandate to enter serious negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament. Roughly speaking, the proposal on the table should require both the United States and Russia to reduce their stockpiles to a few hundred warheads each, China to freeze its expansion, and other nuclear-weapons powers to go down to one hundred warheads or lower.
This August, Archbishop Etienne of Seattle and I plan to join our brother bishops in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bishop Shirahama and Archbishop Nakamura, respectively, to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the bombings of those two Japanese cities. Please pray that our world leaders will be motivated by this gruesome memorial to make concrete progress toward nuclear disarmament and to abandon their reliance on an expansive form of “deterrence” that includes nuclear-war-fighting capabilities.
Since writing my pastoral letter, I often call to mind a quote by General Omar Bradley: “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.” May God help us all as we seek to find a way out of the new nuclear arms race, harnessing the energy needed to be instruments of peace as effectively as we have harnessed the energy of the atom for weapons of mass destruction.
This article was published as part of a symposium titled “The Path Toward Disarmament.” The other contributions to the symposium can be found here:
Raymond J. Juzaitis, “The Need for Deterrence”
Maryann Cusimano Love, “The Promise of Peacebuilding”
J. Bryan Hehir, “A Pluralistic Ethic”
