In Spring 1963 the British Council of Churches appointed a Working Group ‘to study, as a matter of urgency, the question of Britain’s continued possession of an independent nuclear deterrent’. The group (which included a Catholic observer, Father Corbishley, s.j.) reported back to the Council that ‘there is no case for independent nuclear action—that is, without prior consultation with our allies—in any part of the world’, and the Council of Churches endorsed the report in a resolution of October 16th, 1963. The Resolution, together with the Working Group’s Report, forms a document of considerable importance.

Although it must be said that, like previous similar documents, such as The Valley of Decision (1961), The British Nuclear Deterrent fails to maintain its grip at the most decisive levels, it is a serious expression of concern, and its well-informed respect for the strategic and political realities of our situation is particularly striking after the endless hypothetical abstractions that still disable so much Catholic thinking in this field. One can only heave a sigh of gratitude when one reads that ‘the Churches are bound to bear witness’ where one’s nation ‘is prepared to annihilate vast populations in another country’ and that ‘our concern is to find God’s will in this given situation—the will of a God of whom it may not be said that He does certain things in general but nothing in particular’.