Nuclear Weapons and the Battle over Christmas

You know how NORAD every year does the fake alert about incoming flying objects that instead of bombers and missiles from Russia turn out to be a sleigh and 8 reindeer and we all chuckle? Well Christmas and Nuclear Weapons are linking up in a slightly more serious vein this year.

We may all think that the threat of Nuclear War is a dim nightmare from the 1980s and that our biggest concerns are rogue states such as North Korea and Iran but the reality is that the world is filled with weapons of mass destruction despite President Barack Obama’s declaration that he wants to see a world without the bomb. Earlier this year on the 65^th Anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Pope said the “experience in Japan should remind the world of the need to find political solutions to international problems, and of the need to halt the spread of nuclear weapons.”

All of the moral and strategic arguments about Nuclear War have landed in the United States Senate this week as debate over the START treaty got underway. The U.S. Bishops and most of America’s leading Evangelical clerics have long been onside with the idea of getting the START Treaty in place. Bishop Howard J. Hubbard of the USCCB put the Catholic case starkly “Nuclear war is rejected in Church teaching because nuclear weapons cannot insure non-combatant immunity and their awesome destructive power and lingering radiation cannot be meaningfully proportionate” and Leith Anderson, President of the National Association of Evangelicals was equally blunt “In the long and tragic history of human warfare the nuclear weapon occupies a singular position due to the scope and scale of its terrible and indiscriminate power to destroy human life. Evangelicals strongly believe in the sanctity of life.”

Opponents of the new START treaty engaged in what might be the ultimate in chutzpah when they objected to making the Senate work during the Christmas Break alleging that to do so was to violate the true meaning of Christmas. Religious Leaders were not amused. Stephen Schneck, Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America lashed out at the Senators saying “Working men and women are at their jobs in this holy season---before Christmas, after Christmas, and for some even on Christmas Day. I'm convinced the Christ Child specially blesses those first responders, military personnel, health care providers, and other emergency workers who spend His birthday in service to others. Senators, truly honor Christians. Stay at your desks until this work to which you have been called is resolved”.

By Thursday debate was underway, it remains to be seen whether the Bishops and the National Association of Evangelicals will get their Christmas present.