In a memo for Ronald Reagan composed ahead of a May 1982 meeting with Pope John Paul II, Secretary of State Alexander Haig advised the president to emphasize his commitment to eradicating nuclear weapons, “the last great epidemic of our civilization.”
The last great epidemic? It’s hard to read Haig’s words today without a twinge of disbelief, if not jealousy. We’re now living through what might be termed an age of epidemics, both literal and otherwise. Haig’s “last great epidemic” has become our forgotten epidemic, falling to the back of the line behind climate change, gun violence, obesity, loneliness, addiction, and, of course, the Covid pandemic and its potential successors.
Nonetheless, recent geopolitical events may be forcing nuclear weapons back to the front of the queue. Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened nuclear escalation in response to Western support for Ukraine. President Biden’s recent decision to approve the use of American missiles within Russia’s borders has prompted the strongest threats yet.
In the years leading up to the invasion, agreements between the United States and Russia (and, earlier, the Soviet Union) had repeatedly expired or been violated or terminated. In response to Russia’s alleged noncompliance with the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty—one of Reagan’s signature accomplishments—the Trump administration withdrew from the treaty in 2019. In addition to helping further dismantle the arms-control system in his first term, Trump reportedly demonstrated extreme ignorance about nuclear policy, at one point prompting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley to assure our adversaries we wouldn’t attack. Trump also engaged in his own nuclear saber-rattling, helping further weaken the so-called “nuclear taboo.” His second term will likely deliver new shocks to an already unstable situation.
The sole remaining nuclear-arms agreement in force between Russia and the United States is New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), which limits each of the two countries to 1,550 deployed warheads. The treaty is supposed to last until 2026, but Russia, in response to the United States’ arming of Ukraine, has already suspended its full participation, though it claims it will continue to abide by its limitations. In part to rally support for New START’s ratification in 2010, the Obama administration agreed to a modernization program that has been mirrored in Moscow. Both programs include tactical nuclear weapons not covered by New START, which may make nuclear war more likely by helping convince decisionmakers that a limited and winnable nuclear exchange is now possible.
Of course, in this multipolar era, Russia is not the only foreign nuclear power the United States has to worry about. North Korea recently signed a mutual-defense treaty with Russia that could expand its own nuclear program. Israel’s unacknowledged nuclear program poses risks as its war in Gaza continues and spreads. And after the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, Israel’s chief adversary may soon attain nuclear weapons of its own (possibly with Russian support). Most alarming of all is China’s rapidly expanding program, which appears to be aiming for eventual parity with Russia and the United States. China’s nuclear advancement has overturned much of the established wisdom around bipolar deterrence and could lead to a new, supercharged three-state arms race.
It was with many of these developments in mind and on the heels of a visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the archbishop of Santa Fe, John Charles Wester, released the pastoral letter “Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace” in January 2022. Building on Pope Francis’s urgent remarks on the nuclear question, Archbishop Wester called for a new commitment to building a world without nuclear weapons. His letter warns against a dangerous “second arms race”; documents the harms wrought by the nuclear-arms industry, including testing fallout, mining, and waste; rehearses the disturbing history of nuclear near-misses; and pleads for more dialogue about the issue.
As part of such dialogue, in September, the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque hosted the “Forum on Nuclear Strategy: Disarmament & Deterrence in a Dangerous World”—convened in cooperation with the archbishop by the University of Southern California’s Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies. The forum included a public session but consisted mainly of private dialogue between Church leaders—including Cardinal Robert McElroy, an ethicist and political scientist—and government officials and policymakers such as Rose Gottemoeller, the chief negotiator of New START.
The meeting revealed some common ground among its participants but also a significant gulf between the kind of moral reasoning that balks at the existence of nuclear weapons and the strategic thinking behind their deployment. At the center of this gulf lies deterrence. For the nuclear establishment, the concept, which has governed U.S. nuclear policy since the 1960s, remains indispensable. But its critics in the Church and elsewhere allege that deterrence, at least as it is currently articulated and implemented, now stands firmly in the way of disarmament.
