CrossCurrents A Catholic Reflects on Faith in Our Times

CrossCurrents A Catholic Reflects on Faith in Our Times

Bernard F. Swain, Ph.D. www.CrossCurrents.us

Don’t Hold Your Breath

Every year, three days from Good Friday to Easter Sunday mark the moment when Jesus’ followers held their breath. Was this really the end? Was ignominious routine execution the only outcome of this man’s life, preaching, healing, and death? Would his band of followers simply disperse? Would his mission disappear from history?

And every year another three days—from August 6 to August 9—mark the moment the whole world began to hold its breath.

In eight minutes on August 6, 1945 history’s first nuclear attack killed nearly 100,000 people (mostly women and children) in Hiroshima, and the world waited to find out: What was this bomb? How bad was the damage? Would Japan surrender? Would the U.S. attack again? Would this end the war? What about the Russians closing in on Japan from China? What did this mean for the future?

After three breathless days the other “shoe” dropped. The U.S. attacked Nagasaki, again deliberately killing tens of thousands of civilians in a few minutes. Eventually more than 200,000 people died from these two bombs.

The emperor’s radio address soon announced Japan’s surrender, and millions of Americans sighed in relief and cheered the end of World War II.

The irony, of course, is that shortly the world was holding its breath of all over again.

Harry Truman had hoped the A-bomb would scare the Soviets into accepting US hegemony in the Pacific. Instead it triggered the nuclear arms race: first the Soviets got the A-bomb, then we got the H-bomb, then they got that too, then Britain and France had it.

Before long, nuclear weapons were the main pillar of the Cold War. Both sides built nuclear-equipped bombers, then ICBMs, then missile subs – and by then the prevailing strategy had already changed. Instead of maintaining their “first-strike” forces (considered too likely to provoke a preemptive attack), both sides developed “hardened” forces capable of withstanding the enemy’s first strike. Thus the “Sword of Damocles” hanging over the East and West evolved into “Mutually Assured Destruction” – a “MAD” strategy if there ever was one.

The strategy was mad because it depended on targeting the enemy’s cities instead of its military facilities. The theory was simple: The enemy will be deterred from attack by knowing that even military victory will cost millions of civilian lines.

So by the mid-1960s, Hundreds of nuclear warheads were aimed at scores of cities East and West. US missiles targeted Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad, Vladivostok, while Soviet missiles targeted New York, Washington, Boston, Chicago.

Thus the threat the U.S. had held over Japan those three August days in 1945 now became a global threat. The urban populations of America, England, France, Germany, and the Soviet Union became hostages to a sophisticated system of state terror threatening deliberate destruction on a scale far beyond 9/11 or the bomb plot exposed this week in Britain (believing that plot planned “mass murder on an unimaginable scale” requires total amnesia of the last 65 years.)

Dramas like Alas Babylon, Red Alert, Seven Days in May, On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove, and The Day After portrayed that nuclear terror, which kept millions from drawing a peaceful breath for decades. And those who endured 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis never forgot the hold-your-breath suspense of waiting, hoping the Russian ships would turn back but terrified that mushrooms might burst overhead.

In one sense, this new era of terror was no surprise. World War II’s Blitzkrieg made trench warfare ancient history and blurred forever the line between battlefield and homefront. Alfredo Ottaviani, the Vatican’s most conservative cardinal, said the conditions of such modern “total war” might well make a “just war” impossible forevermore.

Certainly, by the end of World War II (ironically called “The Good War” by some) no holds were barred and the very idea of the “rules of war” seemed a cruel mockery. The London Blitz, the Warsaw Ghetto, the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo foreshadowed our new age, when soldiers are no longer war’s main victims (in Iraq, civilian deaths outnumber U.S. troop deaths by nearly 50 to 1!). The old distinction between “combatants” and non-combatants” was morphing into a blunter, more brutal division between “killers” and “killed.”

Probably Harry Truman had no clue what he unleashed in those three August days. He apparently didn’t understand the A-bomb’s destructive power, and he certainly never foresaw such weapons becoming the chief tool of international relations for the next 60 years. Nonetheless, those three days marked a point of no return.

The Reign of Terror he unleashed lives on still.

Today we still cannot breath easy, since it turns out the Cold War was merely Act I of the drama of nuclear terror. That war ended, but the weapons remain, and they fuel more war. Nuclear weapons have become the “holy grail” of all weapons, the “panacea” for empowering all the powerless aggrieved people of the world. The “Nuclear Club” has spread to China, India, Israel – proliferating the promise of nuclear weapons before the eyes of all the world’s angry men.

In an age capable of “weaponizing” anything (a shoe, a box cutter, an airliner, a car, a letter) nukes remain the gold standard. The world is divided between the nuclear haves and the have-nots—and “Nuke Envy” invades every tense spot on earth.

So now we hold our breaths as North Korea tests its weapons. We scramble to rein in Iran’s nuclear program. We fearfully swallow lies about Iraq’s “yellow cake” and aluminum tubes. We allow another U.S. attack on Asian civilians.

To its credit, the Catholic Church has not stood silent. Only one condemnation emerged from the generally irenic documents of Vatican II, when the Council explicitly condemned all targeting of civilian populations by weapons of mass destruction.

Popes and Bishops have consistently taught that Catholic morality rejects not just the use of nuclear weapons but also the threat of their use (US policy still includes the threat of first use—a threat all other nations have renounced) and even the deliberate policy of building of nuclear arsenals and pursuing a nuclear arms race.

The Church’s position rejects the phony, double-standard definition of “terrorism” that pretends only nongovernmental organizations can practice terror. This ploy to exempt national governments from any moral accountability has not fooled Catholic thinkers, who roundly condemn the practice of threatening or targeting innocent people by anyone (including governments) for any reason. One need not be a fanatic to call the US “the world’s biggest terrorist”—one need only count the warheads.

Thus the US has never escaped the Church’s critique against its nuclear arsenal, its weapons industry, its leading role in the arms race, or its sad track record on disarmament. Nor did the U.S. fare better in 2003, when virtually every national Bishops conference of the world joined the Vatican and the Pope (two popes, in fact!) in opposing the US invasion of Iraq.

Sixty-one years later, Truman’s great gamble continues to have us holding your collective breath. Who will strike the next blow? Where will it come? How long can we keep nuclear weapons from the “wrong hands?”

And even this last question shows how tragic and cruel our plight is. For if nukes ever do fall into the wrong hands, it will be the natural result of the “Nuke Envy” felt by people who think they can only achieve a level playing field by acquiring the very weapons that have already been in “the right hands” for 60 years.

In other words, we have loosed a killer monster, a lethal virus, a deadly cancer on the world – and washing our hands will do no good until we destroy it and the world can finally breathe again.

So every year, these three days give me pause. You too?

Send Your Comments and Questions to bfswain@juno.com

Dr. Swain’s opinions do not represent the views of this parish or any other official body.

Bernie Swain has devoted more than 30 years to adult spiritual formation in dioceses in the US, Canada, and France. Since 1991 he has maintained a private practice as trainer, teacher, and consultant to leaders in parishes and other religious organizations. He holds degrees in theology and political science from Holy Cross, Harvard, The University of Paris, and The University of Chicago.

His writings include Liberating Leadership (Harper & Row, 1986) and more than 200 articles in periodicals such as The National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal, The Miami Herald, The Catholic Free Press, The Pilot, Harvard Theological Review, and Liturgy.

A lifelong layperson, he lives in Boston with his wife and three children. Visit his website at:

http://www.CrossCurrents.us

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