The final version of the US bishops’ pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response, although it is not without its disappointments, is still an extraordinary document which is going to have an irreversible effect on the way the Catholic Church thinks about nuclear war. It is not out of the blue however, having spent a long time in gestation — at least since the bishops’ 1976 statement on deterrence, “To Live in Christ Jesus”. And it is the fruit of at least two major developments of thinking about modem war: on the one hand Papal and Conciliar teaching on total war, which began with Pius XII’s broadcasts during World War II; on the other hand modern American scholarship in the Just War tradition, which has been stimulated by the sense of responsibility for Hiroshima and Vietnam. If the main moral thrust — their “No to nuclear war” — comes from the former, it is the latter which set up the possibility for intelligent open debate in the United States on the morality of modern weapons and strategy. But one must give due recognition to a third influence: the profound effect which a handful of Catholic pacifists such as Dorothy Day, Gordon Zahn and James Douglass have had on some of the American bishops.

The remarkable thing is the confidence with which the bishops have intervened in the debate in their own country: not merely with well-meaning generalities such as normally afflicts church documents, but with tough arguments on particular policies, many of which are clearly opposed to those of the US Administration.