Cold War Christians and the Spectre of Nuclear Deterrence, 1945-1959

J. Gorry

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137334244
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

Offering a new interpretation of early Cold War history, this book demonstrates how Christian agency played a pivotal role in the creating of space for the logic of nuclear deterrence and nuclear war, showing a balanced examination of Christians as enablers but, more provocatively, as resisters of nuclear prohibitions.

1

Introduction

For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness.

Eph: 6:12

Today the use of nuclear weapons is practically unthinkable. It is hard to imagine a circumstance in which the use of such weapons could be politically or morally justified. Yet the spectre of nuclear war ending history itself casts a surprisingly small shadow over how we have constructed the ethics of twentieth century foreign affairs. Cold War narratives have traditionally placed great emphasis on the idea that credible threats of mutually assured destruction explain the puzzle of ‘non-use’ since 1945. In so doing they uphold the realist account of time as one in which material power and military force shape past and present. Or in plainer terms, meaning is power and Thrasymachus was right in seeing visions of imaginative civilising action as illusory.

In the aftermath of World War II, E. H. Carr concluded that developments in modern weaponry were threatening the ‘Westphalian moment’ by fundamentally subverting the modern nation-state as an organisation capable of providing security for its citizens. As a response to the dilemma of new technologies, Carr anticipated pooled security and would argue that throughout the Cold War a de facto habit of nuclear non-use became a collectively held form of conflict management. An increasing number of scholarly accounts now take this self-reinforcing normative opprobrium as proof of the evolution of a moral teleology in which values, ideas and culture matter as much as material power in explaining the efficacy of nuclear deterrence.¹ But whether deterrence worked to keep the peace or not, it most certainly worked to instil fear. As Nina Tannenwald points out in her seminal The Nuclear Taboo (2007, p. 9), ‘no one today views a nuclear weapon as “just another weapon”’. Yet it was not always so. Throughout the 1950s many democratic leaders sought to establish nuclear devices as ‘just another weapon’ so much so that in 1957 US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles declared the ‘ultimate inevitability’ of tactical (battlefield, theatre or smaller-yield) nuclear weaponry gaining conventional war-fighting status. While the revealed historical record demonstrates that western politicians were surprisingly open to the possibility of nuclear use, it is also clear democratic leaders felt constrained by public horror, antipathy and widespread feelings of civic revulsion. It seems a reasonable proposition to further investigate, therefore, Tannenwald’s conception of proscription both as radically dependent variable and as plausible foil to conventional accounts of deterrence in explaining the history of nuclear inaction. The Nuclear Taboo divides its story into defined stages: an initial period of emergence, 1945 to 1959, in which ideas of taboo vied for supremacy against attempts to conventionalise; and a second period of consolidation and institutionalisation from the 1960s to the 1980s, in which notions of taboo successfully prevailed over the competition. The interesting questions are from where, how and in what ways did the norms that theoretically stigmatised the nuclear class emerge?

The writing of this book was guided by an interest in the crucial formative period in which the nuclear taboo was raised and the particular roles played by Christians in both enabling it but also, more provocatively, resisting its emergence with a counter vision of justified limited use. The late 1940s, in the wake of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, was a period of great political uncertainty and as World War II ended the first chills of Cold War were felt. In the summer of 1945, the American defence strategist Bernard Brodie declared: ‘Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now its chief purpose must be to avert them’. But the stigmatisation of these weapons first emerged in the 1950s as a result of operational precedents and categories that established them as qualitatively different. In early 1952 Winston Churchill’s Conservative government become the first to formally adopt the concept of deterrence by the threat of massive nuclear retaliation as the basis of its national security policy. This ‘New Look’ strategy reflected both the initial short-lived western monopoly of nuclear weapons, a poverty of accurate delivery systems and the West’s more enduring unwillingness to pay the financial cost of matching Soviet conventional forces. London thinking was ahead of Washington by two years and no official distinction was made as to whether the unleashing of a nuclear holocaust on Russian cities was to be a pre-emptive first-strike response to a conventional Soviet invasion of Western Europe or as a countervalue second-strike response to Soviet nuclear attack. (It is worth noting that this ambiguous policy would remain the basis of British nuclear strategy until the purchase of the Polaris missile system in the early 1960s and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s [NATO] adoption of its current strategy of flexible response in 1967.) The official view was simply that nuclear weapons had abolished total war and the primary focus of defence was to bolster the deterrent. The Marshal of the Royal Air Force and chief architect of massive retaliation, Sir John Slessor (1954, p. 108), argued that ‘citizens must steel themselves to risks and take what may come to them, knowing that thereby they are playing as essential a part in the country’s defence as the pilot in the fighter [plane] or the man behind the gun’. This reckless strategy soon unleashed a turbulent and vigorous debate within Britain not least because it assumed, as Sir Michael Howard (1970, p. 161) would later note, ‘that the civilian population might be induced to grin and bear the nuclear holocaust as cheerfully as they had endured the German blitz’. Christians quickly became among the most vocal and articulate critics of a public policy process that seemed to condone an overwhelming obligation to die. Tannenwald’s account emphasises the role of grassroots anti-nuclear activists as prime actors in shaping prohibitions; can we perhaps assume that the very idea of nuclear opposition was raised from a Christian base? Does this not suggest a case history par excellence of the progressive impact of religious ethics on the secular public square?

