Nuclear Summer

AS YOU READ this column, diplomats from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, Germany, and the European Union are working with their Iranian counterparts to finalize a deal concerning Iran’s nuclear program. I strongly believe that Christians should support the framework for this deal, announced in Lausanne, Switzerland, on April 2, as the best chance to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear-armed state and—equally important—the best chance for the United States to avoid armed conflict with Iran.

In the days following the announcement of this framework, Sojourners authored and published a statement of support, which was signed by more than 50 Christian leaders (see statement here). Part of that statement reads as follows: “It is the sacred responsibility of all those entrusted with political power to pursue, with patient perseverance, every option that makes the destruction of war less possible, in order to protect human life and dignity. This becomes an even more urgent moral and spiritual imperative when we have the chance to prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons, with their terrifying potential of mass destruction ... a goal that reflects the binding commitments made by 191 U.N. member states, including the United States, under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).”

A deal with Iran that prevents it from acquiring nuclear weapons is vitally important, but it should also be viewed through the broader lens of nuclear non-proliferation and, ultimately, disarmament. In late May, the parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, at their every-five-years review conference, failed to agree on how to move forward. But as President Obama said regarding the NPT, “The basic bargain is sound: Countries with nuclear weapons will move toward disarmament, countries without nuclear weapons will not acquire them, and all countries can access peaceful nuclear energy.” Enforcing the second clause of this argument—namely, preventing new countries from acquiring nuclear weapons—is diligently being pursued in the Iran negotiations, and we should rightly support that. However, people of faith and conscience worldwide need to push much more forcefully toward the goal of nuclear-armed countries such as the United States and Russia truly moving toward eventual disarmament.

The Cold War may have come and gone, but its legacy lives on in the roughly 16,000 nuclear weapons that remain throughout the world. The detonation of any one of these weapons, whether accidental or intentional, would have profound humanitarian, ecological, and moral costs that we can only guess at. Progress has been made since the height of the arms race—at one time there were approximately 70,000 nuclear weapons worldwide—but the reality is that those that remain still have the potential to wipe out humanity many times over.

POPE FRANCIS has insightfully pointed out that nuclear weapons represent not only a threat to the human race but a perpetuation of global economic inequality. “Spending on nuclear weapons squanders the wealth of nations,” the pope wrote last December. “To prioritize such spending is a mistake and a misallocation of resources which would be far better invested in the areas of integral human development, education, health, and the fight against extreme poverty. When these resources are squandered, the poor and the weak living on the margins of society pay the price.”

Right now, the United States is planning to spend $1 trillion over the next decade to modernize its nuclear arsenal. When some of our political leaders support this spending in the same breath as they call for cuts to programs that serve our most vulnerable citizens in the name of deficit reduction, we need to name that for the moral hypocrisy that it is.

We also need to move beyond the resigned acceptance and complacency that has characterized for too many our attitudes toward nuclear weapons. President Obama perhaps said it best in his 2009 speech in Prague: “Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot be checked—that we are destined to live in a world where more nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.”

Of course, the United States has a particular moral duty to lead the way, as the only nation ever to have used nuclear weapons in war. This August will mark the 70th anniversary of the United States’ destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our nation should mark this solemn occasion with a new commitment to be not just the country that brought nuclear weapons into the world, but also the country that led the world to abolish them.