Calvinism for a Nuclear Age

Introduction^[1]

Abraham Kuyper never had to worry about developing a Calvinistic doctrine^[2] of nuclear deterrence. On his death in 1920, it would still be another quarter century before the world would learn about the terrible power of these atomic weapons of mass destruction. A great deal changed between November 8, 1920, and August 6, 1945, not least that the Great War—the “war to end all wars”—which Kuyper so bitterly lamented in his twilight years, would gain a horrifying and apocalyptic sequel, from which (this time) not even his beloved home country would be spared. And yet, while Kuyper the man has passed into history, his disciples and his legacy live on. What, one wonders, would Kuyper say today? How would his Calvinism help us understand and practice geopolitics on the nuclear question?

This is a question we cannot put to Kuyper or his sprawling literature directly. Kuyper died long before the nuclear question could be put to the world. We could go to latter-day Neocalvinists to answer the question. Jim Skillen, for example, when he opened the Association for Public Justice office in 1982 authored a policy paper on “Just Defense” against nuclear weapons. In Skillen’s 1981 book, International Politics and the Demand for Global Justice, he argues that the existential threat of nuclear weapons may distract us from the underlying security dilemmas, especially humanitarian catastrophes, that may induce their use. “No equitable, long-term resolution of problems relating to nuclear weapons is possible without the resolution of more fundamental international conflicts and injustices,” he writes.

Skillen continues:

SALT [Strategic Arms Limitation Talks] talks can be carried on decade after decade, but as long as the participants in such discussions are powerful self-seeking states assuming some sort of national self-interest as the chief aim of their foreign policies, there will be no reprieve from Hobbesian fear on all sides. (1981)

In his Thine is the Kingdom, Neocalvinist Paul Marshall argues a simple “no” to waging nuclear war: “It is impossible for any nuclear exchange to meet the just war criteria we have outlined” (1986, 129–30). But that, he says, is different from a doctrine of nuclear deterrence, which Christians should “at this time, support” (Marshall 1986, 133).

We could do much worse than to default to these Neocalvinistic luminaries on such a complex question, but in this article I want to review these arguments in light of current events. These Cold War and post-Cold War arguments are rigorous and Calvinistic, but they are also not delivered for the multipolar geopolitics of the twenty-first century. When Skillen wrote, the world was locked into a bipolar struggle; when Marshall wrote, the world was shortly to enjoy a “unipolar moment.”^[3] We are increasingly moving toward a truly multipolar arrangement, in which it is clear that statecraft will need to adjust not to the rise of merely one power but to the rise of several. In nuclear terms, we are entering a realm of theoretical abstraction because a world has never existed in which multiple great powers command rival nuclear arsenals. We are venturing into the unknown.^[4]

In other words, this is a good time to refresh a Calvinistic perspective on nuclear weapons even if, in fundamental terms, it may borrow or resonate with much of what Kuyper’s Neocalvinistic heirs have argued before. This article proposes to do this in three broad arguments.

First, inspired by the recent work of Derek Schuurman, our first question must be to ask What is a nuclear weapon? While the answer to this can be technical, and there will be some technicalities, I will argue that in a more fundamental way, a nuclear weapon is a technology; it is a system. And so it requires the kind of careful architectonic critique for which Neocalvinism is so well suited. Second, I want to reconsider the tradition of just war and the role of nuclear weapons within it. It is clear to me that Neocalvinism broadly finds itself in the Augustinian-Calvinist just war tradition,^[5] and as a tradition of theological and philosophical reflection on war, it is especially relevant to see how a Neocalvinist analysis of nuclear weapons fits that framework for war and its ends. Finally, and in the third place, I want to consider the Calvinistic dilemma of nuclear deterrence and human depravity.

