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| Moral aspects of military action | |
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| Topic Started: Friday, 10. June 2011, 17:51 (2,015 Views) | |
| valleyboy | Monday, 23. July 2012, 21:25 Post #136 |
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Wars are now largely by proxy away from the European landmass, the Balkans not withstanding. I can envisage no situation where pressing the red button would be the Christian thing to do, so why have them if there are no conditions in which using them is appropriate? |
| Liberal, ecumenical, universal and it's my church too. | |
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| Rose of York | Monday, 23. July 2012, 21:56 Post #137 |
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During the Cold War there was no war on the European landmass, precisely because the Royal Air Force and the United States armed forces had nuclear weapons. Leaders of the Soviet Bloc knew that to launch a nuclear war against the West would lead to destruction of their own territory. We were defended by possession of the weapons, not their use. If we had unilaterally disarmed, we would have been sitting ducks, liable to be wiped out by nuclear weapons. It all boils down to common sense. If I were rich, in a country that has no effective policing, a gangster with a gun could break in and take all I have, unless I have an equally effective gun, therefore I would have one as a deterrent. A thug with reasonable intelligence attacks a weaker person, not somebody stronger than him or her self. |
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Keep the Faith! | |
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| Penfold | Monday, 23. July 2012, 22:09 Post #138 |
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During the Cold war there was a thin excuse of deterrent that did contribute to the stability of Europe, though to call it peace is stretching a point and outside Europe the wars continued in, India v Pakistan, Israel v well off and on all her neighbours, Vietnam, Korea, Malaya, and a host of others so were was there peace preserved. Nuclear weapons have no part in maintaining peace in the modern world, believe me far to many victims of your so called preserved peace have their names inscribed at the National Arboretum over 15000 and rising, and that is just a list of the UK dead. The cold war balance of power has long gone the only reason for maintaining nuclear weapons is political and even that is a very expensive bluff, their is no situation were their use could be deemed a proportionate response, revenge is not a morale justification. There is no Morale or military justification for retaining Nuclear weapons in UK. |
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| Penfold | Monday, 23. July 2012, 22:13 Post #139 |
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With their latest threat Syria have perhaps confirmed what became of the Chemical and Biological weapons once possessed by Saddam Hussain. It was long suspected could we now have the proof needed, please God we do not get confirmation by reviewing the body count. |
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| Mairtin | Tuesday, 24. July 2012, 09:27 Post #140 |
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I note the word "unarmed" in there which changes the context a bit but I still can't imagine Him leading such a band even to liberate Auschwitz; if He had desired to liberate Auschwitz, He could have done so at any time with a simple wave of His hand. We defend violence on the basis of our responsibility to defend and protect other people but God stood back and let His son suffer extreme violence, betrayal and public humiliation. Jesus also allowed His mother to stand at the foot of the cross and suffer the unimaginable pain of watching this all happen to her beloved son.
Ditto.
I sometimes wonder if it is a case of the answers being complex or just a case of the simple answers being unpalatable. |
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| valleyboy | Tuesday, 24. July 2012, 09:36 Post #141 |
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Almost certainly the latter. |
| Liberal, ecumenical, universal and it's my church too. | |
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| paul | Tuesday, 24. July 2012, 16:32 Post #142 |
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I have to disagree with Penfold, sorry old chap. A maniac like Hitler would have used the bomb if we allowed him to produce one. We now have other hotheds developing a nucleur bomb (not admitted). Countries like Israel will not stand back and allow it to happen. I will not gamble on my country's security. There will always be wars, for whatever reasons, history proves it. What we don't want is anihialation by using the bomb. Nobody has been hurt by the UK having a nucleur deterrant and nobody has threatened us with a nucleur attack- yet! |
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| Penfold | Tuesday, 24. July 2012, 17:28 Post #143 |
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I have no doubt that Hitler would have used the atomic bomb, just as we did. The point is that we took every possible conventional step to stop its development and as late as March 1945 were still chasing V2 launch platforms. However this is not relevant to the current situation. The people currently developing nuclear weapons don't care if they are destroyed in the process. In 2003 we bombed Baghdad and because of a ruse by Saddam ended up bombing a command bunker that was being used by civilians at the time, an accident of war but what if we had used a nuclear weapon as the Israelis were threatening to do. The cold war, and the MAD principle worked because all sides involved knew the rules and abided by them, but it came very close on several occasions to being seriously overheated, the Cuban Crisis is famous and resulted in the famous hotline, however their were several other incidents even up to and as recently as 1995. I can not give any detail for these are still secret, though from public source check out http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/nuclear-false-alarms.html http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issues/accidents/20-mishaps-maybe-caused-nuclear-war.htm Dr Strangelove gave an interesting account of how things could go wrong, but the better film is Fail Safe staring Henry Fonda Setting aside the possibility of accidents, false intelligence, ruses and misdirection by the enemy if you dare that still leaves the moral issue of proportionality. Conventional weapons and precision guidance systems are such that we no longer have to rely on the crude carpet bombing of the 1940s to take out strategic targets. We can take out a person in a restaurant from 1000s of miles away but if that rocket is deflected we will take out a block of flats or a school, a risk we take every day in Afghanistan and over 90%. of the time get it spot on. Nuclear weapons are crude and indiscriminate, their use as a deterrent in modern warfare is no longer valid. More worrying is the threat of Biological weapons and much research is being done to counter the effects of such weapons but sadly so is a lot begin done to research their development. Governments are not pumping billions of dollars into stem cell research so that we can have designer babies or cure genetic ailments, they are looking for targeted weapons systems that will enable genocide, but perhaps I am to cynical. The simple truth is that a terrorist will make a dirty bomb and explode it in a city, the only way to prevent that is not by having a bigger bomb to blow up his village afterwards it is to invest in intelligence gathering and analysis and have a robust legal system to allow for prosecution and justice. Locking people up in boiler suits in Cuba is condemned as a moral outrage and rightly so, but to bring terrorists to a just trial is a very tricky thing for the evidence is often obtained in a manner that would not comply with PACE. But then I suppose if you are willing to threaten people with a nuclear bomb you probably have little worries about bashing a prisoner with a big stick. I defended the nuclear deterrent and advocated Multi-lateral Disarmament well into the 1990s but I have come to recognise that since the end of the Cold War there is no justification for the UK to retain Nuclear weapons. And this is the same conclusion arrived at by a former Chief of the Defence Staff Lord Bramel and several other senior military officials. As for no one being hurt by the UK having a Nuclear deterrent, check out the state of the Conventional forces in the British armed forces and the state of many other areas of the Public sector, £20billion (the cost of tridents replacement) could be far better spent and the quality of many peoples lives greatly enhanced. And we would be better able to provide the conventional forces and maintain our intelligence network. Edited by Penfold, Tuesday, 24. July 2012, 17:56.
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| valleyboy | Tuesday, 24. July 2012, 17:52 Post #144 |
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That's true, hence my 'controversial' scenario of whether a retaliatory strike would be in order if missiles were heading our way. I would suggest not, as a human being and a Christian, because killing a hundred million people instead of fifty million of one's compatriots would solve nothing and we wouldn't even be round long enough to enjoy the irony. That being the case the sensible thing is to spend the nuclear billions on health care and alleviating poverty. In any case, a mock silo is quite as effective a deterrent as one full of atomic weapons, and considerably cheaper. |
| Liberal, ecumenical, universal and it's my church too. | |
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8:37 PM Jul 11