Various church groups offer disarmament advice to Stephen Harper:
This letter comes to you, to the leaders of other NATO members and to the NATO Secretary General from the councils that represent churches across the member states of NATO, namely, the Conference of European Churches, the National Council of Churches of Christ USA, the Canadian Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches.
Our letter is a joint initiative to encourage joint action. We ask your Government to ensure that the forthcoming NATO summit commits the Alliance to a thorough reform of NATO’s Strategic Concept. The 60th anniversary meeting is a welcome opportunity to begin the process of up-dating the Alliance’s security doctrine. In particular, we encourage new initiatives that will end NATO’s reliance on nuclear weapons and will engage with nuclear weapon states and other states outside of NATO in the serious pursuit of reciprocal disarmament.
We encourage NATO to consign to history the notion that nuclear weapons “preserve peace” (as claimed in paragraph 46 of the current Strategic Concept), and instead to recognize the reality that “with every passing year [nuclear weapons] make our security more precarious” (President Gorbachev’s assessment; echoed by other leaders).
A world without nuclear weapons is an attractive ideal; so is a world without mosquitoes, minivans and hairy spiders. Something the church leaders fail to address is what they would use to deter nuclear aggressors: a bow and arrow perhaps? Or, for more thorough devastation, the threat of simultaneously broadcasting sermons by Rowan Williams, Katherine Jefferts-Schori and Fred Hiltz to the enemy nation: the resultant brain damage would be incalculable.
Even though a nuclear holocaust is not a particularly inviting prospect, the problem with a bunch of beatnik bishops urging those who would never aggressively use nuclear weapons to get rid of them, while being powerless to influence those who would, is that it would not “preserve peace”: it would destroy it.
A man with a gun if free, and a man without one is a slave………basic fact of life on planet Earth.
I find nothing of merit in what those liberal have to say about the topic.
There is a fine Christian tradition of pacifism. But our pacifists today want to hide behind the blood of those who are willing to protect them. Disarm, and that protection is gone. Then all are at the mercy of those who have guns.
Mao said “power flows out of the barrel of a gun”. Know your enemy -both within and without.
Peace,
Jim
A nuclear weapon is not very like a gun. A better model of the nuclear world is a crowded stuck elevator. nine of the people in the elevator are holding hand grenades. No one can get out.