Jonathan Gorry. Cold War Christians and the Spectre of Nuclear Deterrence, 1945–1959.

Abstract

Through much of the Cold War, the threat to use nuclear weapons was implicit, and sometimes explicit. And yet those weapons have never been fired in anger since Nagasaki. A so-called nuclear taboo took hold, a habit of nuclear non-use that has, so far, become entrenched and strengthened into a self-imposed prohibition and stigmatization of the use of nuclear weapons. But that was by no means preordained. During much of the period covered by this book, mainstream political figures were insisting that nuclear weapons should be used just like any other weapons of war. Today, the author writes, the use of nuclear weapons has become “practically unthinkable” (p. 1). The explanations for why that has happened vary. Has it been purely a matter of realist self-interest derived from the fear of retaliation? Has morality factored prominently in denuclearization? In Cold War Christians and the Spectre of Nuclear Deterrence, 1945–1959, Jonathan Gorry sets out to examine how Christians reacted to and influenced the nuclear age during the formative years of the nuclear taboo from the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 through 1959. The book's main aim is “to explore Christian understandings of ethical citizenship in a nuclear context” (p. 12). The opening chapters trace the origins of the Christian presumption against war, the development of the notion of just war, and the forming of international Christian coalitions ready to confront the kind of global challenges raised by the tumult in Europe in the early twentieth century.