Just War Lessons We Should Remember PDF

## Just War Lessons We Should Remember **Tobias Winright** Although I did not read it until some years after it was published, I was a senior in high school in 1983 when the US Catholic bishops issued their pastoral letter, _The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response_. Its "central" f...

## Just War Lessons We Should Remember **Tobias Winright** Although I did not read it until some years after it was published, I was a senior in high school in 1983 when the US Catholic bishops issued their pastoral letter, _The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response_. Its "central" focus on the "global threat of nuclear war" was timely for me, for angst about all-out annihilation was palpable among youths and young adults. Indeed, I remember some of my peers asking, "Why plan for the future when everything's going to be blown to bits by nuclear war anyway?" That year, more so than a magisterial document, movies preoccupied our minds on the subject, including _The Day After_ and _War Games_, with even more during both the immediately previous and subsequent years. Likewise, a lot of popular music during the 1980s referred to the Cold War and the nuclear nightmare, such as The Fixx's "Red Skies" (1982), Nena's "99 Luftballons" (1983), U2's "Seconds" (1983), Men at Work's "It's a Mistake" (1983), The Call's "The Walls Came Down" (1983), and Genesis's memorable "Land of Confusion" (1986). My existential interest in this issue carried over into my academic study of political science as an undergraduate, especially in courses I took on international relations. In one of my exams an essay question asked, "In the event of a Soviet conventional attack on Western Europe, what will be the implications of NATO fighting a limited nuclear war, assuming it decides to adopt such a strategy?" At the time, although I worried that "even in a limited nuclear war, the casualties would be too high for military and civilians," I concluded that being prepared to ## Just War Lessons We Should Remember At the Vatican and sponsored by the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, the peace laureate asserted, "we need to throw out the "just war" theory, a phony piece of morality." I have published elsewhere why I think that this most recent (it’s not the first) appeal to repudiate just war theory is mistaken. A couple of caveats before proceeding: first, it is important to distinguish between theory and tradition and then to note that there are rival versions of just war theory within the just war tradition, and, second, the tradition is a living, developing one. As such, I agree with and have attempted to contribute to efforts "to develop a peacebuilding ethic to match the sophistication of the just war ethic," one that integrates the latter within the former under the umbrella of "integral peacemaking," and which is more constructive and positive than the dicastery’s wording of “integral disarmament.” I argue that the present position of Pope Francis and the Catholic Church on nuclear weapons is in keeping with the logic of strict Catholic just war thinking and principles. In his exhortation to just war thinkers to "be honest" about just war theory, the Christian pacifist John Howard Yoder asked, "Can the criteria function in such a way that in a particular case a specified cause, or a specified means, or a specified strategy or tactical move could be excluded? Can the response ever be "no"?" In my view, present Catholic just war theory yields a “no” about each of these specified considerations concerning nuclear weapons, even if those who employed its reasoning and principles until recently accepted a strategy of nuclear deterrence as an "interim ethic." Evidence of such "honest" (I prefer instead the term "strict" in order to avoid implying that some just war thinkers are being "dishonest") just war reasoning and principles may be found in Pope Francis' address to the participants in the international symposium "Prospects for a World Free of Nuclear Weapons and for Integral Disarmament." I wish to highlight three points that Pope Francis makes. First, he laments how "the escalation of the arms race continues unabated and the price of modernizing and developing weaponry, not only nuclear weapons. represents a considerable expense for nations. (Its costs have diverted from and deprived efforts to reduce poverty, promote human rights, and build educational, ecological, and health care projects. Not only has it come at the expense of economic development, but it has also impeded "integral human development," which encompasses the * flourishing of "human beings in the indissoluble unity of soul and body" in both their "individual and……. social dimensions." Accordingly, the price is too burdensome and broad-based. In other words, these negative effects of the nuclear arms race are disproportionate to any goods possibly sought from it, and these bad consequences also indiscriminately impact innocent people. * Second, Pope