Facing the Nuclear Heresy: A Call to Reformation G. Clarke Chapman Foreword by Jürgen Moltmann BRETHREN PRESS Elgin, Illinois1 Nuclearism as a Religion For Richard Barnet, it was the scene with the general that was the eye-opener. He remembers it vividly, for it drew to a focus a disillusionment that had grown during his two years in Washington D.C.-first in the State Department and then in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The time was during the Kennedy administration. Barnet was fresh out of Harvard, having finished a graduate research project eventually published as Who Wants Disarmament?. Now he was getting an unsettling answer to his question. The more he worked in corridors of governmental power, the more it appeared that, in effect, very few want it-even among those who nominally are in charge of such matters. It was for him a shock to see the casual, even arrogant manner in which colleagues discussed plans which assumed many millions might die in the course of advancing our own national interest. Barnet felt surrounded by symptoms of a profoundly spiritual sickness. It came to a head when this Air Force general arrived to demonstrate a new early warning system. He was proud of a technology which allegedly would give the President several extra minutes to decide about launching a massive nuclear reprisal. For Barnet, who is now a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, this incident crystallized a new insight that would last him a lifetime: "There was no way to argue with the man or his system, to make him see that he was offering illusion instead of security. The biblical language of idolatry made far more sense as a4 FACING THE NUCLEAR HERESY NUCLEARISM AS A RELIGIONdescription of what was happening than the language of nuclear strategy. There was no way out of the race to destruction except somehow to transcend it."' The young policy analyst had just found himself in the intractable presence of what is, in effect, an alternate religion-a self-contained complex of faith assumptions, complete with reinforcing rituals, codified lifestyle, and a missionary zeal. "Within the hermetic system of nuclear rationality, there were no solutions"; indeed only an altogether new vision could provide a "way out," a means to "transcend" the dilemma. Barnet concludes, "The idea that profound conversion was necessary before a sane national security policy was possible made me very uncomfortable and still does."2 And well it might! The clash of incompatible belief systems is always disquieting, and conversion is painfully exacting in its drive to reintegrate the self in all its aspects around a new vision. But herein also lies hope for the nuclear age.The Bomb as a Religious Issue It is curious that the growing threat of major nuclear war is not widely perceived as more than a moral problem, but indeed a directly religious one. Religion, of course, deals with our relationship to the Holy and with the redemptive consequences that follow, while morality deals with more derivative matters of valuing and behaving. Since 1945 the Bomb has often been debated as an ethical issue, but rarely as a religious one. Why is that? Why this reluctance to push a discussion of values and their adjudication to its source: a tenacious underlying view of ultimate reality? By two functional criteria of religion, namely wholeness and ultimacy, our preparations for planetary suicide would appear to a neutral observer as quite devout. The claim to deal with the whole of reality, first of all, is a trait that distinguishes religion from other facets of culture. The sacred does command an all-encompassing vision and it plumbs the totality of our being. What is merely partial or fragmentary cannot qualify. And whatever lays counterclaims to the wholeness of life, such as totalitarian ideologies aspire to do, should logically be renounced-not as simply a cultural phenomenon but as an outright religious rival. The Bomb comes close to such an encompassing claim. Alan Geyer, for instance, recalls that Karl Barth criticized the churches' failure to condemn nuclear armament as the greatest infidelity since the failure of most Christians to take a firm stand against Nazism. "That comparison is appropriate," Geyer continues, "because it points to the totalitarianism of both Nazism and nuclear weapons."' The "totalitarianism" of the Bomb derives from our recognition of not only the unprecedented magnitude of its explosive power, but also a widening range of thermal, electromagnetic, and ionizing radiation effects. These consequences are so vast and so com-plex in their interactions that the very life support systems of the planet may be undermined. It is the potential "totalism" of these fearful weapons, the boundlessness of their likely impact on global life, that distinguishes them from other modern devices of mass destruction. This is what also confers upon them a virtually religious status. A second functional characteristic of religion is ultimacy: whatever is acknowledged finally as affecting our deepest weal or woe and on which we accordingly lavish our utmost loyalties. In expounding on the First Commandment, Martin Luther put it bluntly: "a god is that to which we look for all good and where we resort for help in every time of need: to have a god is simply to trust and believe in one with our whole heart. . . . Now, I say, whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God. . . ."' Luther, together with many sixteenth-century Reformers, would insist that if the heart clings to a misplaced absolute, the resulting idolatry not only is expressed in false beliefs but also a false heart. Calvin would add that the true knowledge of God and the true knowledge of humanity are closely related. The converse would be that idolatry and an existence in estrangement are corollaries, that worship of false gods both expresses and reinforces the distortion of human life. The Old Testament, for instance, is keenly aware of this mutuality in fallenness. Not only are idols merely human artifacts of lifeless metal or stone, but "their makers grow to be like them, and so do all who trust in them" (Ps. 115:8, NEB; see Isa. 44:9-20). False ultimates exact a heavy cost indeed on the lives of their proponents!6 FACING THE NUCLEAR HERESY NUCLEARISM AS A RELIGION 7 Paul Tillich took up this functional characteristic in his well known definition of religion as "ultimate concern."