Cooperation with evil - nuclear weapons

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I’m aware of that now. But as I wrote, my research regarding Vietnam ends at 1970. US troop withdrawals had begun in 1969. We had dropped more bombs than we had on all of Europe during World War II but the war was lost anyway. From March 1965 to March 1973, we did what?
 
edwest211 said:
The goal is to protect North America from nuclear attack. That’s defense, not cooperation with evil
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Facinating thread.

I’m not disagreeing, but this is like the argument about the use of vaccines using WI 38 cell line which the Congregation of the Faith has spoken on…there might be justification for use, but a Catholic member of the military must speak out against the use…which is another sticky wicket leading to the question of should Catholics be conscientious objectors?

Fascinating thread, indeed!
 
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edwest211 said:
my research regarding Vietnam ends at 1970
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I do not mean to be rude, but leaving 3 years out of your research is skipping out on many events like the Easter Offensive, Operation Linebacker II, and Operation Fish hook as a few points of interest.
 
Depends on your idea of a bad idea. Nukes were inevitable. Someone would have invented them, there is no question about that. And if someone was going to do it, it was a good idea that it was the US. If it had not been, it would have been the Nazis, or if not them, the Soviets.

BTW, I went through Navy jump school at Lakehurst, the side of the Hindenburg hydrogen blimp disaster. Pretty sobering. Those blimps were a really bad idea, an accident waiting to happen.
 
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No, I understand your point. But this thread started with nuclear weapons, not all the details about the Vietnam War, which, while interesting, fall outside of my area of study after 1970. In the meantime, nuclear weapons are not and will never be practical in wartime. Not again.

I lived through most of the Cold War and never lost a second of sleep about it. I own the first Civil Defense book published in 1950. It is titled: How to Survive an Atomic Bomb. An interesting read. But like I said, ICBMs coming over the North Pole and incinerating the city where I lived? I knew my odds of survival were zero. I recall and still see the contrails of high-flying aircraft. The 1950s B-52 is still in service, in upgraded form.
 
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Or, given enough time, the Japanese (Wilcox/JAPAN’S SECRET WAR).
 
Interesting. I didn’t know that.

I read something that said it was actually the British that first came up with a workable prototype and the Canadians were in on it too because they had sources of uranium and plutonium in Ontario. So I guess those countries could have been candidates also, with the British probably the most likely. Also, it is alleged that the first nuclear secrets leaked to the Soviets may have come from two clerks in Montreal.
 
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The Japanese had two parallel but unequal programs, the Ni-go operation, sponsored by the Army and its poor relative, the Navy’s F-go program. Neither was very far along, though there are exaggerated claims made, from time to time, about how close it all was.

Neither the British nor the Canadians had a realistic chance of producing a weapon, working against severe constraints on manpower, brain power and funding/resources. Both did, in concert, do a great deal of early theoretical work, under the MAUD committee, and the Tube Alloys project.

When the US and the Brits/Canadians began working together, the industrial capability of the US, as well as the theoretical (name removed by moderator)uts from all 3 countries, led to the success of the Manhattan Project. But while both Britain and Canada had brains and Canada raw matelrial, neither could have produced a bomb during the period the war lasted, or might have lasted.

The most serious early leaks, though by no means the only ones, came from Klaus Fuchs, a German refugee and Tube Alloys man, who started leaking even before he reached the US, and Allan Nunn May, a British scientist with impeccable Communist connections and sympathies. His perfidy was revealed when Igor Gouzenko defected in Canada. Lots of other good stuff came out of that escape.
 
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The Japanese succeeded in building an atomic bomb and testing it.
 
Yeah, I’ve corrected you on that before. That’s Snell’s report, as discussed in Wilcox’s book, pp. 15-16.Wilcox accepts the idea of a operation at Konan/Hungnam. Nobody of any consequence accepts Snell’s claim, as based on the claims of the pseudonymous “Wakabayashi”, that there was a test of any sort there.