My final conclusion is that the doctrine of nuclear deterrence often depends on a kind of naïve presumption of technological neutrality, a threateningly instrumentalist ethic of war, and a kind of mechanical and material self-interest, a predictive model for human political and social action that is rooted in a dangerously misleading anthropology. Despite this, and contrary to the developing theology of other major Christian traditions,^[6] I will draw out what I believe is a consistent Calvinistic nuclear doctrine: a no-first strike, qualified deterrence. Ultimately, what I find is a confirmation that the careful work of a prior generation of Neocalvinists, especially Skillen and Marshall, is remarkably preserved for the present age.

Do Artifacts Have Politics?^[7] An Architectonic Critique of the Nuclear Bomb

Nearly half a century ago Langdon Winner wrote, “In controversies about technology and society, there is no idea more provocative than the notion that technical things have political qualities” (1980, 121). It is a regular and familiar complaint, especially among people of faith, that any discussion of the moral qualities of systems or technologies is really a discussion about the “users” —about human hearts and human sin. To dedicate, as I am about to, a section to considering the weapon itself in a moral way is a mistake, goes the argument. The weapons themselves are simply tools. We might as well do a moral analysis of a rock formation or a thundercloud; it would be no more relevant than an analysis of a weapon. As the old adage goes, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”

Even remarkably articulate and morally serious scholars like Rebeccah Heinrichs make a version of this argument. She writes, “Nuclear weapons possess no moral agency. The regime leaders in possession or in pursuit of them do” (Heinrichs 2016). She is right, up to a point: moral agency is a special quality of human beings.

But Derek Schuurman’s important book, Shaping a Digital World, would argue that this truth is at best a half-truth and perhaps a more dangerous one for it. Our technologies, our systems, and our institutions, while not possessing moral agency, do have moral qualities. Schuurman argues, “Technology is value laden” (2013, 15). Our technologies may not be agents, but they are not neutral. In a world saturated with new technology, this shorthand has become more obvious in the past few years. Things like social media or cable news are not the origin or root of our political dysfunction, but it is clear they can accelerate, enlarge, and channel it. Our technologies are tools intended for a kind of job, enlarging or enabling some part of our humanity. Schuurman quotes a great scion of technological thinking, Neil Postman:

New technologies alter the structure of our interests: the things we think about. They alter the character of our symbols: the things we think with. And they alter the nature of community: the arena in which thoughts develop. (Schuurman 2013, 15; emphasis original)

This opens for us what Nicholas Wolterstorff argues is a kind of “world-formative” Christian analysis, which is a distinctive feature of Neocalvinism (one which he says it shares with liberation theology):

Liberation theology and neo-Calvinism have similarities that extend beyond the fact that they are both contemporary versions of world-formative Christianity… Both find the culprit in the structure of modern society and the dynamics underlying the structure rather than in acts of individual waywardness. Both offer architectonic analyses of the ills of modern society. (Wolterstorff 2012, 193)

Their inspiration is genuinely Kuyperian: it was Kuyper who (in his essay “On Manual Labor”) called for an “architectonic critique,” the conviction that our moral attention must not only be fixed on human hearts—the work of the physician—but most certainly on the systems and institutions too: the work of the architect (Kuyper [1889] 1998, 231–54).^[8] To invoke such a present-day architect, Desmond Tutu aptly observes, “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”^[9] This is to expound the Calvinism in Neocalvinism: that our modern life calls not only for a gospel that exposes the sin in human hearts—what Calvin called an idol factory—but also for one that exposes waves of human sin as they meet and form in even our best-intentioned institutions, systems, and technologies: an idol industrial complex.

Systems, to therefore repeat the point, are not neutral; they push, prod, enlarge, and channel human agency. Guns—returning to the metaphor—may not have moral agency, but they do have moral design. They are a tool and technology designed with a purpose to enlarge very specific abilities. Hardly anyone needs to be told that introducing guns into a situation changes the situation; it changes the calculations and possibilities of a moment. Depending on the circumstance, it may bend that situation toward justice, but it may also bend that situation toward the possibility of violent injustice. As any tradesman could tell us, the right tool is needed for the right job. We must, therefore, understand our tools and the job. But we must not be so naïve as to imagine our tools are inert, neutral materials whose only moral quality is the use to which human agents put them.

