¹ On NuclearDeterrence: the Correspondence of Sir Michael Quinlan edited by Ogilvie-White, Tanya (IISS, London, September 2011)Google Scholar

² He was an indefatigable correspondent with all sorts of people, from top generals and civil servants to lowly citizens who were worried by the UK government's devotion to nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence. I should perhaps make clear that I was one of the latter.

³ This is why Tanya Ogilvie-White, an international relations lecturer from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, who has been associated with the IISS, was asked to edit the mass of documents which MQ had immaculately filed at home in his spare time. She has chosen a representative sample of the letters for publication, with an expert commentary on the topics, the people and the policies discussed in them. On Nuclear Deterrence is divided into three main parts: I The Logic and Morality of Nuclear Deterrence; II Strategic Decisions: LRTNF and Trident, and III: Arms Control and Disarmament.

⁴ Hence the editor has concentrated on the years up to 1992, when written letters were MQ's predominant form of communication with his supporters and his detractors.

⁵ I myself joined PAX in the late 1950s, alongside Stan Windass, when it held annual meetings at Spode House, next door to Hawkesyard Priory where Dominican students such as Herbert McCabe, Lawrence Bright and Timother Radcliffe were studying. PAX joined with the continental Pax Christi movement in the 1970s under my chairmanship.

⁶ see Chapter 7 of her Collected Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3 (Blackwell's, Oxford, 1981)Google Scholar. Her ground-breaking book on Intention (1957) grew out of this controversy over nuclear weapons.

⁷ Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience (Merlin Press, London, 1961)Google Scholar was a key contribution to the debate before the second Vatican Council. Elizabeth Anscombe's essay in it is reprinted in Volume 3 of her Collected Papers, pp. 51–61. MQ's correspondence with Walter Stein was long and complex, but the editor has managed to include some important excerpts from it in her selection.

⁸ This was one of his objections to the statement put out by the American Catholic bishops in 1983, which forbade the use of nuclear weapons but suggested that possession of them for deterring others was licit. He took great pains to convince Cardinal Hume in Britain not to go along with this suggestion, even if this meant that the UK bishops’ conference should sit on the fence about the issue – which they duly did and are still doing, despite the strongly anti-nuclear stance of the Vatican since the end of the cold war.

⁹ Sometimes people claim that against the evil action of dropping the bomb on a target including innocents we can and should balance the good action of preventing war by deterrence. For an obvious example of this argument see Hughes, G. SJ in The Cross and the Bomb (Oxford, Mowbrays, 1983)Google Scholar. But the argument is clearly fallacious, since preventing war is not an action at all but is only a purpose or result of some actions we do. This is why I cannot be commanded to prevent war in the sense in which I can be commanded to drop the bomb. And the goodness or badness of deterrence is about the actions involved (such as dropping the bomb), not about our purposes in acting. This is not always a distinction MQ observed. For example in Thinking About Nuclear Weapons (his farewell thoughts on the matter, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 48Google Scholar) he writes ‘“innocents” must not be made the object of deliberate attack … and by “deliberate” attack is meant attack in which the harm to non-combatants is positively desired and purposed’. But the issue is not that attacking innocents is our desire or purpose, but that it is our intention.

¹⁰ Blackfriars No. 516, June 1963.

¹¹ But he did begin to do so, notably in an article in the IISS's Survival (Vol. 49 No. 4, Winter 2007–08) called Abolishing Nuclear Armouries: Policy or Pipe Dream? and in Part IV of Thinking About Nuclear Weapons. Since then further work has been conducted by many others, not only at the IISS but elsewhere as well.

¹² In a paper on ‘False Gods’, part of which is included below. I also discussed some of the same themes in my contribution to Language, Meaning and God: Essays in Honour of Herbert McCabe OP (Geoffrey Chapman, London, 1987 pp. 190–208Google Scholar).

¹³ London, Penguin Books 2002.

¹⁴ As the Roman eucharistic prayer III says: ‘grant that we, who are nourished by the Body and Blood of your Son and filled with the Holy Spirit, may become one body, one spirit in Christ’.

¹⁵ For a brief summary of the Christian approach to sovereign state powers in the New Testament see Herbert McCabe OP in Render to Caesar, chapter 22 of his God, Christ and Us (edited by Brian Davies OP, London, Continuum, 2003). Of course, by refusing to collaborate with either the Roman colonial power or the nationalist aspirations of the Pharisees Jesus is bound to be killed by one side or the other in the ensuing conflict.