You do this a lot.
 
MonteRCMS said:
But you can use a tiny nuke [yes, they exist] that is built into an earth penetrator that will only destroy an underground tunnel complex.
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Tactical nuclear weapons, block busters instead of city busters. That is what they would have to use on the mountain artillery batteries in the mountains overlooking the DMZ in North Korea. You would never get a MOAB bunker buster close enough to do the job with their air defenses. I am not sure what the radiation plume would be like from a tactical nuke, but the world would flip out, if even those were used I imagine.
 
Thank you everyone for the replies to my post. As I read Catholic teaching a large nuke cannot be used in action without those involved committing a grave sin except in really strange situations like a large military force being somewhere with no significant civilian presence to be affected. On the face of it it follows that the Church should take action commensurate with its actions against others who defy its teaching such as denying communion to those stating the the use of such weapons is justified. It also follows that Catholics in nuclear weapons units must be considered as potential weak points. But does this happen in practice? Are there so few Catholics who accept the teaching that it is not worthwhile investigating them? Some responders in the thread may have some thoughts.
 
Reread your own first post. It talks about “indiscriminate destruction…” the use of nuclear weapons by civilized countries is not indiscriminate. There are lots of criteria and safeguards. No one person, even the president, can make the decision. So that is not what Church teaching is talking about. It rightly points out that nukes are a danger because they provide the opportunity to people who might use them indiscriminately. But it does not say they are prohibited from use by more responsible authority. Even the Vatican adheres to a “just war” concept that deals with measured responses.

And don’t blame those in the military if you think nukes are evil. People in the military do their jobs as they are lawfully ordered. The US is a country with a government “of the people, by the people and for the people,” even though sometimes it doesn’t seem like it. That means if we have nukes every citizen of the US bears responsibility for it, whether they agree or not. Those weapons were put in place using our tax dollars, by politicians we elected, or failed to prevent being elected. And those politicians did what we asked them to: To keep us safe.

So if you are going to suggest excommunicating someone for nukes, you may need be excommunicated also, along with the rest of us.
 
Hmmm. Not everyone is a US citizen, or lives there. Denying communion is not the same as excommunication. The United States is not the only country that has Catholics in its ranks. The United States, in the only time it has used nukes, did so indiscriminately, killing huge numbers of civilians and destroying only limited military targets. Catholic teaching in the past 100 years has always been that any military action causing civilian deaths must be proportionate. During the cold war, which is not that long ago, the US targeted cities. Indiscriminate. It still has nukes designed for such widespread destruction that their impact cannot be anything but indiscriminate. ‘Lawful orders’ have never been accepted by the Church as justifying sin. And, since the Nuremberg trials, neither have most democratic nations, including the United States.
 
If you live a country that doesn’t have nukes, then this doesn’t apply to you, sorry for implying it might.

However, the rest of what I said is still valid. If you are talking about Hiroshima, you are talking about the US. My point is that every US Catholic should be held responsible for the US nuclear posture. The Vatican has condemned the US use of nukes on Japan multiple times, and has always had the opportunity to deny communion as a result, but has not done so. Also, I’m not sure what you think needs to be investigated. The facts are all known.
 
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Haha the amount of posturing, lies, identity fraud and ego stroking in this thread is absolutely hilarious. Some people need to read less Wikipedia.

The convention on official secrets is (and has been for some time) universal. This site is monitored by various organisations. Those amongst the less savoury, would be all over this topic/characters like a rash if it was in any way legitimate.

It’s not what you say but rather what you reveal about your character. But hell. Even a small child knows that? Amusing that you dont seem to.

Ultimately I do hope most of your suggestions here about being ‘Christian’/having knowledge based around it, are as fraudulent as your career claims are.

If not; Then America and the Church have way more to worry about than Nuclear weapons. You can trust in that much.
 
