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.

In this discussion-paper I look at certain general kinds of peace which certain general kinds of “education” are calculated to bring about, if they succeed; in order first to see which if any of them is ultimately worth having. I find at least one, and at present only one general kind of peace to be worth having; and then examine two broad “realistic” ways — the only “realistic” ways I yet see — in which we might think to achieve that peace. I find neither of those ways to be ultimately capable of delivering that peace, and nearly all the more sensible forms of “peace education” which I have yet heard canvassed, to be tacitly or expressly geared to one or other of those ways. (The present paper came in response to a review of literature on peace education which I was called upon to make, some time ago.) I then consider an “unrealistic” possible way to achieving the same sort of supposedly worthwhile peace, finding that the chances of ever achieving it by that way are slender in the extreme, and that the forms of “education” which I see to be needed in order to achieve it by that general route are themselves so dangerous that the “unrealistic” route too may well find no sensible takers.

After a discursive opening I present an argument with “small holes” in it. By that I mean that assumptions would have to be supplied, at various stages, to make the argument even formally valid; and that many of the steps I do express would have to be rewritten for a similar purpose.

I thought of putting something in the title about theology. Better not. Juxtaposing theology and any single social science might recall the sermon in The Way of All Flesh in which geology was shown first to be totally without significance for theology and then to be positive evidence for the literal truth of Genesis. If theology is to be explained away by sociology, that shows insufferable presumption. If theology could be helped by sociology, which would mean that theologians could or should learn something of it, then this would seem to burden yet further theological curricula. If sociology has no special relevance, but yet is an honourable way of earning a living, both sociologists and theologians should continue to cultivate their separate gardens; but is this not the old idea that something could be true in theology and false in philosophy, and vice-versa, which so annoyed Aquinas?

Fundamentally, the objection to the involvement of sociology in theology seems to be that sociology developed to study things going wrong. There can be a sociology of error; can there be a sociology of truth? The best way of answering this seems to be to look at the work of the American historian of science, T S Kuhn, as presented by the Edinburgh sociologist, Barry Barnes.