A reader writes:

I am a closet fan of your blog. I do not readily post, but I have been more closely following your writing since I began to read your series on the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy. I’m a local of Dallas, and I’m trying to be the Catholic that God wants me to be – higher standards than I expected when I started this journey almost 3 years ago! As you may be familiar with the geographical location of my city (you’ve actually spoken at UT Southwestern Medical Center where a few of my friends are in medical school – I am but a mere accountant), you know that I am in Southern Baptist territory. But like the Carthaginians towards Aeneas, they’re actually mostly friendly to a Catholic who can speak with at least some illumination on the Bible. However, I am also in a circle of people who are fairly committed to current Republican Party principles, which include rules of warfare. To get to the point of this e-mail in the most roundabout way, I have recently had the idea implanted into my head that nuclear weapons (not all nuclear technology) are intrinsically evil. I realize that there is not (as far as I know) a doctrinal teaching on this topic, but I can’t seem to hear anyone tell me a reason why they’re not. As you’ve repeatedly written on torture and war crimes, I’m assuming that you may have contemplated this topic before. Perhaps you’ve even written on it. Would you be able to help me think through this topic? If you have in fact written on it, then perhaps you could direct me to such writings. I realize that you’re a busy man with a family so I don’t want to take too much of your time. But I hope you’ll be able to assist a fellow brother in the Lord in some way. Thank you and God bless you for all of the work that you do.

Black humor lover that I am, I can’t help but think of a conversation I had with a friend of mine once where we noodled the question of whether there might be some circumstance in which the use of nukes was moral. At one point, feeling the grotesqueness of the whole thing, I remarked to my friend, “Okay. Let’s acknowledge that in a *perfect* world, you could incinerate a million people with moral impunity, but sadly we live in a fallen world where this is just not possible.”

That’s more or less what I still think. I *suppose* you could posit a scenario where a large army is standing out in the middle of the desert, a hundred miles from a civilian population center, and then use a nuke to destroy it. Killing enemy soldiers in a just war is morally acceptable, and the means you use to do that killing is not restricted, so far as I can see, to killing them one at a time. So in some remote hypothetical scenario, targeting only soldiers with a weapon of mass destruction would be morally acceptable.

But in this universe, I don’t think that will happen, should nukes ever be deployed again (please God, no.). The deployers of nukes will use exactly the same rationales, fallacies, excuses, slanders and lies to justify their actions next time that ardent conservative proponents of nuclear mass murder are using today: it’s for the greater good, the ends justify the means, a man’s man doesn’t hestitate to do dirty work to win a war dammit, you must hate your country you pantywaist, the Church should stick to babbling about theology and not interfere in the Real World, it’s not murder when we do it, they were animals, there is no such thing as a civilian, we’re not as bad as the Nazis so it’s okay, their leaders are evil so it’s okay to slaughter their children, etc.

All we can really do it stick like limpets to what the Church actually teaches, which, in this case, is “No, you can’t deliberately murder innocent people.” There’s a reason God had to enshrine that in a commandment, because we are geniuses at finding excuses for doing it anyway.