It is often taken for granted that the churches and individual lay Christians were vocal instigators of anti-nuclear sentiment. And it is also true that the churches’ role deserves due consideration as it is easy to forget they were the main forum for debating nuclear morality in Britain before the onset of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in 1958. But Christians were in fact deeply divided in their judgements. On one hand there were those who felt that nuclear weapons were different-in-degree and that their moral nature was determined by use. Such conventionalists endorsed traditional military arguments about the value-neutrality of technology and blurred the line between nuclear and other weaponry. On the other hand, however, there were absolutists who believed that there was something different in kind about nuclear weapons and so sought clear lines of demarcation. In theological terms, one might say that the former denied the seriousness of nuclear possession while the latter embraced its danger as absolute evil. The point is that radically different visions of order regarding deterrence and warfare were imagined and articulated. Unpicking the form(s) and character of these inventions requires a sense of historical, cultural and social context. It also involves upholding an account of social action based on hermeneutics and intersubjective meaning while demonstrating the way ideas are always instantiated through institutions and practices. It means stressing, contrary to conventional constructivist accounts, that (Christian) norms are not stable and monophonic but contested. Ecclesiological similarities, to put another way, cannot and do not guarantee distinguishable modes of action.

This book has been guided by a concern to recover the form and function of a specifically Christian judgement on what is normally considered an entirely secular series of foreign policy interventions. It sets to unpack the assumptions and policy prescriptions that led the British Council of Churches (BCC²) to reimagine the Augustinian tradition of moral and theological thinking in order to affirm the idea that nuclear deterrence was ethical and the battlefield use of nuclear weapons could be just. The BCC have been described by Adrian Hastings (1987), the accepted academic authority, as arguably the key institution of British Christianity in the Cold War period. That little has been written about the churches’ role in this pivotal but largely under-explored area of twentieth century history is all the more strange considering the context. There was probably never a time since the middle nineteenth century when traditional Christianity was taken so seriously by so many. Where the personally committed and orthodox believer was once the exception, as had been the case throughout the first half of the twentieth century, by the 1950s they were very nearly the norm, not least within the corridors of British political power. That intellectual and cultural elites would associate with the churches was considered normal and a Christian sensibility was the social capital that bound Britain together. Throughout the English-speaking world in the late 1940s and 1950s much public and scholarly discussion on East–West relations also possessed a distinctly metaphysical quality. The widespread view was that communism was the ultimate threat to western, Christian civilisation and this tended to align the churches alongside the government (Kirby 1993). Participants frequently defended their foreign policy positions as articles of faith at a time when the prospect of war – this time with nuclear weapons – against ‘godless’ Soviets could not be easily dismissed. Perhaps even more suggestive was the way in which a specific language of providence, sin and order took hold and became an intellectual currency in an era of sharp anxiety and terror. From this perspective, notwithstanding empirical events, the Cold War can be seen as a series of battles between faith-based metanarratives. Nowhere was this confrontation more acute than when debating communist intentions and the ideologies of nuclear deterrence.