Nuclear weapons, like any technology, are therefore also not neutral. But what, therefore, are nuclear weapons? And what are these presuppositions, these perspectives, that nuclear weapons implicitly offer us? What is the world they make possible, as Schuurman would put it, and what is the world they make almost impossible?

First, nuclear weapons are an invention of human beings out of created reality; they are a technology. They reflect an astonishing breakthrough into an atomic science, one which radically shifted humankind’s understanding of the universe. The process of detonation involves a joining or a splitting of those atoms, which produces extraordinary amounts of heat, light, air pressure, and radiation. The first nuclear bombs were fission reactions; later bombs included a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bombs). Modern-day yields vary, from so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons (ranging from a fraction of a kiloton to 50 kilotons), meant for more discrete battlefield uses or shaping operations, to largescale “strategic” bombs like Tsar Bomba, which tested at 57 megatons of TNT by the Soviets in 1961. Theoretically, much larger bombs could be made (and perhaps have been) but have not been tested.^[10]

The technology, in other words, is a breakthrough. It is a scientific marvel. We might call the atomic breakthrough itself a fundamental affirmation of the creation mandate of learning to rule, subdue, discover, and delight in God’s creation. The Neocalvinist emphasis in particular, on a movement from a Garden to a City, shows an apocalyptic trajectory in which God gathers the marvels of human economic, cultural, and scientific advances to find their place in the new heavens and the new earth. They are broken, as Richard Mouw puts it in his reflections on Isaiah 60, not as a vase but as a horse, repurposed, redirected, toward the truly human and the truly divine (2002, 29).

But second, while Isaiah’s apocalypse might well affirm the good latent in human cultural creativity, his vision is equally clear that the weapons themselves will no longer exist. On First Avenue, across from the United Nations in New York City, sits a small park on which are emblazoned that same prophet’s words, repeated in Micah: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” Politics, power even, may have a role in the New Jerusalem, but weapons do not.

So the nuclear weapon is a kind of technology that, while the science affirms the genius of human cultural obedience, is applied in a form that, theologically, we could only say at its very best is a postlapsarian necessity. It is an intermediary tool which, in its best case, is meant only to restrain evil. Nuclear weapons have no home in the Holy City. But governments do, of course, have swords. That is at least one part of the task of political authority. A nuclear weapon then must be measured in how it fulfills the task of the restraint of evil.

This, interestingly, is the account that the anthropologist Hugh Gusterson gives in his book Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (1996). The question he starts his research with is: How can morally minded Americans participate in the design and construction of weapons of mass of destruction? Embedded in the community of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—the facility that designed the neutron bomb for the MX missile—Gusterson is astonished to find that it is the restraint of evil, specifically, that motivates the scientists and technicians. The logic is classic deterrence theory: the design and construction of ever larger weapons of mass destruction not only secures the United States of America from attack, but also precludes the possibility of large-scale state-to-state warfare. This latter rests not only on the scale of nuclear weapons but also on the guarantee of large-scale reprisal, the premise of mutually assured destruction. Here, the three legs of the nuclear triangle are key to deterrence doctrine: air, land, and sea, the latter being the most essential since submarines operating with nuclear weapons are the most difficult to detect and intercept.^[11] This guarantees second-strike capacity, which further guarantees mutually assured destruction, which finally means war is less, rather than more, likely. Stand aside flower child hippies from Berkeley; the true peace advocates are designing neutron bombs at Livermore laboratories. Gusterson even enjoys Sunday services, including at a local Methodist church whose church sign combines the cross and the atom.