Since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Church leaders have repeatedly emphasized the horror of nuclear war and the necessity of disarmament. In Pacem in terris, Pope John XXIII, who helped de-escalate tensions during the Cuban Missile Crisis, questioned the premise of deterrence: “The true and solid peace of nations consists not in equality of arms, but in mutual trust alone.” Nonetheless, the document suggested that the possession of nuclear weapons as a deterrent was permissible as long as progress was being made toward disarmament. Pope John Paul II made this position explicit in a 1982 address to the United Nations: “Not as an end in itself but as a step on the way toward a progressive disarmament, [deterrence] may still be judged morally acceptable.”
But, as Archbishop Wester documents in his letter, the Church and Pope Francis have in recent years begun to turn away from this “interim ethic.” In 2014, as part of the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, the Holy See published “Nuclear Disarmament: Time for Abolition,” which found that the “very possession of nuclear weapons, even for purposes of deterrence, is morally problematic.” Francis echoed that verdict in a 2017 address: “Weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, create nothing but a false sense of security. They cannot constitute the basis for peaceful coexistence between members of the human family, which must rather be inspired by an ethics of solidarity.” In 2019, at the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima, he stated bluntly that the “use of atomic energy for purposes of war is immoral, just as the possessing of nuclear weapons is immoral.”
Archbishop Wester situates Francis’s comments on nuclear weapons within the Vatican’s more general shift toward nonviolence and stronger antiwar sentiment. Although just-war theory hasn’t been explicitly rejected by the Vatican, Francis and others have argued that it has often been misused as a mere list of conditions to check off before going to war. As Cardinal McElroy put it at the inauguration of the Catholic Institute for Nonviolence, “It was not meant to be a justification of war but a restraint on war, and it has lost a lot of that capacity.”
Like just-war theory, deterrence theory admits of ambiguities that can easily be exploited to justify aims outside the concept’s strictest bounds. Nuclear doves have long advocated a more minimal and restrained version of deterrence in the United States’ nuclear posture, such as a no-first-use (NFU) policy—an affirmation that we would use nuclear weapons only in response to an attack. In keeping with President Obama’s rhetorical support for a reduced reliance on nuclear weapons, Biden’s 2020 campaign came out in support of a tempered version of NFU, a “sole-purpose” policy that would declare that the United States possesses nuclear weapons only to deter or retaliate against nuclear attacks—though without explicitly constraining their use. But, as Gottemoeller told me in an interview, “The nuclear priesthood reared its head,” and sole-purpose was rejected in the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review.
Opponents of NFU argue that reserving the option of first use enhances the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons against both nuclear and major non-nuclear (biological or chemical-weapons) attacks. NFU might also leave allies protected by our nuclear umbrella feeling less safe and incentivize them to seek alternative alliances or even develop their own nuclear weapons. Finally, Christopher Ford, assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation during the Trump administration, has argued that NFU is simply “not particularly credible” and likely to be taken as a “cynical ploy” by our adversaries.
Antinuclear advocates point out that the logic of these arguments contradicts a statement first made by Gorbachev and Reagan in 1985 and frequently repeated by government officials ever since: “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Furthermore, as long as a first-use policy remains in place, an adversary like Russia may have a greater incentive to beat us to the punch. The rejection of NFU shows how easily deterrence can be turned from a defensive principle into one requiring “a bomb for every occasion,” as one former nuclear official put it.
Critics say that aggressive nuclear policy uses the rhetoric of deterrence as cover for more expansive aims, such as cementing strategic alliances or projecting power around the world. Ira Helfand, a conference participant and past president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, told me that the U.S. nuclear posture and its position on first use “gives the lie to the whole idea that the U.S. nuclear program is only about deterrence.” As Bishop Wester notes in his letter, the nuclear postures of both the United States and the USSR/Russia have always been a “hybrid of deterrence and nuclear war fighting ability.” The lack of clarity about the precise scope of deterrence—further complicated by China’s emergence as a nuclear threat—reveals not only its limitations as an “interim ethic” but also uncertainty about the very purpose of nuclear weapons.
