Debating nuclear weapons

The BBC reports:

Scotland's religious leaders have joined campaigners on a march for peace from Faslane naval base to the Scottish Parliament. Organisers Scotland's for Peace said the UK Government should not replace the Trident nuclear weapons based near Helensburgh, Argyll and Bute.

The 85-mile Long Walk for Peace started from the base at 0900 BST and aims to reach Edinburgh by Tuesday. Dozens of anti-nuclear campaigners have joined the march.

The Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the Right Reverend Alan McDonald, Roman Catholic Archbishop Mario Conti and Cardinal Keith O'Brien are all set to take part in the march along the way. They plan to hold a rally outside the Scottish Parliament to press their case. In the coming months, the government will decide whether to renew Britain's nuclear deterrent.

This is fairly predictable. The report - which has been amended since it was published earlier today - now records dissent from some within the Churches at their leaders' stand, but does not go into detail. That gives me an opportunity to plug a book, called Britain’s Bomb: What Next?, to be published at the end of this month by SCM Press. The book is published under the auspices of an expert and non-partisan group called the Council on Christian Approaches to Defence and Disarmament. (The Council's President is the former Bishop of Oxford Lord Harries, and its Vice-President is the military historian Sir Michael Howard.) The book is intended to provide guidance and argument, across various viewpoints and covering various issues, on the replacement of Britain's independent nuclear deterrent. One of the essays is written by me, and argues the case for the deterrent. (My strategic points are the ones I set out in this post.)

The other contributions to the book are thought-provoking (they include an argument by Bishop Harries, a longstanding supporter of nuclear deterrence, on why he has changed his mind about a British bomb), and I hope it will be influential. I'm particularly concerned that at the moment the quality of argument commonly encountered on this issue in Christian circles does not appear to be strong. (This is only an impression. Though I follow the interplay of religion and politics with interest, I am not a Christian or a theist, let alone a theologian, so comment as an outsider.)

Cardinal O'Brien commissioned for his diocese this tendentious guide to the debate, for example. It seems to me a model of what happens if you ignore the advice proffered by a great Anglican social thinker, the late Canon Ronald Preston of Manchester University, that: "It is impossible to conceive of any particular moral or Christian responsibility in politics . . . without involving ourselves in technical problems which are rarely simple and clear."

The document's 'Answers to Ten Objections' (i.e. objections to the Church's question-begging assertions) range from non sequitur to plain ignorance. But this one is particularly rich, in response to the objection that if Hitler had had the bomb he would have used it:

Yes, he would have. This proves that nuclear deterrence does not work. The theory of nuclear deterrence assumes that our enemy will always act in a rational manner. Perversely, it is based on trusting our enemy. But an insane dictator, especially one cornered in a bunker, will not necessarily behave in a rational manner. He is quite likely to use any weapons he has. The only answer to this problem is to have a world-wide ban on all WMD.

The second sentence does not follow from the first, and the last sentence does not follow from any of it. You could quite as well argue - and to this day I do argue - that the problem of an irrational despot seeking a nuclear capability justified the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of its dictator.

The 'answer' to the objection "Refusal to consider nuclear weapons is no better than appeasement" takes us well beyond such considerations, though:

Appeasement was the policy of the right wing conservatives, not the peace movement. or the churches. The real appeasement is the political decision making that follows the lead of other nuclear powers rather than making our own moral choice for disarmament. In doing so we would have the force of international law behind us. The Geneva and Hague Conventions outlaw nuclear weapons as being essentially indiscriminate and therefore incapable of being used in conformity to the rules of war.

Any of my readers who is a Roman Catholic in the Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh might wish to ask the Cardinal what vetting went into commissioning the authors of this material. Appeasement was most definitely the policy, and an absolutely central component, of the witness of the Churches and the peace movement as Hitler's intentions became ever clearer.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, was a devoted advocate of appeasement. The manifesto of the principal pacifist organisation the Peace Pledge Union urged "economic appeasement and reconciliation". The Christian Pacifist magazine of the venerable religious pacifist organisation the Fellowship of Reconciliation (still very much with us, as is the Peace Pledge Union) argued in January 1939: "The policy of 'appeasement', though the word has recently been given a new and less favourable content by its opponents, is one which in itself deserves our hearty support. It is an honest and sensible attempt to settle grievances instead of quarrelling and finally fighting about them." Some peace movement leaders - not just followers - went even further. Canon Stuart Morris, General Secretary of the Peace Pledge Union (described by the peace movement historian Martin Ceadel - from whose study of Pacifism in Britain, 1914-45 I have taken the above quotation - as "Britain's most important pacifist organiser" in this period and long after) was a member of an explicitly pro-Nazi and antisemitic organisation called The Link.

I certainly do not accuse opponents of renewing the independent nuclear deterrent of being appeasers. But there is absolutely no reason or justification for Christian peace campaigners to retail straight historical fabrications about the movements and personalities they themselves count as their antecedents.