Joseph P. Martino: A Fighting Chance: The Moral Use of Nuclear Weapons. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, July 27, 1988.
Fortunately unused since 1945, what are nuclear weapons for? ‘Deterrence of enemy attack,’ we answer. But if deterrence fails, would we really use them? Should we?
‘No,’ reply some would-be realists and many moralists. ‘If the Soviet Union launches a full-scale nuclear attack, we’re all going to die. Retaliation would be pointless,’ say the realists. ‘The intentional destruction of innocent human life is evil,’ say the moralists, ‘and we must never do evil that good may come—if any good could come from a nuclear counter-attack.’
Such arguments might be called irrelevant. The Politburo, for example, cannot assume that either despair or stricken conscience will animate Americans who survive a nuclear strike. Military planners must look at capabilities, not motives. As long as America has the means to retaliate, no enemy can prudently crown his planning with mere hope.
Serious American reservations about the retaliatory use of nuclear weapons affect the Soviets less than they affect us. This is a problem, because a republic never negotiates so much with its enemies as with itself. Despairing realists and frightened moralists do us no good. Their dispiriting counsels result in vague or even self-contradictory political and military strategies designed not so much to meet foreign challenges as to assuage domestic sentiments.
Joseph P. Martino argues that we can expunge “moral evasion” from American military strategy only by considering how nuclear weapons may be justifiably used, not by bluffing and praying that no one will ever use them on us. While affirming the injustice of military attacks on innocent persons—long prohibited by the traditional philosophic and religious doctrine of the just war—Martino insists that wrong policy, not nuclear weapons themselves, has encouraged our legitimate misgivings about ‘Mutual Assured Destruction.’
Americans began by confusing deterrence with defense. Deterrence form part of any coherent defense policy; it should never form its whole. The reason for this is simple. Essentially a psychological or subjective condition, deterrence rests on the enemy’s calculating fear. What we predict will deter our enemy or may not deter him. Thus we try to magnify his fears with plans for mass destruction of innocent and guilty alike, a strategy that may frighten our enemy but also frightens us—or worse, leads some of us to a moral disgust with ourselves and even with democratic republicanism itself.
Martino understands but deplores such responses, particularly those of contemporary ‘Left’-leaning clergymen. He shows the bad moral consequences of anti-American moralism. Communist regimes have killed over 95 million persons since 1917; wars have resulted in 86 million deaths since 1740. Twentieth-century war deaths (some 35.7 million, some innocent and some decidedly not) do not compare to the 120 million innocent lives destroyed by left- and right-wing tyrants. And these numbers refer to survival only leaving aside the qualitative, moral benefits of freedom. To oppose tyranny with nuclear arms can affirm justice, not deny it.
Nonetheless, in one sense pessimists are right. “If a nation has not properly prepared itself it is incapable of conducting a just nuclear war,” that is, one which defends Americans, attacks enemy military targets, and does not directly injure the innocent. “Nuclear weapons can be used in a way that allows us to discriminate between the aggressive Soviet government and the Soviet people.” Even in the so-called nuclear age, peace remains as it was in the time of Isaiah, “an enterprise of justice.”
To prove this, Martino draws upon his impressive knowledge of the history of military strategy and the technical capabilities of nuclear and non-nuclear weapons. Civil and strategic defense can protect our people, our command systems, and our forces, while counterforce nuclear weapons—particularly those with accurate warheads producing low fallout—can destroy the “means of repression” and the military-economic infrastructure of our attacker. “Our weapons must be such that we would be willing to use them” when attacked. Such weapons include strategic bombers, the single-warhead Midgetman missile, the rail-garrison-deployed MX missile, and cruise missiles. All these are difficult to attack, easy to defend, and designed for just-war use.
“Those who object to our acquiring usable weapons evidently want us to spend great sums of money on weapons we know to be unusable, or not to buy any weapons whatsoever.” Either alternative means the slow (or in perhaps, at some point, lightning-fast) disintegration of the political institutions that strengthen moral principles in a world often uncongenial to them.
This book deserves candid study by American citizens at a time when our conflicting thoughts and feelings, exacerbated by election-year hype, may lead us further into poorly conceived policies and treaties. More than a timely study, it may contribute to thinking seriously about American nuclear-weapons policy in the years ahead.
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