Rome Newsroom, Oct 21, 2020 / 06:10 am (CNA).- A Vatican official challenged the security theory of nuclear deterrence as immoral at the United Nations this week and called for “genuine progress” toward complete nuclear disarmament.
“Seeking security through arms … only makes us progressively more insecure,” Archbishop Gabriele Caccia said at the UN’s first committee general debate in New York on Oct. 19.
“The strategic doctrines of the Nuclear-Weapons-Possessing States have contributed to fomenting this climate of fear, mistrust and hostility afflicting the world today,” he said.
Caccia, the permanent observer of the Holy See to the UN, underlined that complete disarmament needed to begin “with a renunciation of defense strategies that blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons.”
“If it is immoral to threaten to use nuclear weapons for purposes of deterrence, it is even worse to intend to use them as just another instrument of war, as some nuclear doctrines propose,” the archbishop said, citing Pope Francis’ 2017 speech to an international disarmament symposium.
There are currently nine countries in possession of nuclear warheads: the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.
Among these, the U.S., Russia, and the U.K. have been reducing their nuclear inventories, while China, Pakistan, India, and North Korea are expanding their nuclear arsenals, according to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).
While the number of nuclear weapons in the world has decreased significantly from its peak of an estimated 70,300 in 1986, the FAS reports that there were approximately 13,410 warheads in the world as of early 2020.
The Vatican official called on all states possessing nuclear weapons to make “a No-First-Use pledge.”
He lauded the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) for providing “full recognition to the enormous humanitarian consequences that would follow from a conflict in which nuclear weapons were used.”
“As we await the day for the TPNW to enter into force, it is imperative to continue encouraging, through concerted diplomatic activity, the participation of all Nuclear-Weapon-Possessing States in negotiations to establish ceilings, if not reductions, regarding their nuclear weapons,” Caccia said.
“Genuine progress toward general and complete disarmament should free up much-needed resources ‘that could be better used to benefit the integral development of peoples and protect the natural environment,’” he said, quoting Pope Francis’ recent address to the UN General Assembly.
He continued: “As we embark on the Decade of Action for sustainable development, the Holy See urges renewed consideration the establishment of ‘a Global Fund,’ as first urged by Pope Paul VI, to assist those most impoverished peoples, drawn partially from military expenditures: a contemporary and much-need expression of ‘turning swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks,’ to which the words of Isaiah, inscribed across the street from the entrance to the United Nations, never cease to summon us.”
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Archbishop Caccia: “underlined that complete disarmament needed to begin ‘with a renunciation of defense strategies that blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons’ [and] ‘if it is IMMORAL [“if”] to threaten to use nuclear weapons for purposes of deterrence, it is even worse to intend to use them as just another instrument of war, as some nuclear doctrines propose,’ the archbishop said…”
In 1982 Pope John Paul II addressed to the Second Special Session of the United Nations dedicated to disarmament (“Negotiation: The Only Realistic Solution to the Continuing Threat of War”): “In current conditions ‘deterrence’ based on balance, certainly not as an end in itself but as a step on the way toward a progressive disarmament, may still be judged MORALLY ACCEPTABLE” (p. 10). In 1965 the Second Vatican Council had stated that the Church has “admiration” for those who individually forego violence—without harm to others, but also asserted the right and duty for defense, and accepted “deterrence” if this was a step toward nuclear disarmament, and therefore in the end stopped short of demanding a “freeze” in ownership of weapon arsenals (Gaudium et Spes, nn. 78-82).
Aside from the still-extravagant number of remaining warheads (down to 13,400 from 70,300) is the new threat posed by rogue states armed with only a few such warheads. So, deterrence as still a “prudential judgment” rather than as “immoral”? And, just as some “defense strategies (that) blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons” SO TOO can renunciation of deterrence “blur the distinction” between self-defense and unilateral nuclear disarmament or now rogue-state nuclear blackmail.
So, yes to Archbishop Caccia call for: “…concerted diplomatic activity, [with] the participation of ALL Nuclear-Weapon-Possessing States in negotiations to establish ceilings, if not reductions, regarding their nuclear weapons.”
Really? Is this guy kidding?? In fact is, the threat of nuclear war has brought the world a RELATIVE peace since the end of WWII. Unlike the North Koreans who occasionally THREATEN to use nukes, we in the US HAVE used them out of necessity, to prevent the greater evil of even more deaths in a conventional war invasion. Our enemies know that if need be, we will use them again. Yes, negotiate as long as possible if some positive outcome is in sight. If not, in the end you must opt to defend your citizens. What religious men fail to take into account about war in the REAL world, is that the enemies of the US are often men with NO sense of morality at all, who kill blindly for NO reason. . Stalin, Mao, Hitler, others of their conscience-free ilk, do not bind themselves to any moral calculations. When your enemy is an amoral person with NO regard for how many are killed when they initiate and pursue goals of war, you handcuff yourself and doom your people to death when you wrestle with philosophic questions of how many angels dance on the head of a pin. That is the reality.
Human beings are not monsters. Threats and coercive measures give us a primitive look in these modern times. It is high time we say good-bye to those clumsy little ways.