The early Cold War period was a time of great social transition not least because the British defence consensus was brought to the point of collapse over attitudes to nuclear deterrence.³ In policy terms the churches’ endorsement of nuclear weapons can be remembered for helping to reconcile a broken consensus at precisely the time when the traditional security paradigm was most under threat from an organised anti-nuclear peace movement with its unconditional commitment to denuclearisation. A comparative focus that historically and theoretically locates the churches’ contribution aside the development of such a protest movement is useful in that it also helps bring focus on the centrality of imagination in an ideational terrain. And this is in two respects. First, because the peace movement demanded a new, expanded vision (not least from Christians) of the form of civic responsibility necessary in a nuclear era. The second reason is that peace activists claimed that the orthodox just war synthesis between political pragmatism, force, and ethics was rendered obsolete by the invention of nuclear weapons. It is against this background that this book attempts to provide meaningful answers to the following questions: How did theological–political judgements affect an ecumenism that aimed to influence Cold War security policy? How did Christians within the BCC imagine their own obligations as active responsible citizens when faced with threats of nuclear apocalypse? In analysing such evaluations this book makes extensive use of the hitherto unused archival material and official publications of the British Council of Churches.

One further reason why a book of this nature is needed is that it illustrates nicely how security issues have driven and can drive secularity. This also questions the standard sociological paradigm of secularisation as a process of desacralisation (rationalisation, privatisation, differentiation, etc.). The received wisdom sees the marginalisation of religious belief as essentially a positive act – to remove that which is superfluous and additional to reveal what is human and self-sufficient (Milbank 2006). Here secularisation has become, sociologically speaking, the inexorable creation of modern space that enables a knowable and authentic human autonomy through the separation of the natural/supernatural distinction. But the idea of a stark divorce between secular reason and religious faith cannot be so easily sustained. Secularisation appears something more suggestive than a simple absence of belief and practice or the inevitable by-product of modernisation. By reflecting on a disjointed Christian discourse on foreign policy this book follows Martin (2005) into arguing that history, culture, different theologies and ecclesial structures are significant factors in demonstrating that there are different dynamics rather than one master narrative of secularisation. The aim from this perspective is to reveal the subtleties of secularity by using a case history to better specify the varieties (despite similarities) of Christian witness in time and place.

In the secularisation literature there is clear tendency to concentrate on the wider cultural presence of the churches and to relegate questions of the quality and content of religious belief. There is less interest in assessing the cultures of religious participation and commitment. Yet if the early years of the nuclear age represents a period of enormous ‘religious vitality’ (e.g. Hastings 1988) how can it concurrently be a key phase in the ‘de-Christianisation’ of late post-industrial modernity (e.g. Brown 2009)? If Christianity was taken so seriously by so many in the 1950s why did belief collapse so radically in the following ‘secularisation decade’? It is not my purpose here to begin to answer such questions but posing them suggests we are arguably at either a distorted understanding of the early Cold War years as an age of religious revival or we have an incomplete sense of the nature of the violent cultural attacks that followed in the 1960s. If this is so, both Callum Brown’s ‘death of Christian Britain’ and Hugh McLeod’s (1981) ‘end of Christendom’ theses are qualified. This study hence casts light on a wider narrative of large-scale social change by linking questions of late 1940s and 1950s religiosity to nuclear ethics and fears. The debate is interesting because it gives a sense of how the churches saw themselves and their responsibilities at a time when it had become difficult to treat Cold War politics in moral terms because, to paraphrase William Faulkner, there was only one frightful question left: When will I be blown up?

From the very beginning Christianity has shown itself as very adaptable in terms of its cultural setting and political role. As will be shown in Chapter 2, not all believers have seen this ability to remake existing culture as a positive feature of their religion. Transforming culture to reflect the demands of the gospel, for some purists, is nothing other than a metamorphosis of the gospel to reflect culture. But many Christians wish to see questions of coercion/non-coercion as fundamental criteria in separating secular and sacred markers. Yet Roy (2010, p. 89) has taught that within all religions ‘cultural markers and religious markers are continually being connected and disconnected, secularised and made sacred, in a see-sawing that is never a simple repetition’. In this light the following can be regarded as a modest attempt to further shape the conversation pursued by Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) in which he isolated the ethical dynamic implicit within Protestantism (as opposed to Weber’s emphasis on the cultural dynamics implicit within Protestant ethics) as one that dislocates the transcendent in favour of post-Enlightenment immanence. Within such narrative the churches are themselves agents of a ‘political’ rather than ‘existential’ secularisation (Katznelson and Stedman Jones 2010). My intention is to add colour to a picture that sees secularisation not so much as Christian loss or disenchantment (Weber’s term is ‘Entzauberung’), but more as a transformation in Christian understanding, ambition and action.