Francis is "genuinely concerned by the catastrophic humanitarian and environmental effects of any employment of nuclear devices." Nuclear weapons are weapons of mass destruction such as land mines, cluster munitions, and chemical and biological weapons. Like these other weapons of mass destruction, which are "all expressly prohibited by international conventions,” so too “nuclear weapons are not only immoral, but must also be considered an illegal means of warfare." They threaten, moreover, not only people but the planet not only immediately but also indefinitely. Indeed, they are also weapons of long-term destruction. The effects of both mass and long-term destruction are indiscriminate and excessive, so much so that even the "risk of an (accidental)detonation as a result of error of any kind" factors negatively into the equation. Moreover, the "mentality of fear that affects not only the parties in conflict but the entire human race" is, again, both indiscriminate and disproportionate. For these reasons, Pope Francis has “firmly condemned,” for the very first time in Catholic teaching, not only the use of nuclear weapons but also "the threat of their use, (as well as their very possession.") * Third, in the pope's view, nuclear weapons and deterrence have not been successful in providing real security but instead “create nothing but a false sense of security" and thereby "cannot constitute the basis for(peaceful coexistence between members of the human family."19 Nor have "the instruments of international law... prevented new states from joining those already in possession of nuclear weapons." Plus, there are heightened concerns now given "the challenges of contemporary geopolitics, like terrorism or asymmetric warfare." In short, it seems more likely, or probable, that nuclear weapons and deterrence have been and will continue to be unsuccessful in achieving their aims of security. These three major points highlighted by Pope Francis cohere with traditional just war reasoning and principles, especially the jus in bello criteria of discrimination and proportionality but also the e jus ad bellum criteria of probability of success and proportionality. They are neither pacifist nor strictly nonviolent in their moral presuppositions and methodology. No pacifist or nonviolent reasons, in principle, are invoked. After all, as the US bishops acknowledge in The Challenge of Peace, it “is clear that those in the Church who interpret the gospel teaching as forbidding all use of violence would oppose any use of nuclear weapons under any conditions.” Period. Although pacifism and nonviolence rightly have come to be officially lauded as a valid approach for Catholics, as acknowledged in Gaudium et spes, The Challenge of Peace, and other magisterial documents, that approach to the ethics of war and peace is not evident in Pope Francis’s address on nuclear weapons. 22 Of course, admittedly, pacifists, even as they criticize just war thinking and principles, sometimes use that very sort of reasoning and criteria to do so or to make negative judgments about specific wars. Regardless, Pope Francis’s reasoning in his address coincides with what the US Catholic bishops observed as to how, for "the tradition which acknowledges some legitimate use of force, (some important elements of contemporary nuclear strategies move beyond the limits of moral justification."24) Pacifists should be okay with this too. As Yoder wrote, "Wherever any new opening for the moral criticism of the use of violence arises, it is in some way a use of the just war logic, and should be welcomed as at least an opening for possible moral judgment."25 In _The Challenge of Peace_, the bishops held that US and Soviet strategies at the time failed the tests of the jus in bello criteria of discrimination and proportionality. 26 Indeed, the bishops ruled out counterpopulation warfare/ and "the deliberate initiation of nuclear warfare, on however restricted a scale."27 On the use of limited or "tactical nuclear weapons," the bishops expressed their "extreme skepticism about the prospects for controlling a nuclear exchange, however limited the first use might be."28 As we have seen, these in bello concerns have been echoed by Pope Francis. In addition, the bishops invoked the jus ad bellum criterion of a reasonable hope of success in bringing about justice and peace, and they questioned "whether such a reasonable hope can exist once nuclear weapons have been exchanged."29 Similarly, David Hollenbach wrote that the "ad bel-lum criterion of reasonable hope of success becomes the relevant moral norm in this debate," leading him to conclude that "the hope that any use of strategic weapons can be kept limited exceeds the bounds of rea-sonable judgment."30 Importantly, Pope Francis extends this consideration of probability of success to the question of deterrence, which the * bishops accepted "for a time."31 In all of this, as the bishops put it, the ""no' to nuclear war must, in the end, be definitive and decisive, 32 a clear example of the "honest" just war reasoning Yoder rightly respected even though that "no" was accompanied for a few decades with a conditional and temporary "yes" on deterrence. 