Here is what would have to happen for communion to be denied to the US military personnel for handling nuclear weapons. A lot of people don’t realize this, but the US military is under the Archdiocese for the Military, USA, formerly the Military Ordinariate of Archdiocese for the Military Services of the United States.

The current archbishop is Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, J.C.D. He has 1.8 million Catholics in his diocese, making it the sixth largest diocese in the US. All US Catholic military chaplains report to him on spiritual matters. Any denial of communion would have to come from him. He is not going to do that on his own. So it would have to be a direct order from the Pope to Archbishop Broglio. Then the Catholic military chaplains, who are military officers, would have to implement it. Such a thing would cause a firestorm that would have far-reaching implications for The Church in the US.

Every Pope from Pius XII through to Francis has condemned the Hiroshima bombing and has had the opportunity to deny communion to military personnel who handle nuclear weapons. None of them have. Think about it. It’s just not going to happen.
 
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jfz178 said:
Reread your own first post. It talks about “indiscriminate destruction…” the use of nuclear weapons by civilized countries is not indiscriminate. There are lots of criteria and safeguards. No one person, even the president, can make the decision.
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Do you actually believe what you said?
jfz178 said:
And don’t blame those in the military if you think nukes are evil. People in the military do their jobs as they are lawfully ordered. The US is a country with a government “of the people, by the people and for the people,” even though sometimes it doesn’t seem like it. That means if we have nukes every citizen of the US bears responsibility for it, whether they agree or not. Those weapons were put in place using our tax dollars, by politicians we elected, or failed to prevent being elected. And those politicians did what we asked them to: To keep us safe.

So if you are going to suggest excommunicating someone for nukes, you may need be excommunicated also, along with the rest of us.
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And what if this argument was modified for use with abortion instead of deliberate targeting of civilians?

If such an argument would work, it would also “demonstrate” that pro-lifers are just as responsible for abortions, as the ones who actually perform them, wouldn’t it?

I hope this conclusion is sufficiently absurd to show that no, this argument doesn’t work.

(In fact, wasn’t a similar argument used in Nuremberg trials?)

You also ignore intentions here (again). Two alternative intentions (trying to target only military targets and bluffing to keep deterrence) have been offered that would make things much more complex. You effectively denied having them, but they are still possible for other people.
 
A couple of unrelated coments about nuclear missiles and Catholic morality:

In May, 1983, the NCCB (Nation Conference of Catholic Bishops, predecessor to the USCCB), published a pastoral letter on nuclear war and nuclear deterrence. In it, they accepted the idea of nuclear deterrence as a way of avoiding nuclear war, but with obvious trepidation, since they deemed deterrence only a temporary measure along the way to nuclear disarmament. The letter can be found at the link below. It is rather lengthy. (In going through it, I developed a certain sympathy for journalists who are charged with reporting on such news and answering the question of “what did the bishops say?” by the next day’s news story.

The Challenge of Peace


In the 1990’s there was a controversy which arose about a Catholic Launch Control Officer working in a two man launch crew for on-alert Minuteman ICBM’s.

Minuteman on-alert launch crews consist of only two persons, in a small concrete and steel capsule 80 feet underground, secured by a blast door which can only be opened from the inside. At that time they took 24 hour shifts. Policy had recently been changed to allow for female launch officers. And yes, there is a single bed in the capsule for one of the members to nap while the other remains at the controls.

The officer objected to serving on a mixed crew, deeming it to be a near occasion of sin. He was supported by a chaplain and even his archbishop.

The whole story can be read at the link below. But what struck me about the whole thing was that while the officer and supportng clergy agreed about the moral peril of serving with a woman, no one brought up any objection to having ones hand on nuclear trigger.

Sex and the Married Missilleer

Sex and the Married Missileer - First Things

At Minot Air Force base in Minot, North Dakota, a wife kisses her husband goodbye, knowing that he will be spending the night alone in close quarters with a...
www.firstthings.com www.firstthings.com
 
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