The world nuclear weapons make possible, its enthusiasts insist, is an apocalyptic escalation of destruction that is so unthinkable and so irrational that it paradoxically makes for peace. Lieber and Press in The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution write, “To be clear, nuclear weapons have had a huge impact on international relations by helping to prevent great power war. These weapons are the most effective instrument of deterrence ever created” (2020, 2). In reality, they conclude, “Nuclear weapons have made the world a better place” (Lieber and Press 2020, 130). Such weapons are so terrifying that they transform human conflict as we know it, pushing statecraft into finding other, less destructive means, of resolving the seemingly irresolvable.

Nuclear weapons certainly have been transformative. Even in popular culture, apocalypse—long a fascination of human cultures the world over—shifted into an anthropocentric theme. Generating a world-ending catastrophe had always been the exclusive privilege of God or the gods, but now we, as Oppenheimer famously opined, quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, “have become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

That is transformative technology. Does it live up to its promise of restraint?

This is unclear. The existence of nuclear weapons in their short political history has often served as a very dangerous accelerant. We could think of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union was only narrowly avoided by back-channel diplomacy. We could think of Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces, whose cool head and calm judgment averted a nuclear reprisal from the Soviets after the Soviet satellite system issued a false alarm about a nuclear launch.^[12] One might also consider that Petrov was freshly alert to Soviet false alarms, since just three weeks prior, the Soviet military had shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007, mistaking it for an enemy launch. Accidents, misperceptions, and errors are more common than we would want to imagine, and not only in foreign nuclear regimes. American cases abound (Schlosser 2014). In other words, in a technologically perfect world without malfunctions in machinery, with abundant and clear strategic information, nuclear weapons might make for a safer world.

The problem with cause and effect in live social science experiments, like recent history, is that we cannot rule out the possibility that nuclear escalation has genuinely defused tensions and reduced warfare. It is nearly impossible to prove what would have happened absent the backdrop of mutually assured destruction. But it is equally difficult to prove that nuclear weapons are not dangerous existential gambles that, far from restraining evil, are themselves kept under restraint only by fallible and, in some cases, alarmingly archaic systems in our armed forces. The stakes of the gamble are important: even if we assume nuclear weapons result in fewer or less intense conflicts, the possibility of nuclear escalation is so vastly disproportionate even to those gains, the costs and benefits may not equal out. While we cannot rule out the possibility that nuclear weapons have made for some restraint of evil, some reduction in state-to-state warfare, we also cannot ignore that our machines, our systems of decision-making,^[13] and our political judgments are far from perfect, and what these machines make possible: the end of the world. Such a sword restraining evil may well be real, but it feels more like the Sword of Damocles rather than the sword of Romans 13.

The Ends of War: Just War and the Ethics of Nuclear War

In the first place it bears repeating that the just war tradition generally rules out nuclear war.^[14] This is the majority report of the just war tradition, to which Calvinists (and Neocalvinists) rightly belong. Michael Walzer, in his standard work Just and Unjust Wars, argues that “we threaten evil [nuclear war] in order not to do it, and the doing of it would be so terrible that the threat seems in comparison morally defensible” (1977, 274). He endorses possession for deterrence only reluctantly, largely rejecting their actual use. “Nuclear weapons,” as he concludes, “explode the theory of just war” (Walzer 1977, 282). As we have seen, Walzer’s general conclusion conforms to his Neocalvinist contemporaries, such as Jim Skillen and Paul Marshall.

But although just war theory generally is against nuclear war, it is clearly not a pacifist position. The teachings of just war theory are broadly separated into jus ad bellum and jus in bello, broadly justified reasons to go to war and right conduct within said war. It is in jus in bello, with its critical criteria such as distinctions between combatants and non-combatants, proportionality in means related to legitimate military objectives, military necessity and, especially, non malum in se (no use of means that are intrinsically evil, such as biological war, mass rape, or weapons of mass destruction) that it becomes clear that nuclear war is not an option for Calvinist statecraft.^[15]

The more consistent just war position of the Augustinian-Calvinist is that killing in a just war is not murder, that the soldier does not do evil, and therefore that if nuclear weapons are an evil ruled out by the conduct of a just war, they are not available as a coercive means, regardless of the needs of the war.