During the Albuquerque conference’s public session, Helfand contended that the U.S. nuclear posture makes clear that we are not living up to our obligations under the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Signed by the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council—China, France, Russia, the UK, and the United States—the NPT is the main international treaty governing nonproliferation and disarmament. Its Article VI states that parties to the treaty will “undertake to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” In response to Helfand, current and former American officials present at the conference claimed that the United States has tried to live up to its obligations by requesting arms-control talks with Russia and China—they simply refuse to talk.
But Helfand argued that American pledges of fealty to the NPT are belied by its resistance to the recent Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). That treaty, which entered into force with its fiftieth signatory in early 2021, bans nuclear weapons for current non-nuclear states and commits its nuclear-armed signatories to a process that would lead to the elimination of their nuclear arsenal. The Vatican was among the initial signatories of the treaty and has advocated for its wider adoption. But the United States, along with other nuclear-armed states and NATO, has refused to have anything to do with it. Gottemoeller, a Catholic who attempted to dissuade the Vatican from its support for the TPNW, said that the treaty “interferes with NATO’s extended deterrence mission.” Critics of the treaty also allege that it undermines the NPT’s authority as the primary vehicle for nonproliferation and disarmament. The treaty’s advocates, meanwhile, see it as a wholly consistent development of the NPT’s Article VI.
Gottemoeller has also expressed concern over the moral burden the Vatican’s position places on Catholics working within the deterrence paradigm. At the conference, Cardinal McElroy insisted the Church’s position that nuclear weapons are immoral is “not a judgment on individual action”; it’s meant to apply to states and institutions.
Resistance to the TPNW points to the potential limitations of anti-nuclear advocacy by institutions like the Church. In these pages and elsewhere, Bernard G. Prusak has framed the Church’s potential role in this debate in terms that Cathleen Kaveny lays out in her 2018 book, Prophecy Without Contempt. Prusak argues that an approach of “prophetic indictment”—a simple condemnation of any policy of deterrence—is likely to alienate policymakers and, therefore, to fail. That doesn’t mean that those who are morally opposed to nuclear weapons should refrain from open and blunt criticism of such policies, but they “must also engage in the debate about what can be done now, starting from where we are.”
It may help to look back to the early 1980s, when the U.S. Church made its most significant intervention in the nuclear-arms debate. In 1983, the U.S. bishops released a pastoral letter, “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response,” which sought to clarify Catholic teaching on deterrence and the possession of nuclear weapons. The context was the Reagan administration’s program of “peace through strength” and nuclear buildup. Opposed to Reagan was the growing nuclear-freeze movement. Supported by huge numbers of Americans and Europeans, as well as the Catholic peace group Pax Christi, this movement sought a halt to the further production and testing of nuclear weapons by both the United States and the Soviet Union. The Reagan administration, which included several Catholics, tried to dissuade the bishops from adopting the rhetoric of the freeze movement, which they regarded as dangerously naïve. As initial drafts of the bishops’ letter became public, Reagan administration representatives attempted to influence them through letters, phone calls, and meetings. Reagan himself excoriated the nuclear-freeze movement in speeches—even speculating that “foreign agents” were behind it—and enjoined clergy to help him fight the “godless” Soviet Union. Meanwhile, John Paul II, who had a famously close political relationship with Reagan, urged the U.S. bishops to soften their language.
The bishops faced the same charges then that anti-nuclear movements face today: they were accused of being out of their depth, of unfairly targeting the United States instead of its opponents, of underestimating the evil of those opponents, and of giving them a strategic advantage. Despite the friction, the bishops took the Reagan administration’s criticisms seriously, incorporating some of them into the pastoral’s final draft.
