(ACNS) The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, currently visiting the Anglican Church in Japan, today took part in an Act of Remembrance at the epicentre of the atomic bomb blast in Nagasaki. During the Act of Remembrance, Dr Williams laid flowers at the memorial and spoke about the pressing importance of working for a world free from nuclear weapons:
“There are no victories in human history without their element of tragedy. Victory in human affairs always means that someone has lost …sometimes the victory has been gained at the price of such violence that we have to say that everyone has lost. Those who have won the conflict have lost some dimension of their own life, their own welfare and integrity.”
“To see the effects of the use of the atomic bomb here in Nagasaki is to see how this degree of slaughter and violence leaves everyone defeated. The wholesale killing of the innocent and the destruction of an entire environment, natural as well as cultural, the long-term effects, physical and psychological, on those who survived – all of this constitutes a would that affects the attackers as well as the victims.”
Because conventional incindararies are so much more humane than atomic bombs. Why doesn’t the firebombing of Tokyo and the rest of Japan get half the attention that Hiroshima and Nagasaki get? Why don’t people gather around on the island of Melos and talk about a world free of swords and spears?
The problem isn’t so much nuclear arms, or guns, as Original Sin.
How nice. He wants to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Maybe all the nations of the world could pinky-swear, cross their hearts and hope to die, that they will not possess them. But wait! Let’s just get rid of armies while we are at it! Why stop half way? We can build a world of peace and harmony without weapons or war!
Back in the real world … this is the thing about nuclear weapons. They allow a nation to directly achieve strategic objectives. A nation doesn’t need to defeat the other nations’ military to impose its will. It can go ‘over’ the enemy’s military, or obliterate it at will. So if Nation A has nukes, and Nation B doesn’t, Nation A wins. People who run nations haven’t failed to notice that equation. And that’s why nuclear weapons are never going away unless and until they get obsoleted by something more effective. It is simply too dangerous not to possess them in a world where the knowledge to build them exists.
More to the point, nuclear weapons make a nation invulnerable to reprisal in the real world. This was the primary lesson that Saddam Hussein took away from Gulf War I. If he had possessed nuclear weapons when he invaded Kuwait, he would be the regional hegemon right now. It would have been too risky for the US to act as it did in 1991. And the Arab/Israeli balance of power would be drastically shifted. Again, nations do not fail to notice these things.
This idea is just ignorance that indulges the fantasies of intellectuals who attend learned conferences and chatter amongst themselves about great plans to re-make the world as if they had influence and power to do so. They might as well try to rid the world of death.
carl
I agree with everything AA just said.
Aside from that, though, I’ll admit to getting tired watching various prelates expend enormous energies solemnly discussing issues that are not their primary business, energies that could be directed towards tremendous crises that ARE their business. It’s a bit like a Manhattan firefighter on the evening of 9/11 taking time to go on a march for the ending of harp seal slaughter or the raising of the minimum wage. Or Abraham Lincoln in 1863 taking time to go on a world tour to speak on behalf of women’s suffrage. Nobody would question that, if the man didn’t have other business to attend to, his heart might be in the right place. But given the obvious and pressing reality of the Twin Towers or Gettysburg, one would be hard pressed to interpret the fellow’s actions as anything but a desire to escape from his real responsibility, or to, like a squid squirting out a cloud of ink, hide his blunders and inactivity in a passionate cloud of rhetoric about Japan, or Wall Street, or whatever.
A world where the one-eyed man will rule the land of the blind.
[i]Kermit as Capt. Smallett (unarmed):[/i]
Actually, I never believed that violence solved anything.
[i]Long John Silver (sword point at Kermit’s throat):[/i]
Allow me to disagree.
[i](Muppet Treasure Island)[/i]
If the civilized nations of the world gives up nuclear weapons, they will be at the mercy of any uncivilized nation who gains even one.
Jim Elliott
It does occur to me to pop in the comment that the Archbishop is only trying to heed the great Karl Barth who reckoned atomic warfare should be [i]status confessionis[/i] for the Church. I fancy he had a point …
I expect this is written in the context of his visit to Japan where, perhaps understandably, there are sensitivities on the subject.
He is right on the use of nuclear weapons, they are an abomination. But the threat of the use of them throughout my cold-war childhood is I believe what kept us safe, when with only conventional weapons there would probably have been war and invasion, perhaps in Europe. I don’t expect the Archbishop would agree with me on that.
Strangely, although we now feel safer with developments with the Iron and Bamboo curtains, the reality is that with the spread of the technology, that things have probably never been more dangerous.