Even this may strike the casual observer as a less than distinctive contribution. Writes Paul Marshall,

It may be responded that a refusal to engage in nuclear war may be clearly Christian but that such a position is not really relevant to our present disputes. After all—there is nobody who is in favour of nuclear war! But a refusal to engage in nuclear conflict does have some bite. It asserts that nuclear conflict cannot be used to achieve political goals, and this at least cuts out certain Pentagon Generals and Soviet Marshals. Further, a refusal of nuclear war means that one cannot plan to win such a war—and this contradicts much of current United States nuclear policy… It requires us to oppose certain overall trends in western, and of course eastern, nuclear planning. The realisation that we must avoid nuclear war means that it is impossible for any Christian to accept a ‘first-strike’ nuclear policy. (Marshall 1986, 130)

Herbert Butterfield, an Augustinian-Christian Realist across the channel from Dutch Neocalvinism, makes the point most directly.^[16] Any just war must aim at a just peace (a sometimes referred to third category of jus post bellum); it must have as its fundamental aim a justice that restores relationships, as Philpott argues in Just and Unjust Peace (2012).^[17] Again, Butterfield is no pacifist. He understands that coercive force may be necessary and even essential to such justice, but how can nuclear weapons achieve this outcome?

He writes, “Let us be clear about one important fact: the destructiveness which some people are now prepared to contemplate is not to be justified for the sake of any conceivable mundane object, any purported religious claim or supramundane purpose, or any virtue that one system can possess as against another.” In fact, says Butterfield, “we have reached the point at which our weapons have turned against us, because their destructiveness is so out of relation with any end that war can achieve for mankind” (1960, 92).

Certainly, the actual use of nuclear weapons as a means of war would represent the most catastrophic failure of not only diplomacy but also military strategy of the modern era. But our discussion about nuclear weapons and just war becomes more complicated when we understand that nuclear doctrine is to actual war like expensive fine China in the family cupboard is to dinner: never to be used under any circumstance, except under the most dramatic duress (and even then, probably not). Understood in this light, the use of nuclear weapons is actually in the wars states don’t fight. The use of nuclear weapons in the context of war is the explicit objective that deterrence means to avoid. It aims to make state-to-state warfare of the kind the twentieth century witnessed in not one but two wars a piece of ancient history.

This explains the ambivalence that military commanders sometimes have toward their own nuclear arsenal: a very expensive set of assets that actually contributes nothing practical in the day-to-day practice of national security. Some high-ranking officers have actually gone on the record bemoaning the cost of maintaining a nuclear posture when other branches of the armed forces have such urgent, practical needs—forces that, as they point out, actually get used. The cost of maintaining and upgrading America’s nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years is conservatively estimated between $1.5–$2 trillion USD. That is in itself an astonishing price tag, but it also opens itself up to opportunity cost criticisms: What national security work could be done under that umbrella of a more practical nature that the Americans will no longer be able to do?

Yet all of this is somewhat abstract bellyaching if we accept, as most military strategy does, that some type of deterrence is necessary in a nuclear world. The goal of that deterrence is explicitly the non-use of nuclear weapons, opening up a curious new line of moral inquiry for the Calvinist: Is construction and possession of weapons of mass destruction a good for public justice if its aims are explicitly to prevent war rather than to wage it?

Paul Ramsey, perhaps the most famous just war theorist of the twentieth century, calls this the ethics of a nuclear bluff, in which deterrence rests on the perceived but not actual threat to use nuclear weapons. But even such a bluff, argues Ramsey, must be rooted in Christian ethics. Here, he argues that “if any action is morally wrong, it is wrong to intend to do it.” “If then,” writes Ramsey, “we find that ‘having’ nuclear weapons involves intending to explode them over predominantly civilian targets, no more need be said: the intention is criminal, just as the action is criminal” (1968, 250–58).

