This week is marked by two significant dates from 1945, the use of the atomic weapons first on the city of Hiroshima on August 6^th and three days later on Nagasaki. The loss of life and the dawn of the availability of weapons of mass destruction were marked by those August days. If you look back to the old Roman Missal and read the Introit for the Mass of the Transfiguration you will find these words:

“All  the world shone with thy lightning and the troubled earth shook”

The psalmist who wrote Ps 76 could not have appreciated just how awful was that prediction for there is something deeply uncomfortable and prophetic in those few words. The argument that this action ultimately saved lives and brought the war to a rapid conclusion is challenged more and more.

Now, some 71 years later, after the Manhattan Project that gave birth of those weapons, we live with an uneasy stalemate. The acronym that was coined in the depths of the Cold War between East and West was MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction.

Looking back, I cannot help feeling that for all the risks we suffered, we were then in safer times than now. We knew who we were facing, we monitored the air space twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. And by some chance, we got away with it.

In the West, both in the UK and the US, protest groups formed and voices of dissent were raised over the attempts to morally justify the thousands of warheads that were being stockpiled. CND in this country and Plowshares in the US took part in marches, protests in the public space and acts of civil disobedience. An effort was made to restrain the war-mongers. Treaties were signed East and West to limit production and storage of these weapons, now many times more potent than those that caused the devastation in Japan all those years ago.  

Recently, the House debated the update of the Trident Weapons system and with a large majority, confirmed their agreement. There was one chilling moment when the Prime Minister, Theresa May, was asked by an SNP member if she would be prepared to press the button that, in retaliation, would kill many thousands of men women and children. Her reply was brief and direct. “Yes.”

There is of course a simple logic in her response. It is no longer a deterrent if you abdicate the right of a responsive action.

But now we face not only a Great Powers standoff, but must contend with the ever growing number of small countries, often with unstable governments whose support for terror groups make their possession of nuclear weapons even more alarming.

I cannot imagine a nuclear response to an IS atrocity, however crazed the action. The recent murdering of the French priest, Father Jacques Hamel, is of a wholly differing order. The tragic circumstances of his death when he was sharing the Eucharist sadly reflects the assassination of Oscar Romero in El Salvador. I have no answer as to how the open society that we live in in the West can prevent or respond to such horrendous atrocities. But I do know that retaliation in like manner is certainly no answer.

One of the greatest documents to come out of Rome in the 20^th Century was the letter of John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, published a few months after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and only a short while before his passing to the Lord in the June of 63.

Among the many paragraphs on the rights and duties of humankind, of our need to act according to a moral compass, there is this statement.

“Hence justice, right reason, and the recognition of man's dignity cry out insistently for a cessation to the arms race. The stock-piles of armaments which have been built up in various countries must be reduced all round and simultaneously by the parties concerned. Nuclear weapons must be banned. A general agreement must be reached on a suitable disarmament program, with an effective system of mutual control. In the words of Pope Pius XII: "The calamity of a world war, with the economic and social ruin and the moral excesses and dissolution that accompany it, must not on any account be permitted to engulf the human race for a third time."

That would seem to be a fairly unequivocal position for a Christian to take. As we share the Eucharist during these days of remembrance over what we once did, let us pray for what we might do in the future, that the morality of our actions may be guided by the words of John, for Peace on Earth.

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