33 According to Yoder, this more "honest" approach to just war, which draws lines identifying where a "no" is obliged, was already evident among those Catholic just war thinkers who condemned obliteration and area bombing during World War II. "It is this notion that there must be a limit somewhere which in the 1950s came to be called nuclear pacifism, even though in its logic it is a form of just-war thinking."34 But again, there were and continue to be rival versions of just war thinking, including among Catholic writers. Ted Grimsrud refers to those who, like Hollenbach and the US Catholic bishops, are "nuclear pacifists," who think that no nuclear war can ever be justified or justly conducted on just war grounds, as opposed to those who are just war "realists,” such as William O'Brien and John Courtney Murray, SJ, who maintain that just war principles can indeed govern and regulate even nuclear war. 35 A noteworthy example of a strict interpretation and application of just war reasoning was a 1961 collection of essays by several Catholic writers, _Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience_, edited by Walter Stein, who also contributed a couple of essays to it.36 Hardly pacifistic - indeed, in her contribution G.E.M. Anscombe was scathing of pacifism - these authors stringently employed just war reasoning to condemn nuclear weapons, both their use in war and their use in deterrence.37 In contrast to both pacifism and amoral cynicism, they believed that it is still possible to differentiate between justified killing and murder, between combatants and noncombatants, between limited and total war. Thus, just war reasoning and principles remain in force even as they rule out the possibility of either justifying embarking upon nuclear war or its just conduct. 38 In the end, for them, nuclear war was immoral because it is mass murder and because even "the policy of 'deterrence' involves a conditional willingness to unleash such a war.. [and] is therefore not only wicked in what it risks, but in terms of implicit intention. 39 For Stein, the "distinction between 'using' and 'possessing' these weapons" upon which those who "defend the stock-piling of nuclear weapons tend to base" their stance collapses. 40 In the end, the approach to just war reasoning represented by Stein et al. holds "that there are limits - creaturely * limits, in war as in every other sphere of human action; that these limits bind, and sustain, us even in the face of the most urgent 'necessity."41 To return to where I began this essay, during my initial study of just war thinking and questions regarding nuclear arms, I was more of a "realist"; however, over the decades I have become a strict just war proponent who, accordingly, is a nuclear pacifist. I think that the Catholic Church, while open to the possibility of the "realist" approach at first and while temporarily granting conditional acceptance of deterrence, has now, with the papacy of Francis, also embraced nuclear pacifism in accordance with a stricter approach to just war reasoning. These just war lessons now decrease that interim acceptance of nuclear weapons and deterrence to zero, just like they have yielded a firm "no" to the morality of nuclear war. ### Notes 1. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, _The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response_ (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1983), no. 5. 2. See Ryan Leas, "38 Essential ‘80s Songs about Nuclear Anxiety," _Stereogum_, January 23, 2018. 3. I wrote about Regis Factor's impact on my life in "Way beyond 'the Way' but It Paved the Way: On C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man," in _Take and Read_, ed. Dianne Bergant and Mike Daley (Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press, 2017), 19-23. 4. The first books I read by Stanley Hauerwas were _Against the Nations: War and Survival in a Liberal Society_ (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985) and _Should War Be Eliminated? Philosophical and Theological Investigations_ (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1984). 5. “Appeal to the Catholic Church to Re-Commit to the Centrality of Gospel Nonviolence,” Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, May 17, 2016, https://nonviolencejustpeace.net/2016/05/17/an-appeal-to-the-catholic-church-to-re-commit-to-the-centrality-of-gospel-nonviolence/ 6. Claire Giangravè, "Vatican Nuclear Summit Blends Realpolitik and ‘Reaching for the Moon,” _Crux: Taking the Catholic Pulse_, November 11, 2017. I too attended this summit; see Tobias Winright, "What Do Pope Francis' Statements on Nuclear Weapons Mean for Catholics in the Military?" _Sojourners_, November 15, 2017. 7. “Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire: Concept of ‘Just Wars’ Must Be Thrown Out,” _Belfast Telegraph_, November 11, 2017.