“Every thinking person fears nuclear war and every technological nation plans for it. Everyone knows it’s madness and every country has an excuse”- Carl Sagan. Nuclear arms construction and threat of nuclear war is dangerous to the world around us and though it seems far fetched the threat is very real. There are a lot of issues with nuclear war as most of us may know but the biggest ones are loss of innocent lives, the emotional pain or the years of problems that come with it and the inevitable damage to the environment around us. While the U.S and Russia are the two biggest threats of nuclear war with a long history of animosity, other countries are beginning to develop their own nuclear weapons. Countries like North Korea and Syria. Though construction of the nuclear bomb began in 1942 known as the Manhattan Project “The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons.” The threat didn’t become real until the first nuclear bomb was dropped showing the true extent of its power. In August of 1945 the U.S dropped the first and the second Nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The explosions vaporized everything in the near vicinity and went on to kill 129,000-226,000 people most of which were civilians. This was the only use of nuclear weapons in an armed war and the reasons why are obvious. The chaos and the death that those two bombs released still has effects to this day. “These individuals had a 42 percent increase in cancer risk.” Following the bombings the United Nations had a general assembly in 1946 and created the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission with goal to eliminate all nuclear weapons. However, this idea didn’t last long, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just the beginning of the threat of nuclear war. Soon after began the arms race between the U.S and the Soviet Union in the building of Nuclear weapons. Six months after the assembly the U.S tested their first post war Nuclear experiments and tested their nuclear capabilities on a fleet of 95 ships that were mostly Japanese, or German captured in the war. The construction of the bombs continued, and the race began between the Soviet’s and the Americans with the rest of the world growing in fear of what could come. In 1954 the U.S dropped a test bomb on Bikini Atoll a place in the Pacific Ocean but underestimated the size of the explosion. The explosion was meant to be 5 megatons but ended up being 15 megatons and the radiation poisoned civilians 300 miles away. Again, yet another example of how dangerous the nuclear bombs were. From there continued the building of the bombs which eventually led to the cold war. In 1983 during the cold war the world went through a very close encounter with Nuclear Apocalypse. In a Russian base an alarm was set off letting the officers know that 5 nuclear warheads had been launched from the U.S to destroy Russia. Luckily instead of immediately firing back the commanding officer, Colonel Petrov, assumed it was a glitch in the system. Luckily for all of humanity his intuition saved everybody as the threat really was nothing more than a glitch. Rays of light bouncing of high-altitude clouds hitting the sensors of the satellite. Once again nuclear weapons threatened humanity and we can see the evidence proving how horrible these weapons are. Even now nuclear weapons are still a concern for humanity when we look at North Korea who’s been threatening the U.S for years or even Syria.
In May of 2015 North Korea developed capability to launch Nuclear missiles at the U.S and threatened them that they would fire if the U.S tried to force their hand. However even after all these threats North Korea made to the U.S they claimed they would abandon their nuclear program in 2018. Nuclear war has been a threat for almost 75 years now and it continues to be a threat. Nuclear war is a threat to all of humanity and one of the most dangerous social injustices out there in the world. God teaches us to love each other and forgive not to go out and kill hundreds of thousands of people to win wars. The church attempts to avoid killing and defend the lives of others and the threats of nuclear war or the actual use of nuclear bombs go against this idea. There are five major principles in war that the catholic church teaches, and we can look at few to determine if nuclear war is acceptable in the eyes of the church. If we use WWII as our example, we can first look at the war through discrimination. With a weapon that caused as much destruction as the atomic bomb there is no way for there to be any discrimination. Everyone near the bomb was killed whether they were soldiers or innocent. This mass killing goes against the principle of discrimination because so many innocent people lost their lives. The second principle we can look at is proportionality and whether there was more good done than evil. In the case of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings there was a lot more evil done than good. The Americans saved the lives of their own troops but instead killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people many of which weren’t even part of the war. The evil done was far greater than the good therefor the bombing went against yet another catholic principle of war.