¹⁶ Just War by Guthrie, Charles and Quinlan, Michael (London, Bloomsbury 2007)Google Scholar

¹⁷ In his books the Shield of Achilles and Terror and Consent (London, Penguin Books, 2002 and 2008) Philip Bobbitt persuasively argues that for the twenty-first century this is no longer the case See also The End of Sovereignty by Camilleri, Joseph and Falk, Jim (Edward Elgar, Aldershot, 1992)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Leviathan, Part 1, Chapter 17

¹⁹ The common good of all is a constant theme of papal pronouncements in international affairs. Cf. the recent statement of Benedict VI to the newly-appointed US ambassador to the Holy See, February 29^th 2008, and his speech to the United Nations, 18^th April 2008.

²⁰ This is what happened in the case of British buckling under a Saudi threat to break off intelligence co-operation about suspected terrorists because of an unwelcome Serious Fraud Office investigation into the alleged bribery of a key Saudi official by the arms manufacturer BAE. The enquiry was halted on the ground that the Saudi threat could undermine ‘the UK's global counter-terrorist strategy’ and endanger ‘British lives on British streets’. The challenge to the rule of law and of the independence of the judiciary, which were implicit in halting the enquiry (a decision taken without reference to the likely global repercussions of undermining the rule of law) was issued because of perceived risks to the ‘UK's national and international security’. In other words state security trumped the rule of law in this case.

²¹ It is worth noting that one of the few times when there was some hint – we cannot here escape dreaming the dream of the Eumenides– of a post-nuclear world, when the victorious powers discussed the ‘Baruch’ plan of 1946 for internationalising and thence eliminating nuclear weapons, the hope was crushed by the two main characters, the USA and the USSR. They could not overcome their belief in their own false ‘divinity’ which had created the insoluble conundrum in the first place. Much the same has to be said about the failed attempt by Reagan and Gorbachev at Reykjavik in 1986 to do something similar. And the same is likely to happen with the initiative by Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, Sam Nunn, William Perry and others, for the nuclear powers to get rid of their nuclear weapons before things get much worse. Of course, if per impossibile their initiative were to be successful, this would mark the beginning of a new phase of history.

²² On this see Ken Booth, Trident Replacement or International Trust Building?; and also Booth, Ken and Barnaby, Frank, The Future of Britain's Nuclear Weapons (Oxford, Oxford Research Group, March 2006)Google Scholar; Booth, Ken, Theory of World Security (Cambridge University Press 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Booth, Ken and Wheeler, Nicholas J., The Security Dilemma: Fear, Cooperation and Trust in World Politics (Houndmills, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008)Google Scholar.

²³ Its likely consequences, including mass-migration without regard for national frontiers of people from inundated lands, simply exemplify the fragility of the ‘sovereign’ state system

²⁴ The Pope made the essential point in his speech to the UN on 18^th April 2008. Gordon Brown of the UK has said much the same: ‘For the first time in history we have the opportunity to come together around a global covenant, to reframe the international architecture and build a truly global society’. It is worth noting here that during local elections in the UK the Labour Party was heavily defeated partly because of complaints from voters about rising global food and fuel prices: issues which the electorate has yet to understand are practically beyond the power of any sovereign state government to control.

²⁵ Although it will seem ungracious to say so, at this point I must regretfully conclude that the concept of a bishop who is a servant of a state-established institution is a theological contradiction in terms. This is one reason why I had to abandon membership of the ‘Church of England’ many years ago.

²⁶ Some of this pressure was doubtless subjective, simply coming from the fact that the bishops were also loyal citizens of their state. But in other cases, as with the US bishops’ pastoral letter The Challenge of Peace it also came from spokesmen for the government who were invited to give their views to the drafting committee of bishops.

²⁷ On this see my pamphlet Nuclear Weapons: What Does The Church Teach? (London, Catholic Truth Society, 1985)Google Scholar and my unpublished dissertation for Kings College, London which updated it to 1989.

²⁸ Of course, since the 1980s papal teaching about nuclear weapons has changed drastically, so that Benedict IV's new year statement for 2008 called nuclear policies ‘baneful and fallacious’.

²⁹ This is a phrase coined by Professor Paul Rogers of Bradford University to name the strategy by the most powerful states of keeping the ‘lid’ on conflicts by the threat or use of force.

³⁰ In so far as the revelation of the Qur’an, committed as it is to monotheism, also rejects intentionally killing the innocent (v. Qur’an 2:190–95 and the comments of M.A.S. Abdel Haleem in the Introduction of his translation, Oxford University Press 2004, pp. xxii-xxiv), Islam too must divest itself of association with the polytheism of state powers.