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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
-‘Would you press the button you know is going to annihilate millions of people ?’
-‘If the circumstances demanded it, I would.’
This reply, under oath, by Air Commodore Magill to Pat Pottle at the British Official Secrets Trial of February 1962, distils the essence of nuclear deterrence. In the light of common sense, and especially with reference to just-war principles, it also defines its essential immorality.
As a prosecution witness, the Air Commodore was being cross-examined by one of the accused who had invaded a nuclear base in protest and who was later sentenced to imprisonment for this offence. The Air Commodore’s reply is of course in no sense surprising; everybody knows that the backbone of nuclear strategy remains the threatened icineration of enemy cities. (Even is so-called tactical nuclear combat and in so-called strategic counterforce strategies it is precisely the ultimate threat against enemy cities which seeks to enforce the proposed restraints.) What is notable about Air Commodore Magill’s colloquy with his objector is simply that it spells out, with a clarity we cannot evade, the moral cost of nuclear defence.
This cost lies not merely in the risking of future enormities; it involves gravely immoral intentions here and now. These declared intentions to execute city-hostages ‘if the circumstances demanded it’ are no less immediately and categorically genocidal for relating to a future hypothetical condition. No doubt there is a difference between murder accomplished and murder in one’s heart, but it is not a difference between murderousness and non-murderousness.
1 From a Symposium: Peace on Earth: The Way Ahead to be published shortly by Sheed and Ward Ltd., LondonGoogle Scholar.
2 The Tablet, 19 October 1963. Captain Hinterhoff's references are to A Strategy for American Security ‐ An Alternative to the 1964 Budget, edited by Professor Seymour Melmann of Columbia University.
3 ‘Control in Modern War’, Foreign Affairs, January 1962.
4 0n the Prevention of War (London, 1962), p. 95Google Scholar; italics Strachey's.
5 Cf.‘It is admittedly unlikely that an enemy would ever present its opponent with land or sea targets, such as massed armies or fleets, to which megaton weapons would not be disproportionate, but such weapons are now deemed necessary to meet the not‐altogether fanciful threat of satellites orbiting in space with a nuclear load, or to disrupt the enemy's defensive radar, and they are even being tested for these purposes.’ ‐ Mgr L. L. McReavy, Peace and War (London, 1963), p. 50. Who has ‘deemed’ it necessary that these‘not‐altogether fanciful’ threats be met with an over‐all overkill capacity of between seventy‐eight to one thousand two hundred and fifty times and to maintain this capacity for these‘not altogether fanciful’ purposes? (Mgr McReavy's single‐clause proviso, “There can therefore be legitimate uses for most nuclear weapons”, though not so evidently for the immense number that are being stockpiled on both sides', is not nearly ‘so evidently’ efficacious as his emphatic, categorical re‐abstraction of nuclear ‘legitimacy’. This characteristic, one‐way mixture of concrete and abstract, factual and fictitious, committed and non‐committal assertions, forms a casuistic critical mass; and the coming together of such casual ‐crucially un‐pursued ‐ concessions and tacit complementary evasions is catastrophic.)
6 Peace and War, p. 50.
7 ‘ibid’., pp. 50–51: ‘It is true, as we have observed, that both sides are seeking to escape from this suicidal policy, as crazy as it is criminal; but neither has yet formally abandoned it, and the current MacNamara plan, of which the British government approves, expressly holds it in reserve’.
8 Ibid., p. 51.
9 ibid., pp. 53–53.
10 read morally (?).
11 ibid., p. 51.
12 Cardinal Heenan, John C., Unity and Peace: Some Aspects of the Vatican Council (Burge Memorial Lecture, delivered at Church House, Westminster, on 25 May 1965Google Scholar. SCM Press).
13 I have stated this point in detail in ‘The Limits of Nuclear War: Is a Just Deterrence Strategy Possible?’, in Peace, the Churches and the Bomb (ed. James Finn; Council on Religion and International Affairs, New York, 1965).
14 The most serious formulation of proposals envisaging such a re‐structuring of Western defence is to be found in Justus George Lawler's Nuclear War; the Ethic, the Rhetoric, the Reality (Newman Press, Westminster, Maryland, 1965)Google Scholar. The whole book, which I was fortunate to see in proof, forms an outstandingly important work of constructive witness. (The need for ‐ at least ‐ such a radical re‐structuring of the deterrent is already implicit in Mgr McReavy's unobtrusively pregnant remark: There can therefore be legitimate uses for most nuclear weapons, though not so evidently for the immense number that are being stockpiled on both sides' ‐ op. cit., p. 50; italics added. Cf. p. 16 and note 10, above.)
15 The Guardian report on the Auschwitz trial, 20 August 1965.
16 Unity and Peace, p. 19.
17 Cf. The Guardian, 10 November, 1964.
18 op. cit., pp. 18–19.
19 ‘The Hiroshima Choice’, The Observer, 6 September, 1959.
20 Thomas Corbishley, s.j., Crux, Spring 1956. Cf. Fr Corbishley's article ‘Can War be Just in a Nuclear Age?’, Blackfriars, September 1965, which has moved a sufficiently long way from this 1956 statement to conclude that ‘Nuclear Warfare is the end of reason, precisely because it involves the use of force out of all proportion to any possible good which may be brought about. Indeed it seems necessary to hold that to contemplate the mere possibility of launching a nuclear attack on an enemy implies such colossal failure to recognize the value of human life, as to reduce the whole operation to something sub‐human’. Nevertheless, Fr Corbishley still defends the interim threat of nuclear war: ‘we need to give more time to the discussion of the ethic of bluffiing’. Unfortunately ‐just as Mgr McReavy restricts himself to an unexamined reference to the need to ‘reform’ the intentions behind nuclear deterrence – Fr Cornishley, gives very little time to ‘the ethics of bluffing’ in his own article, and does not refer to existing discussions purporting to refute the argument from bluff in the nuclear context.
21 Letter to The Tablet, 2 June 1962.
22 Tke Catholic Herald, 11 April 1963.
23 The Tablet, 23 June 1962;
24 ibid., 22 February 1964
25 ibid., 22 March 1958.
26 iW., 10 February 1962. (The notion of nuclear weapons essentially as diplomatic counters 'frequently recurs in Tablet editorial comments.)
27 Cf. p. if, above.
28 AAS xxxvi‐II‐xi, p. 12.
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