Newspaper Article

IS NUCLEAR DETERRENCE IMMORAL?

Ronald E Powaski Ronald E Powaski is a teacher in Euclid, Ohio, and author of "March to Armageddon: The United States and the Nuclear Arms Race, 1939 to the Present," to be published by Oxford University Press next spring

1986

Overview

As a follow-up to their 1983 pastoral letter, \"The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response,\" America's Roman Catholic bishops are re- examining their stand on nuclear deterrence. In their pastoral letter, the Catholic bishops stated that deterrence is largely responsible for the high level of tension in superpower relations since the atomic age began. The United States and the Soviet Union, in effect, have loaded guns pointed at each another. The bishops fear that one day the guns will go off, producing a cataclysmic nuclear holocaust. But at the same time the bishops criticized nuclear deterrence, they gave tacit recognition to the fact that America's nuclear arsenal is a powerful factor deterring not only the use of the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons but Soviet non-nuclear aggression as well. In a key passage of the pastoral letter, the bishops provisionally accepted the idea of deterring war through a balance of nuclear military power as long as both sides worked to bring about a gradual reduction of their respective nuclear arsenals.

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