I was two months old when my country killed at least 150,000 people in Japan with the atomic bomb. Today, more than three decades later, I have been reading for the first time the personal accounts of those who remember seeing the flash of that bomb, and feeling its pain sear their skin. Looking at the pictures of countless scorched and wasted corpses, my mind flashed back to similar images at the Dachau Memorial Museum and prison camp in Germany seen 13 years ago when my brother and I visited there. Taking out the journal kept during that European trip, I read, “It’s hard to believe that men would actually resort to treating other people in such ways and feel justified about it.”
Like most living Americans, I grew up knowing of the bomb more as a justifiable and heroic memory than as current reality. I was taught with pride that we were the first to invent the bomb. Its explosion over Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war, and saved American lives. The single most brutal murderous act of modern warfare was glorified with rhetoric about peace and life.
The Japanese who remember that day speak of being in hell. Futuba Kitayama, then a 33 year old housewife, wrote, “Under the bridge were floating, like dead dogs or cats, many corpses, barely covered by tattered clothes. In the shallow water near the bank, a woman was lying face upward, her breasts torn away and blood spurting. A horrifying scene. How in the world could such a cruel thing happen? I wondered if the hell that my grand-mother had told me so much about in my childhood had fallen upon the earth.”
We do not find in American history books such vivid accounts of the mass horror which descended upon the people of these cities. Such memories are repressed. A whole generation of Americans has grown up thinking of the bomb as something in our past, rather than in our present and our future. To us, the bomb seems strangely remote, intangible, hypothetical, almost other-worldly.
The reality is that the inferno which ravaged those first victims of the nuclear age has been magnified tens of thousands of times and is now capable of engulfing all the globe in such perdition.
The poignancy of the Word of God dismembers the trust which this nation, or any nation, places in its obliterating destructive capability. What this manifests at the heart, biblically speaking, is the idolatry of nationhood.
To plan for nuclear wars in which tens of millions would die--in this nation as well as others--on the basis of the nation’s survival is to say, quite simply, that crimes against humanity are justifiable in the interest of national security. This exaltation of a merely temporal political entity is precisely what the Word of God defines as idolatry. Ultimate significance and authority is placed somewhere other than in God, and replaces God as Lord over life.
Whenever false idols possess a people, the biblical witness heralds a prophetic word which delivers judgment, urges repentance, and thereby offers hope. Always it begins by revealing the truth about the situation in which we find ourselves, contrasting that present plight with God’s love, his covenant, his faithfulness, and the intentions of his kingdom. We are beckoned then to choose whom we will serve, knowing that it is a choice between death and life. We are called to place our faith in Christ as Lord and Saviour.
When we ask what such a response of faith requires of us with regard to idolatry, the answers always have a disarming simplicity which defies our pragmatic instincts, our disposition to be realistic, and our calculating, protective, self-serving nature. The reign of such idolatry over our lives, individually and corporately, has to be utterly broken.
The bomb finds its rationale only in the idolatry of nationhood which condemns millions to death in the name of its survival. Relegating the state to its proper biblical role, and yielding our primary loyalty to Christ’s kingdom, necessitates the abolition of the bomb. There is no qualifying, conditional word.
Pragmatically, one protests that the Russians are as wedded to their nuclear arsenals as we are, and in Washington a current debate rages over the quantity of Soviet power and the nature of their intentions. Recognizing the Soviet’s drive to equal our own destructive power is part of being discerning and wise about the world’s present situation.
But a biblical view does not justify one nation’s possession of nuclear weapons because of another’s. To plan and prepare for the destruction of millions of lives is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord for any group, at any time, for any reason.
In his inaugural address, Jimmy Carter said his “ultimate goal [was] the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this earth.” It is difficult to think of a more concrete way to begin than by simply halting the daily production of additional nuclear bombs.
But the unyielding momentum of the arms race, the bureaucratic, technological, and corporate interests served by nuclear weaponry, and the mentality of “being realistic” about nuclear war all conspire to limit that goal to inaugural rhetoric rather than actual policy.
The evidence of these pressures was painfully present by the first day of the new administration. Papers prepared for Carter’s transition team at the Pentagon and released on January 21 demonstrated the Army’s strong desire to improve the tactical nuclear weapons they already have deployed with NATO forces in Europe. The Defense Department and the Energy Research and Development Administration have concluded that a new 155mm. nuclear projectile “is critically needed by NATO nations,” according to the Washington Post’s summary of these documents.
Defense Secretary Harold Brown’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee for his confirmation was summarized as follows: “ He said the United States has the ability to destroy the Soviet Union ‘as a functioning society’ even after a Soviet attack, and that the highest U.S. priority is to retain this capability.”
On the day of Carter’s inaugural a story in the local news section of the Washington Post told of plans being developed, and officials being hired, to arrange for the evacuation of the two million Washington area residents to rural Virginia and West Virginia during the threat of nuclear war. This is part of a $50 million, four year Pentagon program on “Crisis Relocation Panning” begun by former Secretary Schlesinger and including 400 likely nuclear targets throughout the country. (But such plans for places like New York City are considered impossible.)
Breaking the hold of nuclear madness and eradicating the stockpiles of nuclear holocaust requires the most radical conversion of our fundamental convictions. It is the same conversion which Christ calls us to when he asks us to give ourselves over to the kingdom of God.
Ronald V. Sampson in The Psychology of Power crystallized the meaning of that call when he wrote the following in 1965:
Already the apologists of “realism” are busy exhorting us to accept the realities of life in the atomic age, and learn to live with the Bomb. .. The terror inspired by the equilibrium of fear is such that we can rely on the bomb as an effective deterrent, a super-policeman guaranteeing the peace of mankind. In other words, what we failed to win under the star of Bethlehem, we shall gain under the mushroom cloud. Men will not act rationally from love, but they will learn to do so from fear.
In fact, the atomic age has at last ‘proved’ what so many men have always wanted to believe in their hearts: that the doctrine of the carpenter of Nazareth is a monumental irrelevance; that his sacrifice on Calvary was pathetic, noble perhaps, but futile and pointless. For this is the logic of peace through the deterrent. And it is curious to hear such doctrines on the lips of Bishops and churchmen.”
Wes Michaelson was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.
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