* * *

It should be noted before proceeding that the terminology used in this book belongs to a highly contested field. It is appropriate to clarify the meaning of certain key terms. The title ‘church’ refers to the collective Christian church and not one particular denomination (e.g. Church of England) unless otherwise specified. The term ‘state’ describes not only elected government (Cabinet and Prime Minister) but also the permanent institutions of civil service, and coercive apparatuses such as police, armed forces, and judiciary. In this sense my study brings into focus a tension between citizen and state. It draws attention to the ways in which the Christian duty of allegiance to his or her state is articulated.

My understanding of (political) ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ is very much influenced by Max Weber’s ‘taxonomy of responsibility’ in Politics as a Vocation. Realism earns its label by emphasising consequences over moral principles and idealism by emphasising moral imperatives over expediency. For Weber (Gerth and Mills 1991, p. 120) ‘we must be clear that all ethically orientated conduct may be guided by one of two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims: conduct can be orientated to an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ or to an ‘ethic of responsibility’. This is not to say that an ethic of ultimate ends is identical with irresponsibility or that an ethic of responsibility is identical with unprincipled opportunism’. Weber’s discussion is suffused with theological content and the Sermon on the Mount constitutes his ‘ideal type’ of intention. For realists the theological referent tends to be the Passion. The terms of the debate are familiar. Realists see (liberal) idealism as deontological, utopian, or normative political theorising that attempts to moralise politics. Idealists see realism as the consequentialist notion that morals should have no part in political decision-making.

‘Pacifism’ (without the qualification ‘nuclear’) is used to define the position held by individuals and groups who reject the use of direct force and violence. James Hinton’s excellent study Protests and Visions (1989) offers a compelling insight into the etymological origins of the word. ‘Nuclear pacifists’ accept that war can be a morally legitimate venture as long as it is not waged with nuclear means. ‘Pacificists’, while working for peace and the prevention of war, look for the removal of force from international relations. A ‘pacificist’ does not reject the use of force in all circumstances. Following Ceadel (1980) the term ‘pacificist’ will be italicised to avoid visual confusion with pacifism. ‘Peace activists’ include all those who challenge from within the ‘peace movement’ the dominant culture of war. The term includes pacifists, pacificists, anarchists, international socialists, as well as traditional liberal-idealists. Whilst most pacifists are peace activists, not all peace activists are pacifist. Before the nuclear age, many peace activists would in fact have associated themselves with the just war position, particularly in world war struggles against fascism.

‘Deterrence’ is defined as a military strategy whose primary purpose is the prevention of hostile action by a foreign adversary through fear of counter-attack. The idea involves persuading an adversary that the potential costs of military action will exceed the expected gains. The standard texts are Morgan (2003) and Freedman (2004). Fisher (1985) and Finnis, Boyle and Grisez (1987) provide ethical assessments of the nuclear variety. ‘Just war’ is a moral vision of deterrence-cum-retribution that, in this book, usually refers to the tradition that encourages states to find alternative methods of conflict resolution and set limits on the effects of war if there is military engagement. Formally articulated in the fourth century by St Augustine, just war theorising begins with the assumption that armed conflict is wrong but can be justified if certain conditions are fulfilled. Its greatest utility lies in its ability to encourage judgement on both ius ad bellum (declared reasons for war, announced war aims), and ius in bello (strategies adopted, the morality of the means employed). It thus sets to reconcile a central theme of Christian thinking – prohibitions on the taking of human life – with a recurring feature of history – the prevalence of warfare. Just war arguably stands as the only area of applied ethics where an essentially medieval conceptual vocabulary still commands contemporary currency. Yet it is a discourse which, in supporting a sovereign right to deterrence, self-defence, and retribu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Vision and Order
• Part II Faith and Fear
• Part III Power and Justice
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index