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An Epitaph for the Cold War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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Just Deterrence by the ‘Pembroke Group’—a ‘distinguished group of civil servants, servicemen, service chaplains, theologians and academics’ to quote the blurb—claims to be about ‘Morality and Deterrence into the Twenty-First Century’. Actually it is about the morality of nuclear deterrence as practised by NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Inevitably, therefore, the book has the character of an epitaph. Of course the corpse of East-West deterrence is still twitching. Nevertheless, old-style deterrence is to all intents and purposes defunct. As Saddam has shown, new-style deterrence is about something very different. Today the question Hugh Beach’s contribution poses is all too relevant: could anything be worse than a war?
Just Deterrence is not a great book, like Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars, or Finnis, Grisez and Boyle’s Morality and Realism. For reasons beyond the editors’ control, it is not a strikingly apt intervention as was Walter Stein’s Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience in 1961, but neither is it perniciously muddle-headed, like Michael Novak’s Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age. Like Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence edited by Geoffrey Goodwin in 1982, (with which it has much in common, including certain authors) it has some very closely argued chapters, and others which are certainly stimulating if, in the end unacceptable; together with yet others which are, to my mind, badly wrong. As an epitaph, it is well worth scrutinising closely as we peer at what is written for our edification on the gravestone of the Cold War.
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- Copyright © 1991 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Just Deterrence: Morality and Deterrence into the Twenty‐First Century edited by Malcolm McCall and Oliver Ramsbotham. Brassay's (UK), 1990. pp. xv + 146. £19.95.
2 The Pembroke Group do not appear to have noticed the much discussed work of Gar Alperowitz, whose Atomic Diplomacy was reprinted in 1985 in ah expanded edition, taking account of newly available documents not accessible when it first appeared in 1965. Alperowitz studied American policy in the last months of World War II. He showed that Truman's decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had nothing to do with calculations of likely casualties following an invasion of Japan, or comparing these with the casualties likely to follow the use of the bomb. It had everything to do with Byrnes's diplomatic strategy for containing the Soviet Union in the post‐war world. Rightly or wrongly, Truman's advisers, civilian and military, were united in telling him that an invasion would not be needed to get the Japanese to surrender, and he did not disagree with them. He did not drop the bomb with the intention of avoiding a costly invasion of the Japanese mainland. While this point is left on one side in Just Deterrence, Leonard Cheshire's book The Light of Many Suns, which also ignores Alperowitz's work, is frequently quoted in support of their case by the Pembroke Group. Cheshire argues that the Japanese Emperor could never have persuaded the military to surrender without the destruction wrought at Hisoshima and Nagasaki. This may be true, but does not weaken Alperowitz's case.
3 The terms ‘ethics of distress’ and ‘emergency ethics’ were used by the French and German bishops respectively in their pastoral letters on peace issued in 1983. An argument for the practical incoherence of the position eventually adopted by the American bishops, in their 1983 pastoral letter The Challenge of Peace, was expounded by Michael Quinlan (a Pembroke Group member) in Theological Studies Vol 48 (1987) pp. 3–24. As to logically fallacious arguments, see James Cameron's review of Michael Novak's Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age in Nuclear Catholics and Other Essays, Grand Rapids, 1989.
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