Deterrence, for Ramsey, was not simply an abstract logic. It, too, must be subject to the possibility of use. Therefore, “We should declare again and again, and give evidence by what we do, that our targets are his forces rather than his cities” (Ramsey 1968, 250–58). With a first-strike ruled out, a Christian logic of deterrence—argued Ramsey—rests on a credible second- and third-strike capacity, aimed as far as prudentially possible at the array of enemy forces, not at cities or civilians. That this constraint on strategies and tacticians is almost impossible to imagine is, of course, why we find ourselves in this tortuous ethical dilemma. That it is perhaps not entirely impossible yields the possibility of a genuine deterrence that is more than an empty bluff. Here, perhaps, lies an abundantly qualified but theoretically acceptable Calvinist doctrine of nuclear deterrence. There is, however, one further complication.

Human Depravity and Deterrence: The Anthropological Error in Nuclear “Doctrine”

An immediate complaint at least one theologian^[18] has made to me about an argument for a Calvinist doctrine of nuclear deterrence is that doctrines are very specific theological things and not subject to the adjectival whimsy of other fields of study. Yet it is curious to me that the state has adopted this language of doctrine as well, especially as it relates to its foreign policy and strategic objectives. It is, therefore, not wrong to talk about nuclear doctrine, but it is confusing, especially when the two uses of the term—the church’s and the state’s—get sandwiched together.

But it may also be instructive, especially as in this section I want to argue that it is especially at the level of theological doctrine that the political doctrine of deterrence runs into a major crisis: namely, a defective anthropology.

The political doctrine of deterrence depends on a set of anthropological presuppositions, the most important of which is the law of rational, material self-interest. While to the social scientist this is a generic and often encountered presumption, for the theologian or philosopher, alarms are undoubtedly already ringing. Nuclear deterrence as a system of logical consequences depends on a very basic kind of game theory, and that game theory requires actors who have very similar cost/benefit calculations, rationally organized on a material basis. Actors can be depended on to behave in particular kinds of ways—say, escalating or de-escalating, retrenching or aggressively posturing—depending on how those calculations compute. Deterrence is, therefore, what the social sciences call predictive; it gives us the ability to predict with reasonable confidence the tendency of actors under given conditions.

But what if rationality, as Alasdair MacIntyre so famously argued (1988),^[19] to say nothing of self-interest, is not universal? What if the doctrine of nuclear deterrence has embedded within it anthropological presumptions that are, if not wrong, at least dangerously incomplete? This is part of the argument that Dmitry Adamsky makes in his important book Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion, Politics, and Strategy, in which the reader is introduced to “nuclear priests” and patron saints of each leg of the nuclear triangle, and St. Seraphim, the “burning one”: “Be joyful, the shield and protector of our Fatherland” (2019, 157). Such “nuclear Orthodoxy” is embedded in a story of existential crisis for the Russkiy Mir, the third Rome, whose Christian civilization is under threat from new and ever more degenerate powers. Is the material self-interest of the modern moral order, on which deterrence rests, up to the work of decoding and predicting such nuclear Orthodoxy?

This is the Calvinist dilemma in the anthropology of nuclear deterrence. Can the Calvinist depend, existentially, on this kind of stable, material self-interest? Is this consistent with a picture of the heart as an “idol factory,” of our desires formed and deformed by the very currents of power and domination that these weapons are expected to contain?

