A World Without Nuclear Weapons

by Tyler Wigg-Stevenson

We have begun to move in the right direction. The leadership of the United States, as the world’s only superpower, is an indispensable first step, and — as mentioned above — Presidents Obama and Medvedev issued an unprecedented joint declaration in favor of nuclear weapons elimination. President Obama subsequently affirmed this goal and laid out an ambitious agenda for the future.

The vision has been cast — now comes the hard work. Make no mistake: we’re not talking about the US disarming and trusting that the rest of the world will follow. But the US must exercise true leadership in a multilateral, step-by-step process that brings everyone along. These steps will likely include:

A stated commitment to total abolition;
Bilateral negotiations between the US and Russia — who together have 95% of global arsenals — toward verifiable and irreversible reductions in arsenals;
A ban on all nuclear testing, making it more difficult for new countries to develop arsenals (which requires US Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty);
A global lockdown of existing bomb-capable material, and a ban on producing more of it (the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty);
And, the development of transparency measures to ensure that nuclear power is not being used as a back door for a weapons program.

The final state will only be one in which we have put in place the diplomatic and technological frameworks where nuclear breakout is both nearly impossible and not worth the risk for would-be cheaters.

Hearing this for the first time, many wonder how we can ever really hope to abolish nuclear weapons — like slavery, which, though abolished, yet persists despite its illegality. What differentiates the Bomb from other human evils is its uniquely fragile supply chain. Plutonium and bomb-quality uranium are necessary to make a nuclear weapon and they are not found in nature. Only highly-developed nations have the resources to make these materials, and even they can’t do it in secret: you can see the factories from space. For this reason we can imagine a way to control the bomb material, and if we control the material, we can control the bomb.

As we consider this process, one observation is particularly important. First, there are many who doubt that achieving Zero is finally possible. Fair enough, though the experts who think it can be done are formidable. But the negative consequences of failing to pursue the goal of Zero in good faith are far more certain than an inability to attain the final state of a nuclear weapons-free world. Unless we strive for Zero, we condemn ourselves to proliferation, and we know what happens then. This means that even the most hardened skeptics should not let their doubts about the final, future step stop them from supporting the goal of Zero now, which is the only way to avert catastrophe.

Finally, though nuclear decisions rest in the hands of only a few powerful people, recent events only highlight the need for a groundswell of popular support for abolition. The work of disarmament is unavoidably long; the steps required will be contentious. And without a critical mass of nonpartisan, popular support, we will never be able to hurdle the obstacles in the way. By contrast, however, if a generation shifted its paradigm from “nuclear weapons keep us safe” to “nuclear weapons have to go,” we would enable our elected officials from both parties to exercise the necessarily bold leadership to get the job done.

TOWARD A CONFESSIONAL NUCLEAR THEOLOGY

In what I’ve written so far, there is not an ounce of “Christianity.” Any non-Christian — any atheist — could support the security logic of striving for Zero on the policy merits alone. One does not need a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior not to want to be blown up.

The question to followers of Jesus, then, is: what can we offer as Christians to the nuclear issue?

I would remind us as we proceed with a dreadful and fearsome topic that we should never fall into that easy error committed by the church at Ephesus: forgetting our first love. The church, to speak as the church, must begin with the recognition that we are not our own masters. And any authority we have is entirely derivative in nature: namely, to discern of any given issue, “What saith the Lord?”

Toward that end, my primary hope for the Christian contribution to the nuclear issue is that we avoid moral sausage-making: that lamentable process wherein we refuse to stand on the basis of our Lord and Scriptures and faith, preferring instead to toss a bunch of secular judgments into the meat grinder of our synods and councils, add but a pinch of Godtalk about peacemakers and ploughshares while turning the crank, and finally present the resulting gut-cased tube of gristle and meat as a treasure of divinely-inspired wisdom — which, of course, it is not.

The church’s witness, in such a case, becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary of the collective judgment of secular expertise. And if the experts — the generals and policymakers and scientists and physicians and economists — suddenly changed their minds and declared nuclear weapons to be a moral good, we would have to change our pronouncement altogether. Or, revealing the hollowness of our judgment, we’d have to track down other experts who will say what we want them to.

This is not to disregard secular wisdom or criticize prudential judgment. To the contrary, the quality and caliber of opinion that marks the call for the elimination of nuclear weapons, which we see in the landmark Wall Street Journal op-eds, imparts on us a moral responsibility to act on what they have said.

We only honor these experts’ call to arms, however, if we respond by speaking from our particular strength, which is actually not our own strength, of course, but the power of God in Christ. For, if we who are called to the ministry of God set aside our gifts to pretend we are nuclear strategists, with vital judgments about national security, what have we added?

But if we begin instead with all that we finally know — Christos Kyrios, Christ is Lord — then we will have the basis for a confessional nuclear theology. We will have a Christian contribution to the matter of nuclear weapons. And I believe that that our primary contribution is twofold: our unique vocabulary and our unique sense of possibility.

Vocabulary

Statistics are the easiest way to communicate the devastation that a nuclear weapon causes. I began with a series of stats related to a single terrorist bomb. But to really describe the Bomb, you need theology.

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Comments

james hayes

Slavery was intrinsically evil. A weapon, like an ax , is morally neutral.

I am not convinced that we could afford to disarm with little hope that all adversaries would actually disarm.

Bob Snodgrass

I certainly disagree with Mr. Wigg-Stevenson's assessment on the need to disarm nuclear arsenals. History seems to show that disarmament is naive, even reckless. That's the claim of Professor David Schaefer, who sums up the point better than I could...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123923509427103247.html

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