It seems to me that most of the Church’s commentators on “just wars” and “preventitive wars” based all of their thinking on a belief that war takes time, that the victims have time to see the unjust thing that is being done to them, and then react.
With the coming of the nuclear age, war does not take time.
In the hypothetical which I have used in this site, which none of the pacifists in this site have dared to deal with, a West-hating Muslim radical who has urged nuclear terrorism against the West gets control of Pakistan – a real possibility, something which could literally happen any day – and suddenly has access to about two dozen nuclear weapons, as well as the capital, scientists, and machinery necessary to build, say, half-a-dozen multi-megaton thermonuclear “city killers.”
Let’s change the hypothetical slightly to fit this thread. After the West-hating, nuclear-saber-rattling Muslim is made Grand Ayatollah of Pakistan, and immediately starts purging the government of pro-Western sane people, by having them murdered as traitors to Islam, the Vatican, afraid of a preventitive war against the madness in Pakistan, appoints a Pakistani-speaking Catholic priest as the Vatican legate to Islamabad. The legate is told to wait for the Grand Ayatollah in a room filled with government memoranda. As the waiting legate casually glances at the memoranda, he realizes with a shock that his Muslim hosts do not know that he can actually read Pakistani, and that they have left him in a room in which all of the Grand Ayatollah’s signed secret orders to his new radical government have been left laying out in plain site.
Among the papers is a memo signed by the Grand Ayatollah instructing his chief nuclear scientist to have the six 50-megaton thermonuclear “city busters” transported to cargo ships due to depart for American ports in three weeks’ time.
Seeing a copying machine, the legate copies the memo, dated that day, as well as the memo from the Grand Ayatollah one month before commanding the murder of pro-Western Pakistanis. Each bears the same signature.
Stuffing these photocopies into his pocket, the legate doesn’t mention the memoes to the Grand Ayatollah, aware that if does he will die.
Back in Rome, the legate hands the memoes to Pope Benedict XVI, and translates them.
Pope Benedict XVI, sighs, thinks, and says, “If we deliver these memoes to the Americas, it will start a ‘preventitive war,’ within the next three weeks. I will be the cause of the very thing I condemned in my September 22, 2002 statement.” The Pope then stands up, carries the memoes to the fireplace, and burns them.
Six weeks later, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, Chicago and Los Angeles, and their suburbs, are all incinerated, in a few seconds, by six huge perfectly-timed thermonuclear blasts.
Death toll: 85 million babies, children, women and men.
Did the Pope sin in the hypothetical?
