Are nuclear weapons useless?

Since no one ever wants to use them...

Welcome back to our Substack Seminar on just-war principles!

If you are just joining us, I’d encourage you to look back on previous episodes, to gain a better sense of what we’re about and to learn the “ground rules” for this discussion. For the full experience, read up from the bottom of the segments listed here. But you don’t need to know everything, and you can always catch up later; we’re happy to have you join us right now!

Once again let me encourage readers (and listeners) to join in our discussion, asking your questions or making your arguments in the Comments section. I know from experience that this topic provokes lively and enlightening debates, and I’m waiting for our little Substack Seminar to reach what you might call a “critical mass.” As I explained a few months back, I’ve set aside the outline that I’d presented for our discussion, in hope of jump-starting those debates.

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Having devoted my last few posts to the question of the just peace that is the goal of a just war— the vision of victory— I now want to apply those thoughts to the question of nuclear war.

In most discussions about the morality of using nuclear weapons, the focus is on whether the scale of destruction— and particularly the massive civilian casualties— can ever be justified. I plan to tackle that question next week. This week, however, I want to focus on a question that is not asked so frequently, and yet seems crucial: Is it ever in a country’s interest to use nuclear weapons?

For now, in other words, I am setting aside the questions that have ordinarily dominated this seminar: the questions of ius ad bellum and ius in bello. Yet as I hope I have demonstrated successfully in the past few weeks, those questions are tightly tied to questions about the just peace that is the goal of any just war. What is the vision of victory? What is the wrong that is to be made right? How can the war right that wrong? What will the post-war peace look like?

Last week I wrote that a just war aims to make the world a better place. As ‘Crusader’ noted in a corrective comment, that was a sloppy war to express what I intended. (‘Crusader’ phrased his criticism more politely.) We should have learned by now to fear the leaders who promise that a war will make the world a better place. A genuine casus belli should be specific, limited, and demonstrable; the proposed military campaign should provide a clear way to right the wrong. And remember St. Augustine’s precept that a just war should be fought for the right intention; if the campaign is successful in righting the wrong, then the war should stop— even if there is some other attractive policy goal that might be achieved by continuing to fight.

But my point, however poorly expressed, was that ideally a just war should end in a peace that improves life for everyone involved. The injustice that prompted the war having been eliminated, the two countries should be able to live in peace. That is, again, an ideal situation, not always a reasonable expectation. Still it is a goal to be kept in mind. Does the post-war peace at least improve relations between the two nations? Again, ideally, with the cause of tensions having been resolved, they can live as friends.

Or look at the same question of post-war peace from the perspective of an unjust nation: an aggressor, interested only in conquering and subjugating a neighboring society. This unjust nation must have a coherent vision of victory, in which he derives some profit from his new territory. If he has reduced the conquered nation to rubble, and earned the lasting enmity of the conquered people who survive (thereby guaranteeing that sooner or later they will rise up in resistance), how has he gained?

Now apply that same logic to the situation of a nation contemplating a nuclear strike on another nuclear power. Under what circumstances would he be better off, after having subjected the enemy to a nuclear attack? The answer, I suggest, is: None. No such circumstances exist.

(Here I should stipulate that I have in mind an all-out nuclear war, or at least the use of multiple nuclear warheads. It is possible— not easy, but possible— to create a scenario in which the strictly limited use of nuclear weapons could result in an income that at least one side would find acceptable. Even then, the substantial risk that a single use of small-scale nuclear weapons would escalate into a wider conflagration would have to factor into the equation.)

Leaving moral issues aside, what are the possible situations in which one superpower might consider a nuclear strike against the other?

• One country achieves such massive superiority that it can obliterate the other country without allowing a counter-attack. That possibility may have existed in the past; today it seems far-fetched. But even if it could happen, what would the victor gain? His own territory might escape immediate damage, but the effects of fallout would be deadly. The destruction of the other superpower would cripple the entire world economy. The world’s survivors would unite in hatred of the victor.

• One country might launch a massive attack, and the other would be forced to ask whether or not retaliation made sense. Assuming that the country under attack was facing massive destruction, what would be the point of destroying the aggressor as well? It profits us nothing (in worldly terms) to know that a half-hour after we die, our enemies will die, too.

Some strategists suggested, during the Cold War, that if the US knew that a Russian nuclear attack was going to render the US powerless, we owed it to the world to ensure that at least Soviet Communism would not gain universal hegemony. Is that an acceptable moral argument? Shouldn’t we let the world’s people make that decision for themselves? That argument bears an uneasy resemblance to the argument that abortion is the “merciful” choice since the baby’s life would be miserable.

• There remain the possibilities that have been explored by nuclear strategists, in which one nuclear power attacks one city, and its rival has to decide whether to retaliate against one of the aggressor’s cities, or perhaps two. Such hypothetical tactical decisions do provide interesting fodder for moral questions— which we’ll take up next week.

But the fascinating thing is that today, several decades into the nuclear age, those questions remain hypothetical. As early as the 1960s, I was reading books by brilliant thinkers like Henry Kissinger and Herman Kahn and Thomas Schelling, who helped to made the study of nuclear strategy an academic field. Remarkably, that study has remained academic; it has never (thank God) been put to practical use!

Throughout history, every other breakthrough in military technology has been quickly followed by its use on the battlefield. Not so with nukes. Since their horrible introduction of The Bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, atomic and nuclear weapons have never been used— except to deter the use of nuclear weapons by other nations.

Why have the nuclear missiles stayed in their bunkers (where, please God, they will rust and rot)? My answer to that question: Because there is never a rational reason for a nation to use them.

Yes, it is possible that an irrational nation, or a nation led by an irrational leader, or an irrational ideology, could resort to nuclear weapons. The task of defending against that possibility might be a reason to hold onto nuclear weapons. There is also the daunting possibility that a terrorist group, not identified with any particular nation, could obtain a nuclear capability. In that case, however, it is difficult to see how a nuclear deterrent could work. (More on those topics, too, next week.)

As early as 1959, the great Jesuit moral theologian, John Courtney Murray, writing in Theological Studies, recognized the irrationality (and immorality) of relying on nuclear weaponry as a deterrent, and reached an unsettling conclusion: “Since nuclear war may be a necessity, it must be made a possibility; its possibility must be created.” By that he meant that if we are destined to live with these incredibly destructive weapons, we must find ways to use them in a just and limited war: a formidable challenge.

Sixty-six years later, we have not met that challenge. We still have a bulging arsenal of nuclear weapons; we still don’t know how we might use them, in ways that would make moral or even tactical sense.