Neocalvinists like Bob Goudzwaard would say no (1979). The idea of a rational self-interest producing a spontaneous economic or political order, says Goudzwaard, has incubated a “faith in progress,” an idealistic constancy at the root of so much of modern society’s perils (1979, xxii). Such a conviction is necessary to operationalize the mechanistic, positivist presumptions in game theory, and in much social science generally. This, Goudzwaard says, is the fruit of the Enlightenment, the “mother” of all modern revolutions (1979, 36–54).^[20]

But if we discard this revolutionary anthropology for a more Calvinistic one, we discover instead a diplomacy that would require not static and presumed rules of self-interest, but a more dynamic, historical, and even religious statecraft. It would require the kind of careful consideration of both the theologian and the historian, in an effort to understand how worldview, in a very socially fundamental sense, shapes social and political interests, and how such interests, just as such worldviews, may indeed take very different shapes and outcomes.^[21] In such a Kuyperian-inspired diplomacy, statecraft would be as much a kind of interreligious dialogue as pure power politics (Joustra 2019a).

The problem of human nature is compounded not only by such foundational diversity but by our finitude. It is not only that human nature cannot be pragmatically depended on to prioritize a kind of “Secular”^[22] material security; it is also that we are too often strangers to ourselves and to each other. And so, international relations is defined by anxiety and fear of what we cannot know. The combination of insecurity and fear can drive actors into self-destructive policies.

This was certainly Kuyper’s armchair analysis of the Great War. The fundamental fault, as Kuyper saw it, was neither British nor German but human pride. Europe, he wrote, “had smashed upon the rocks of human pride. They had mistaken cultural advances for moral improvement, so that their technical progress had only multiplied their powers to destroy” (Bratt 2013, 368). At the end of his life, although some of Kuyper’s commentary, according to his own son, lacked “conceptual unity,” it remains clear that he saw that supposedly Christian Europe had “exploded civilization” with its pride and that “people had been satisfied with [Christian] appearances alone and failed to bring the gospel to the heart, and the sad outcome was that in Europe the torch of division and discord (with a view to life’s most fundamental principles) was set alight” (Kuyper 2019, 256). Despite their Christian baptisms, “the genuinely devout in every one of them [Christian nations] had not lagged a bit in baptizing their country’s cause as the Lord’s” (Bratt 2013, 370).

For the Calvinist, there is no solving this basic dilemma of human nature and the character of fear in international relations; there is only remediation. “We cannot penetrate to the roots of fear if we merely condemn the other party moralistically,” Herbert Butterfield wrote across the channel from Kuyper. “It is necessary to attack rather the structure of that fundamental dilemma which is the prime cause of international deadlock” (Butterfield 1960, 87). Fear, he argued, plays a far greater part in life and in the course of history than we often realize, and “sometimes we know that it is fear that is in operation when individuals and nations are bullying or bragging, or taking a crooked course” (Butterfield 1960, 88).

To argue, then, as the doctrine of deterrence enthusiasts do, that it is this same fear that will produce a stable détente between apocalyptically armed human powers is folly:

We must not imagine that all is well if our armaments make the enemy afraid; for it is possible that, at least in the twentieth century, it is fear more than anything else which is the cause of war… Under the high pressure which fear induces, any minor and peripheral issue can seem momentous enough to justify a great war. (Butterfield 1960, 89)

The catalog of near misses and genuine mistakes that nearly produced nuclear wars in the atomic age, altogether apart from real confrontations like the Cuban Missile Crisis, bears witness to this harrowing, if so far averted, prophecy.

The theologians are right then, in the final sense, to object to the doctrine of nuclear deterrence because, as a doctrine, it is defective or at least dangerously incomplete in its anthropology. Rationality is neither universal in its definition and practice nor perfect in its information.

The Case for No-First Use, Qualified Deterrence

We have so far established that a Calvinist case for nuclear weapons must include a “no” to nuclear war. It may include a provisional yes to deterrence itself, although we have also established some worrying tendencies in the technology itself. The promise of a Calvinist doctrine of deterrence is in the nuclear bomb’s potential to restrain evil, yet nuclear weapons seem to be intrinsically escalatory—invoking a nuclear sword or shield is a dramatic escalation beyond most conventional means of war. Further, insofar as the trauma of nuclear holocaust exercises a restraining function on human politics, it does so only under a somewhat particular cost/benefit calculus, which is rooted in a dangerous insufficient anthropology. That this doctrine of deterrence works some of the time is not the question. Insufficient anthropologies are not entirely wrong; they are simply insufficient. A combination of information asymmetry and rival definitions of rationality dangerously compromises the logic of nuclear deterrence.

