{"id":6001,"date":"2010-03-31T10:39:59","date_gmt":"2010-03-31T14:39:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/?p=6001"},"modified":"2013-05-10T15:26:53","modified_gmt":"2013-05-10T19:26:53","slug":"trimming-the-nuclear-arsenals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/2010\/03\/31\/trimming-the-nuclear-arsenals\/6001\/","title":{"rendered":"Trimming the Nuclear Arsenals"},"content":{"rendered":"

by David E. Anderson<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"post01-nuclearweapons\"For much of the past two decades, the issue of nuclear disarmament had faded from public view.<\/p>\n

Sporadic progress had been made since Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), but as international relations professor Amitai Etzioni<\/a> argued in a recent article in the World Policy Journal<\/em>, \u201cWhile there have been deals aplenty, recent action toward these goals (reduction and elimination of nuclear arms) has been wanting\u2026.The hope that nuclear abolition would follow the original Reagan-Gorbachev arrangement lost much of its appeal after the collapse of the Soviet Union.\u201d Etzioni noted that while some reductions in arsenals continued even during George W. Bush\u2019s administration, \u201cdealing with American and Russian weapons lost any sense of urgency.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last week\u2019s announcement<\/a> that the United States and Russia have reached agreements to reduce their nuclear arsenals and that President Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev will meet in Prague on April 8 to sign to a new treaty that cuts the number of deployed nuclear weapons by 25 percent may change all that. The date of the signing is close to the anniversary of President Obama\u2019s April 5, 2009 address in Prague<\/a> on nuclear disarmament\u00a0 that has been described by John Isaacs, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, as \u201cperhaps the most significant nuclear weapons speech since World War II\u201d and \u201cmore important than President John F. Kennedy\u2019s nuclear test ban speech back in the 1960s.\u201d<\/p>\n

In mid-January this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the minute hand<\/a> of its famous Doomsday Clock from five minutes to six minutes away from midnight, declaring that \u201cwe are poised to bend the arc of history toward a world free of nuclear weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the first time since atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, leaders of nuclear weapons states are cooperating to vastly reduce their arsenals and secure all nuclear bomb-making material,\u201d the group said in a statement. \u201cIndeed, we may be at a turning point, where major powers no longer see the value of nuclear weapons for war-fighting or even for deterrence.\u201d<\/p>\n

The scientists cited a number of factors, including the election of Barack Obama and a joint letter he and Medvedev issued on April 1, 2009, pledging nuclear weapons cuts and a readiness \u201cto move beyond cold war mentalities\u201d; the bipartisan disarmament drive led by former top US policy makers George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sam Nunn (their efforts included the recent documentary film, \u201cNuclear Tipping Point,\u201d produced by the Nuclear Security Project<\/a>); and growing participation in the public debate by \u201ca range of civic and religious leaders, including evangelicals, on the role of nuclear weapons in national security.\u201d<\/p>\n

Religious groups have been involved in the public conversation about nuclear arms since the first atomic bombs were dropped by the United States on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. On August 20, 1945, just days after the bombings, Protestant leaders, most of whom were associated with the Federal Council of Churches, the precursor body of the National Council of Churches, issued a statement<\/a> expressing their \u201cunmitigated condemnation\u201d of the horrific attacks.<\/p>\n

Less than a year later, the Federal Council\u2019s Calhoun Commission, including Protestant theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and John C. Bennett, founders of the journal Christianity and Crisis<\/em>, issued a more full-bodied report entitled \u201cAtomic Warfare and the Christian Faith\u201d and declared that \u201cwe have sinned grievously against the laws of God\u2019\u201d in using nuclear weapons. The report called on the United States to end any further atomic weapons production.<\/p>\n

But as David Cortright, director of policy studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, has pointed out recently, a very real ambivalence marked the churches\u2019 response to the bomb. \u201cAs the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s, some of those who had greeted the bomb with horror now came to accept it as a necessary deterrent against godless communism and the perceived threat of totalitarian aggression,\u201d he wrote in \u201cTranscending Ambivalence: A History of Enjoying the Bomb,\u201d published in the Spring 2009 issue of Yale Divinity School\u2019s journal \u201cReflections<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 The issue was dedicated to the subject of faith and the future of nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

