No problem facing contemporary world leaders tests political intelligence and moral imagination more severely than the issue of nuclear weapons. The awesome question of what is a viable armaments policy perplexes men no less in 1960 than it did in 1945. What are responsible governments to do with instruments of lethal destruction? What programs can international institutions devise that will broaden the narrow spectrum of security that nations have enjoyed since World War II? Who is prepared to gamble on another's restraint with the growing stockpiles of ever more deadly weapons that nations possess?

If there is no security in national weakness can states find safety in national strength? If so, what has happened to criteria of national power when thermonuclear devices can in fatal strikes wipe out whole populations, armies and industrial potentials?

In “Morality and Foreign Policy” a distinguished Catholic theologian has raised a series of important issues that trouble him in the writings of political realists. Father John Courtney Murray should realize, however, that those he attacks are deeply troubled by many of the same issues. Unhappily, he falls prey early in his analysis to the very polemics he attributes to authors of “the new morality.“

Thus Father Murray concentrates his attack on what he calls “an intramural argument going on within the Protestant community.” This ignores a rich body of contemporary Catholic writing which is central to the tradition he is criticizing. The editors of The Review of Politics, for example, stand in the forefront of fulltime Catholic writers on international morality and they have their European counterparts.

The problem of force in international society comes to life most dramatically in connection with planning for national security. International law and organization have attempted to diminish and control recourse to force by individual states on behalf of their pretended national interests. But these efforts have been, on the whole, rather unsuccessful except when they rested solidly on mutual advantage and fear of retaliation.

International law and organization have been especially unsuccessful in replacing national systems of security with an effective international security system in an age characterized by nuclear weapons and the comparatively permanent threat of Communist aggression. The resultant “fearful choice” may be expressed in the language of international ethics in the following way: The basic national interests of the states of the free world must be defended against Communism which would destroy those interests.

For the past several years a campaign of propaganda has been gaining momentum to influence international, national, and personal opinion in favor of birth prevention programs. The vehicle for this propaganda is the recently coined terror technique phrase, “population explosion.” The phrase, indeed, alerts all to the attention that must be given to population pressures, but it also provides a smoke screen behind which a moral evil may be foisted on the public and for obscuring the many factors that must be considered in this vital question.

I take it as axiomatic that any battle between armies, if it is going to be fought at all and thus won or lost, must be fought upon a common field of battle. And if this holds true for battles it holds equally true for debates upon fundamental spiritual absolutes: unless the theoretical grounds are common to both parties argument is futile. Precisely because of this, debate is often futile in our time because agreement upon fundamentals is rarely possible within a world as. badly fissioned spiritually as is our own. It is of ten,'better to retire from the game than merely go through the motions mechanically, scoring debater's points and winning empty victories due to a superiority in dialectical skills.

I think it is one of W. H. Auden's poems that contains the most crushing indictment of that peculiar social phenomenon of our times—the clamorous demand for bigger, better and more exciting news: “Give us this day our daily news,” he wrote. Today, the U-2 incident, the Cupan situation, the election at home, and the crisis in South Africa all elbow one another in and out of the headlines to distract us from die burden of day-to-day living. In the routine of these hypnotizing comings and goings, certain issues become inevitably obscured, important aspects are ignored, and fundamental principles utterly lost.

There are a host of issues facing us today which pose an ethical problem in the field of foreign policy. What kind of international order will prevail in the future? Will it be one compatible with ideas, principles, and political structures such as those we enjoy in the United States while offering a place within that structure to Communist states? Or will it be an international structure designed by and compatible with the objectives of the Communist states while offering a possibility of coexistence to us and to other states similarly organized?

Under what types of circumstances, if any, should we continue nuclear tests? Under what circumstances, if any, should we actually use nuclear weapons? Under what circumstances, if any, should we use nuclear weapons to enforce our views of what is just and equitable in the relations between nations? Under what circumstances, if any, should we use firm measures to keep our allies from engaging“ in unjust or imprudent actions?

In his reply to Philip Toynbee's passionate plea that capitulation now would be better than mutual nuclear destruction, printed along with other essays in The Fearful Choice, the Most Reverend Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, stated that “for all I know it is within the providence of God that the human race should destroy itself in this manner. There is no evidence that the human race is to last for ever and plenty of Scripture to the contrary effect.“

At no time before has there been such a need to clarify the purposes and meanings of American diplomacy. The survival of our nation, and of the broader civilization of which it is a part, depends in large measure upon the skills and arts of diplomacy— upon constant negotiation and communication both with the totalitarian world and with the rest of the free world. For a long time to come we must reassess the adequacy of the took of our foreign policy, measuring them against the complex tasks which they must perform, and the great goals toward which they should be directed.

The supranational ordering of atomic power is the indispensable precondition for survival, but it tells us nothing about the purpose for which we want to survive. And while this problem has been the object of protracted negotiations, the United States, as the leading nation of the non-Communist world, was called upon to act as though that problem were on the way to solution, as though mankind and, more particularly, Western civilization would survive, and to fashion out of its power and leadership a common purpose for the whole non-Communist world.

The United States was expected to use its predominant power on behalf of the purpose that would be not only its own but also one in which the non- Communist world could recognize its distinct character and in whose achievement it could experience a common destiny.

John Courtney Murray's writing cannot fail to be profound and instructive, and I have profited greatly from it in the course of the past decade. But I must confess that his article, "Morality and Foreign Policy" (Worldview, May), leaves me in a strange confusion of mixed feelings. On the one hand, I can sympathize with what I might call the historical intention of the natural law philosophy he espouses, which I take to be the effort to establish enduring structures of meaning and value to serve as fixed points of moral decision in the complexities of the actual situation. On the other hand, I am rather put off by the calm assurance he exhibits when he deals with these matters, as though everything were at bottom unequivocally rational and unequivocally accessible to the rational mind. And I am really distressed at what seems to 3ie to be his woefully inadequate appreciation of the position of the "ambiguists," among whom I cannot deny I count myself.

In this country we are fond of polling the public to find out what it thinks about practically any given subject. We have thousands of polls about foreign policy, and the public is ever ready to express attitudes on any question, no matter how complex, about which it might be asked. It is even ready, apparently, to express its convictions on problems which do not exist. One poller, for example, conducted a survey on the public attitude toward the “Metallic Metals Act.” He found that a good sixty percent of the public had an opinion about this act and a majority of them were in favor of it—even though the “act” existed only in the poller's imagination.

An unbridgeable gulf separates the demands of Christian ethics from the way man is compelled by his natural aspirations to act. That conflict is foreordained by the nature of Christian ethics and the nature of man. Christian ethics demands love, humility, the abnegation of self; man as a natural creature seeks the aggrandizement of self through pride and power. It is the tragedy of man that he is incapable, by dint of his nature, to do what Christian ethics demands of him.