By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age by Paul Boyer & Tom Engelhardt

Author:Paul Boyer & Tom Engelhardt [Boyer, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: ACLS Humanities E-Book
Published: 2013-01-28T05:00:00+00:00

Thus in the dawn of the atomic era, a question that would continue to trouble consciences forty years later—the morality of threatening atomic retaliation (or “deterrence,” as it would come to be called)—had surfaced as a fundamental and divisive issue.41

The Calhoun Commission report, and particularly its relegation of the fundamental moral issue to a footnote, deeply disappointed A. J. Muste. “If responsible people are going to say such things,” he wrote, “they rest under a very solemn obligation to say just what they mean.” Talk of preventing atomic war by the threat of reprisal not only had “an ugly and sinister sound, especially when it comes from Christian lips,” he said, but such a strategy could easily edge over into advocacy of a preventive first strike. To believe that a “no first use” pledge (one of the commission’s recommendations) would restrain a nuclear-armed nation if it thought itself threatened, he said, was “utterly sentimental.” If Christian leaders continued to equivocate on the ethical issue, Muste concluded, they would be “handing a blank check to the militarists” and their ultimate guilt could well be “far greater than that which rests upon the Nazis.”42

Muste had at least one outspoken adherent. In The Christian Response to the Atomic Crisis (1950), Edward L. Long, Jr., reviewed the respective positions of Muste and the Calhoun Commission and found the former more persuasive and biblically defensible. The impulse to retain a retaliatory capability, Long insisted, reflected secular expediency, not Christian discipleship. “When all considerations except those of ultimate religious obedience are eliminated,” Long wrote, “it seems that the ultimate principle of love would demand a pacifist position.” The only hope of breaking the “vicious cycle” of the nuclear arms race, he wrote, lay in the religious and [Page 228] ethical realm. “The cost of Christian faith is not cheap,” he concluded, “but reliance upon political schemes may be costlier still.”43

And what of the Roman Catholic position? In view of the condemnation of wartime terror bombings and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks in the major Catholic journals, one might have expected a categorical rejection of any conceivable future use of the atomic bomb. In fact, the response was more qualified and ambivalent. The atomic bomb raised “numerous and extremely grave” moral issues, said America on August 18, 1945, but precisely for this reason, it went on, “moral theologians will hesitate to give a forthright decision as to whether or not its use as a weapon of war can be justified for any reason or on any ground. ” Commonweal and America had little to say on the ethical aspects of atomic weapons in the later 1940s. Catholic World, having emotionally deplored the use of the bomb in its first post-Hiroshima issue, offered a rather different view in May 1946. In “God, Man, and the Atom Bomb,” Francis X. Murphy, Catholic chaplain at the U.S. Naval Academy, insisted that the development and use of the atomic bomb was “in accordance with the divine plan.” With “Christian concepts of

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