In the 1980s, however, there was a resurgence of both religious and secular efforts to mobilize in support of nuclear disarmament and to push for an end to the arms race. Most notable were the nuclear freeze movement and the Roman Catholic bishops\u2019 pastoral letter \u201cThe Challenge of Peace<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 Evangelicals, too, were early opponents of the use of nuclear weapons, including Sojourners, the Christian social justice community, and, from the middle 1980s, the National Association of Evangelicals. More recently, evangelicals have organized the Two Futures Project<\/a>, a movement of American Christians for the abolition of all nuclear weapons led by the Rev. Tyler Wigg-Stevenson<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Catholic bishops\u2019 1983 letter, the product of a special moment in church history created by Vatican II, was significant in a number of ways, not least because it put the nation\u2019s largest religious community squarely in the midst of the public debate over the Reagan administration\u2019s nuclear arms policies. It also challenged the church\u2019s own deep-seated anti-communism and was widely praised for what many regarded as the bishops\u2019 nuanced approach to the nuclear weapons issue. In the letter, the bishops endorsed a \u201cno-first-use\u201d declaration by the United States and voiced support for a comprehensive test ban treaty, both of which continue to be sticky issues in current arms control debates. But they also supported continuing the core policy of deterrence even while making their approval \u201cstrictly conditional\u201d and \u201ca step on the way to progressive disarmament.\u201d<\/p>\n

Protestant denominations in the United States and international church bodies such as the World Council of Churches, however, pushed beyond the Catholic bishops and the idea of deterrence to hold up an abolitionist vision of a world without nuclear weapons. In 1986, the bishops of the United Methodist Church, for example, published their own pastoral statement, \u201cIn Defense of Creation<\/a>,\u201d which forthrightly rejected deterrence and said the doctrine \u201cmust no longer receive the church\u2019s blessing.\u201d Branches of what is now the Presbyterian Church USA also have a long history of opposition to the nuclear arms race, stretching back to 1946. In the 1980s, they endorsed a \u201cCall to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race<\/a>\u201d and backed \u201ca mutual freeze on the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons.\u201d Over the years, regular Presbyterian statements have continued to follow on arms control and disarmament issues.<\/p>\n

As underscored by the Presbyterian statement, the renewed debate in the 1980s paralleled and supplemented developments in the secular arena, especially the nuclear freeze campaign led by the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy (now known as Peace Action<\/a>) and other hybrid secular-religious peace groups.<\/p>\n

On the international level, both the World Council of Churches and the Vatican, under a succession of popes, have been outspoken opponents of the arms race and any use of nuclear weapons. Pope John Paul II edged the Catholic Church close to pacifism, declaring there are next to no conditions in a nuclear age that justify nations going to war with each other.<\/p>\n

While there had been sporadic arms agreements before, notably the important Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970 and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks treaty (SALT II) agreement between President Jimmy Carter and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, it was the mounting secular and religious pressures of the 1980s that created the framework for an accord between Reagan and Gorbachev calling for deep reductions in both US and Russian strategic arms. Their agreement resulted in the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the subsequent Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), signed in 1991. A second arms reduction treaty, START II, was signed by George H.W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin in 1992, but it never officially entered into force when the Russians said they would no longer be bound by it after George W. Bush unilaterally withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002.<\/p>\n

A proponent of nuclear disarmament since his days in the Senate, President Obama quickly made the issue of nuclear disarmament a very visible part of the administration\u2019s agenda. This was most notable in the speech<\/a> he gave in Prague on April 5, 2009, in which he stated \u201cclearly and with conviction America\u2019s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.\u201d He insisted he was not being na\u00efve in holding up such a vision and acknowledged that it \u201cwill not be reached quickly\u2014perhaps not in my lifetime,\u201d but nevertheless with patience and persistence it was an achievable goal.<\/p>\n

Obama followed the Prague speech with two other important acts. In July, he and Russian President Medvedev signed an agreement on the basic terms of a treaty to sharply reduce each country\u2019s number of warheads and missiles. In September, he chaired a session of the United Nations Security Council that adopted a resolution to shore up the rules aimed at stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

On December 5, 2009, the START I treaty quietly expired without a successor agreement in place, and in January, in his State of the Union address, Obama said the US was completing negotiations on what would be \u201cthe farthest-reaching arms control treaty in nearly two decades.\u201d Under the terms of what is now being called New START, Russia and the US will cut their warheads to 1,550 on each side within seven years of a new treaty being signed.<\/p>\n

But the difficulties presented by both the international negotiations needed to implement and enforce the agreements and the domestic political realities in the United States are not likely to quietly wither in the face of Obama\u2019s soaring rhetoric or aspirations.<\/p>\n

