In November, after the United States permitted long-range Ukrainian missile attacks on Russian soil, President Vladimir Putin lowered the threshold required for Russia to launch nuclear weapons. The Pentagon reports that China “surpassed 600 operational warheads as of mid-2024” and will likely pass 1,000 by 2030. President Trump’s turn away from European alliances has led to concerns that nations currently under the U.S. nuclear umbrella will soon see the need to build their own bombs. Amid these and other concerns about a dangerous new arms race in an unstable, multipolar world, Pope Francis has pushed Church teaching toward more forceful condemnations of nuclear deterrence and the very possession of nuclear weapons.
In light of these shifts in geopolitics and the Church’s position, the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California and the University of New Mexico’s Endowed Chair in Catholic Studies and Religious Studies Program convened a forum in September for a high-level discussion of the current state of American nuclear policy. Titled “Nuclear Strategy: Disarmament & Deterrence in a Dangerous World,” the forum brought together defenders of Catholic teaching, dissenters who nonetheless draw on the Catholic moral tradition, tribal and rural communities affected by nuclear production and testing, and secular thinkers from within the nuclear-weapons and arms-control communities. It included both closed-door meetings and a concluding public session.
Participants included Rose Gottemoeller, chief negotiator of New START; Christopher Ford, former assistant secretary of state for International Security and Nonproliferation; Thomas Mason, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory; Cardinal Robert McElroy; and Joseph Mitsuaki Takami, archbishop emeritus of Nagasaki, among others. We convened four other influential participants in the forum to articulate their competing positions on disarmament, deterrence, and the role of the Church.
Read the symposium contributions here:
Archbishop John Wester, “A First Step”
Raymond J. Juzaitis, “The Need for Deterrence”
Maryann Cusimano Love, “The Promise of Peacebuilding”
J. Bryan Hehir, “A Pluralistic Ethic”
