MAD Men and the Nuclear Option

It was a beautiful, sunny day. Whips of white clouds hung lazily in the air while people bustled about, oblivious as to what was about to happen.  31,000 feet above them the bomb bay doors opened on Enola Gay. The command was given, Little Boy was released. Forty-three seconds later, at 8:15am on August 6, 1945 the first atomic weapon was detonated above Hiroshima, Japan, a city comprised mostly of civilians.



Three days later, on August 9, 1945 a second atomic weapon, the Fat Man, was dropped on the civilian population of Nagasaki, Japan. The devastating attacks broke the back of the Japanese empire and brought about the end of WWII. Japan surrendered six days after the second bomb was dropped.



This would be the only time that atomic weapons will be used in war. The Allies justified the action with the claim that the number of lives saved on both sides of the war far exceeded that which would have been lost had a long, drawn out ground war on mainland Japan would have taken place.



The attacks gave birth to the nuclear arms race where the United States went head to head against Russia to see who could build the greatest nuclear arsenal the fastest. This in turn gave birth to the concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD). It was the idea that no country would ever use atomic weapons in war because the opposing country would retaliate in kind and there would be mass destruction and death in both countries.  As of the spring of 2019 the world wide inventory of nuclear weapons was known to be just under 14,000 weapons, with more than 90% of those being owned by the United States and Russia.



Hollywood had a hay day with this idea, producing dozens upon dozens of movies about a world pushed to a nuclear war and the aftermath that follows.



Recently, Pope Francis commented that the use of nuclear weapons was an immoral action and must be added to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. He is not the first pope to speak out about nuclear weapons. Saint John Paul the Great and Pope Benedict also have spoken out against nuclear weapons. Pope Francis not only said that the use of nuclear weapons was immoral but that the mere possession of the weapons is just as immoral.



The concept is actually quite easy to understand. If an action is immoral then threatening to do that action to another is just as immoral. Killing is immoral, it is sinful. Threatening to kill another is therefore also immoral and sinful. The act comes with a greater punishment but the threat also has consequences.



War is also bad for it brings with it the death of innocents and brings out the worst in humanity. There is such a thing as a justified war. Deliberately targeting and attacking innocent civilians in a war is never justifiable, even when it saves more lives than it takes. You can never use an evil act to justify stopping a greater evil.



That is the concept Mutually Assured Destruction is based upon. If you destroy my country’s civilian population I will destroy yours. MAD makes the threat of an immoral action, which in itself is an immoral action, to discourage an immoral action. It is a zero sum gain when it comes to eternity. The threat and the action both separate us from God.



Is the United States a moral nation? Most within the United States would like to think so. But how can we be considered moral when we use many immoral means to protect ourselves. A moral nation must lead the world by doing that which is upright and good. Threatening to destroy the world’s population is anything but upright or good.



Perhaps the moral thing to do is to dismantle our nuclear arsenal and show the world that no matter how bad things get between us and our enemies we won’t resort to the mass destruction of innocent civilians. What do we really have to lose by doing this? Do we really have to worry about a country wiping us off the face of the earth in a massive nuclear attack? If Mutually Assured Destruction really works then when there is no worry about retaliatory destruction there is no reason to be armed to retaliate. The opposite of MAD is therefore also true.

“Now what happens?" asked the man in black.
"We face each other as God intended," Fezzik said. "No tricks, no weapons, skill against skill alone."
"You mean you'll put down your rock and I'll put down my sword and we'll try to kill each other like civilized people, is that it?”

Oh if such a world existed.