A theological foundation for rejecting possession and use of nuclear weapons. Source: Pax Christi Two weeks ago the Catholic Peacebuilding Network (CPN) hosted a symposium on the Pope and the Bomb at Georgetown University, Washington DC.
Archbishop Tomasi and Alessio Pecorario from the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development were present. It was aimed at bringing the Church's absolute rejection of nuclear weapons to the US Catholic community (including the bishops and students) and thus ultimately to generate more of a debate about the horror of US nuclear policy. Ken Butigan from DePaul University and Marie Dennis of Pax Christi's Catholic Nonviolence Initiative gave the following paper. Many years ago, Jesuit peacemaker Rev Richard McSorley, SJ wrote: "The taproot of violence in our society is our intention to use nuclear weapons. To retain nuclear weapons escalates the possibility of their use, which would unleash suffering on an unimaginable scale. Nonviolence: A Theological Foundation for Nuclear Disarmament We Need Your Support Donate. Was the US right to drop the atomic bombs? The answer is more difficult than you think. View of the radioactive plume from the bomb dropped on Nagasaki (Hiromichi Matsuda/Handout from Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum/Getty Images) Ethical issues around the bombings have never been resolved On August 6 it was the anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and on August 15 – officially declared the feast of the Assumption of Our Lady in 1950 – it was the anniversary of the dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki.
In its Heritage Series, the CTS has republished The Day the Bomb Fell, an eyewitness account by a German Jesuit, Fr Johannes Siemes, alongside Peace is our Problem, an essay written by Mgr Bruce Kent in 1970. Fr Siemes, who was living in the Jesuit novitiate at Nagatsuka, 2km from Hiroshima and halfway up a hillside, starts: “6 August began in a bright, clear summer morning…” In retrospect, knowing the appalling devastation that he was to witness and that has been described countless times since, these words sound heavy with ill-omen. The US is pursuing two contradictory strategies with North Korea and it could lead to nuclear war. Since it opened in Berlin in 2015, Ferdinand von Schirach’s Terror became a global hit, with hundreds of stagings all around the world, as well as an unending flow of ethical debates in mass media.
It is a court drama, the report of the trial against Lars Koch, a German fighter pilot who has shot down a Lufthansa plane that has been hijacked by a terrorist; the plane was heading for a stadium of 70,000 people (watching a Germany-England game), and Koch’s pragmatic decision – one in which he broke the constitutional law – was to end the lives of 164 people on the plane rather than allow the terrorist to slaughter a far greater number at the stadium. At the end, the audience must vote: guilty or not guilty. Each spectator is provided with a small gadget with two buttons, 1 (guilty) or 2 (not guilty), and the audience learns its verdict. Nuclear War and Christian Responsibility. Pope Francis calls for elimination of all nuclear weapons. ROME - Pope Francis has called for a “collective and concerted” multilateral effort to eliminate nuclear weapons, telling a United Nations conference working on a treaty to prohibit such weapons that international peace and stability “cannot be based on a false sense of security, on the threat of mutual destruction or total annihilation, or on simply maintaining a balance of power.”
The conference took place March 27 in New York, after the UN General Assembly voted in December to negotiate a legally binding treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons, with the aim of working toward their total elimination. Such a treaty would make explicit what is implied in the 1970 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which calls on declared nuclear powers to aim for complete nuclear disarmament. Philosophyade: UTILITARIANISM AND NUCLEAR DETERRENCE. In 1945, when deciding whether to use "the most terrible weapon ever known" the US President appointed an Interim Committee made up of distinguished and responsible people in the government.
Most but not all of its military advisors favoured using it. Top-level scientists said they could find no acceptable alternative to using it, but they were opposed by equally able scientists. NUCLEAR DETERRENCE. Nuclear Abolition or Deterrence: A Nuclear Ethics Debate. One of the most important political cleavages in contemporary international society is marked by the lack of consensus on the continued reliance of nuclear weapons by some states for their security.
On one side of this debate, it is argued that nuclear deterrence remains an important instrument of international security given (1) the stubborn nuclear security dilemmas in East Asia over North Korea and in the Middle East over Iran and (2) the increasing tensions between the United States and Russia over a number of controversial security issues. Even U.S. President Barack Obama holds this view. Additionally, Washington has begun a significant nuclear weapons modernization effort despite Obama’s 2009 Prague commitment to move towards a nuclear-weapon-free world.
Other nuclear-armed states too, have followed suit. Moral cosmopolitanism is committed to the idea that all human beings are equally subjects of moral regard. References Anon., 2015. Anon., 2016. Arms Control Association, 2016.