Still, the letter was a strong statement of opposition to the nuclear-arms race. While echoing John Paul II’s insistence that deterrence be understood as an interim ethic, it made clear that the concept of strategy based on horrific threats “strained [their] moral conception.” The U.S. bishops also went further than the pope in trying to define the kind of deterrence that was morally acceptable in the current circumstances. Such deterrence, they insisted, could not include targeting civilian populations intentionally or indirectly. And, given that deterrence must be limited to preventing nuclear war, neither the Reagan administration’s extensive plans for waging a nuclear war, involving drawn-out strike-counterstrike scenarios, nor its nuclear buildup could be tolerated. “If nuclear deterrence is our goal,” the bishops wrote, “‘sufficiency’ to deter is an adequate strategy; the quest for nuclear superiority must be rejected.” John Garvey wrote in Commonweal that, for the political standing of American Catholics, the pastoral was “more significant than Kennedy’s election.”
The nuclear-freeze movement and the work of groups like the bishops placed significant constraints on early Reagan-
administration policy. The degree of their influence is contested, but it likely helped push Reagan to begin negotiating the INF treaty in 1981. It also fueled resistance in Congress to the administration’s maximalist nuclear-modernization proposals, though Reagan still managed to secure support for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or “Star Wars,” his impractical space-based nuclear-defense project. The freeze movement also helped move the administration’s rhetoric away from discussion of “winnable” nuclear war and toward the idea that nuclear weapons “must never be used.” Finally, it had a significant effect on Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985 and whose enthusiasm for disarmament—in the wake of UN exercises that nearly sparked a nuclear war in 1983—set the stage for the agreements of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The present circumstances are much less propitious for intervention by the Church. There is no broad-based popular antinuclear movement comparable to the freeze movement, which brought a million people to the streets of New York City for a demonstration in the summer of 1982. Nor have the U.S. bishops shown any interest in taking the issue on again as a group.
For these reasons, there is a risk that Francis’s condemnation of deterrence will consign the Church to irrelevance on this issue, at least in the American context. It may stand as a powerful expression of moral conviction but also one of practical powerlessness. As some at the Albuquerque conference argued, if the Church wants to exert influence, it should outline a feasible path from deterrence to disarmament, rather than simply condemn the former while insisting, unrealistically, on the latter.
There is, however, a risk of overinterpreting Francis’s condemnation of deterrence as more of a “clear break” with past teaching on nuclear weapons than it really is. After all, deterrence was never accepted on its own terms, but only when coupled with genuine efforts at disarmament. One could argue that the Vatican is just recognizing that deterrence—at least as it is currently conceived—isn’t leading to disarmament. As Cardinal McElroy put it, deterrence is being implemented as a “foundational strategy,” rather than as “an intermediate tool.” What was supposed to be an interim ethic has become a permanent ideology that can hardly be challenged.
But if, as Gerard Powers argues, the Church is condemning deterrence as it exists and not as such, then it should make that as clear as possible. And it should attempt to chart a path from the current “deterrence plus” strategy to minimal or sufficient deterrence—or some other way station if deterrence must be abandoned completely—and from there to disarmament. The current nuclear postures of the United States and its adversaries may well be morally bankrupt, but they are also conceptually underdeveloped, outdated, and, given the stakes, “dizzyingly insane,” to use Daniel Ellsberg’s language. This situation presents an opportunity for the Church to propose an alternative that is moral and, just as importantly, rational. But that will require engaging seriously and in detail with nuclear policy as it exists. Arguments against the reasoning behind nuclear policy will hold more sway with the nuclear establishment than sweeping moral pronouncements, which are easily dismissed as naïveté or, worse, useful idiocy.
Neither the United States nor any of its adversaries will abandon deterrence at a stroke and disarm unilaterally in the hopes that competitors follow suit. Nor will the environment of mutual suspicion give way to an ethics of solidarity overnight. An interim ethic—one that necessarily fails the most stringent moral tests but provides a framework for progress toward disarmament—remains necessary. Developing one that can succeed remains the challenge of peace.
