Volume 30, Number 10 · June 16, 1983
The Bishops and the Bomb
By McGeorge Bundy
The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response, The Pastoral Letter of the US Bishops on War and Peace.
National Catholic News Service
32 pp., $3.50 (paper)
Report of the President's Commission on Strategic Forces
(The Scowcroft Commission).
US Government Printing Office, 29 pp.
Underneath our continuing debates on nuclear danger we begin to detect the possibility that we may be able to reach a new level of common understanding of what nuclear deterrence is, what it is and is not good for, and how it relates to morals, to politics, and to the prospects for peace. It is too soon, and probably too much, to try to set forth any 'general theory' of deterrence, but it does seem possible to clarify some elements of its nature. Such an undertaking may have additional value in a season in which, as Emma Rothschild has powerfully demonstrated, the Pentagon under Caspar Weinberger is doing its best to give deterrence a bad name.[1] Such consideration of Mr. Weinberger's misconceptions is one powerful catalyst of new understanding, and another, itself refined by extended debate, is the pastoral letter of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, overwhelmingly approved in Chicago on May 3. Still a third is the report of the Scowcroft Commission, in which good and bad arguments are mixed together with remarkable inattention to their intrinsic incompatibility.
Review, 5396 words
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