Senate approval of New START is expected to present challenges, although the administration says it hopes the deal with Russia will be ratified by the end of this year. As the Washington Post <\/em>editorialized, \u201cIt\u2019s hard to see how new treaties will bring about the disarmament of North Korea or stop Tehran\u2019s centrifuges.\u201d Other skeptical and critical voices are being heard from, some of them asking, as former correspondent William Beecher recently put it<\/a>, why Obama keeps \u201cwaving the flag\u201d of a world without nuclear weapons. \u201cHe\u2019s well aware that nations make strategic decisions based on their perceived national self-interest,\u201d Beecher has written. \u201cWith so much mistrust in the world, no member of the nuclear club is about to disarm when to do so would make the cheaters the strongest bullies on the block.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the moment, the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), a key statement drawn up by every US administration setting out its basic nuclear doctrine, including the reasoning for retaining nuclear weapons and the circumstances in which they might be used, represents another slipped deadline. The NPR was due to be submitted to Congress on March 1, but a draft version was reportedly rejected by Obama as being merely a \u201ctweaked\u201d version of the Bush administration\u2019s stance, rather than something that would reflect Obama\u2019s nuclear-free aspirations and move much closer to a declaration of \u201cno first use,\u201d making clear the United States would not use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear nation. The Boston Globe<\/em>\u2019s Bryan Bender wrote in January<\/a> that the review \u201cis shaping up to be a major showdown for Obama this year\u201d and that the president was \u201ctaking on some of the most sacred cows of the nuclear program.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy understanding is that the president and vice president are unhappy with the draft that has been produced,\u2019\u2019 Joseph Cirincione, president of the Plowshares Fund<\/a>, told the Guardian<\/em> newspaper on February 28. \u201cNothing has been settled on the key issue: what is the use for nuclear weapons? This is an issue the president cares deeply about.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Obama himself said in his State of the Union address, \u201cEven as we prosecute two wars, we’re also confronting perhaps the greatest danger to the American people\u2014the threat of nuclear weapons. I’ve embraced the vision of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan through a strategy that reverses the spread of these weapons and seeks a world without them. And at April’s nuclear security summit, we will bring 44 nations together here in Washington, DC behind a clear goal: securing all vulnerable nuclear materials around the world in four years, so that they never fall into the hands of terrorists.\u201d<\/p>\n

The tug-of- war inside the administration over the critical NPR comes as nuclear arms issues take center stage in the coming months. Along with the April 12-13 global nuclear security summit Obama alluded to, in May the United Nations will hold a conference to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, perhaps the toughest of issues as both Iran and North Korea press ahead with programs for developing their nuclear capabilities, and the nuclear powers are unable so far to come together on a comprehensive negotiating stance for either effort.<\/p>\n

Obama is also expected to seek Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which the United States has signed but not ratified. The Senate briefly took up the treaty in 1999 but rejected ratification. The Obama-orchestrated UN Security Council resolution in September 2009 called on all states to refrain from conducting nuclear test explosions and to ratify the CTBT.<\/p>\n

For the most part, observes John Isaacs, members of Congress have been very quiet in response to the president on nuclear weapons issues. \u201cThe predominant sound from Washington, DC, from Congress, to the president\u2019s proposals has been silence,\u201d Isaacs said in December at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs<\/a>.\u00a0 \u201cThe sounds of silence are because nuclear weapons simply are not that popular, and that gives the president\u2026a freer hand than he would have on some other issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

Popular or not, it is worth noting that according to a Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly-United Nations Foundation survey in October 2008, controlling nuclear weapons around the world was ranked as the most important US foreign policy priority by 80 percent of respondents. Among Catholics and white evangelicals the percentages were even higher at 82 percent and 86 percent, respectively.<\/p>\n

Religious groups are continuing their pressure on Obama\u2014and the rest of the globe\u2014to move toward a nuclear-arms-free world. In February, the Catholic bishops from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in an open letter to President Obama and the government of Japan, urged world leaders to \u201ctake a courageous step toward the total abolition of nuclear weapons and the realization of a world without wars.\u201d In remarks prepared for a recent public forum organized by Georgetown University\u2019s Woodstock Theological Center on \u201cGod and the Bomb: Deterrence, Disarmament, and Human Security,\u201d international affairs professor Douglas Shaw<\/a> observed that \u201cfor all the complexity of and disagreement about nuclear weapons, there are some things we know about them. We ought not to live comfortably behind the threat of killing millions of other human beings in an afternoon\u2014because it is morally dubious at best and because it is an unreliable means to guarantee our security.\u201d Woodstock will repeat the forum on April 13 at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in New York City.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe moral end is clear: a world free of the threat of nuclear weapons,\u201d Archbishop Edwin O\u2019Brien of Baltimore, a member of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops committee on international justice and peace, told the Global Zero Summit<\/a> in Paris in February. \u201cThis goal should guide our efforts. Every nuclear weapons system and every nuclear weapons policy should be judged by the ultimate goal of protecting human life and dignity and the related goal of ridding the world of these weapons in a mutually verifiable way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe path to zero will be long and treacherous,\u201d he added. \u201cBut humanity must walk this path with both care and courage to build a future free of the nuclear threat.\u201d<\/p>\n

David E. Anderson is senior editor for Religion News Service. He has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on the war in Afghanistan<\/a> and on God and empire<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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