All of which should make the convicted Calvinist a principled abolitionist. This echoes the conclusion of Paul Marshall, who states bluntly, “Obviously, what we want to achieve is the eradication of nuclear weapons” (1986, 132). Multilateral nuclear disarmament, he goes on to write, “appears to offer the most substantial hope” (Marshall 1986, 133).

The problem, as he quickly points out, is that the weapons are already here. We cannot wish them away or erase them from our history. Nuclear weapons are here as a fact of international relations, and the nuclear threat does not appear to appreciably recede from disarmament.

In fact, disarmament may make the situation dramatically worse. Certainly, unilateral disarmament would expose the non-nuclear state to other nuclear states in a dramatic and unprecedented fashion. Such an unbalancing of the logic of deterrence could, in fact, escalate the likelihood of nuclear conflict. Multilateral disarmament, while in principle more promising, has plenty of its own practical pitfalls. There is the problem of “virtual bombs,” in which states with an advanced understanding of nuclear technology could still quickly assemble the needed components. This is one of the signature anxieties around Iran’s nuclear program which, although it may not yet possess “the bomb,” has all of the facilities and enriched uranium to have one assembled in increasingly short order. The line between civilian and military nuclear capacity can get blurry here and would require—as the International Atomic Energy Agency is charged to perform—rigorous, regular inspections of enrichment facilities. As is well understood, however, such inspections—while hardly irrelevant—are also not foolproof and require sovereign consent.

Lieber and Press put it more dramatically:

In essence, [nuclear] abolitionists present a false choice: between the world of conventional conflict that existed before 1945 and the world of nuclear dangers we inhabit today. But abolition, if successful, would create a third, more dangerous situation: a world of conventional wars and nuclear know-how, in which adversaries teetered on the brink of a rearmament race and faced real incentives to pre-empt once they reacquired nuclear weapons during a crisis. (Lieber and Press 2020, 130)

A Neocalvinist nuclear posture is, therefore, neither permissive of nuclear war nor abolitionist. It is caught somewhere between. This is what I call qualified deterrence. What are those qualifications? From our discussion so far, I can broadly think of five:

1. A nuclear deterrent should be robust and substantial enough to ensure second and third strikes—including all legs of the nuclear triangle: land, sea, and air. If states build the weapons, they must accept the terrible responsibility of those weapons and pay the price—in a literal way—for maintenance and repair. Nuclear technology has advanced significantly since 1945, but technology malfunctions and actors make mistakes. As expensive as it is, any state possessing a deterrent must invest heavily to ensure the redundancy of manpower and technology to prevent as far as possible accidents or malfunctions. States must also accept the burden that the logic of nuclear weapons places on them, not only insuring against accidental technological failure, but recognizing that deterrence and mutually assured destruction require the most substantial investments in diplomacy and statecraft. As Schuurman would remind us, a nuclear state must commit to never becoming a prisoner of nuclear machines in its possession.

2. A nuclear state should also therefore engage in vigorous nuclear diplomacy with an aim to multilateral reductions. Total disarmament is not the goal, but the fewer weapons exist, the lower the risk of exposure to accident or error. A credible, robust deterrent is possible for many states with dramatically reduced stockpiles. Much depends on the ability of diplomacy to forestall arms races and to reduce our risks in absolute terms by reducing the weapons in absolute terms.

3. A nuclear state must suspend any lingering materialistic myopia when it comes to self-interest, and work diligently to mainstream substantial historical and religious expertise into its foreign policy. A Kuyperian might call this comparative and applied worldview expertise. It is not enough to depend on doctrines of deterrence that neither understand nor predict the behavior of international actors who do not share the same presumptions of the West’s modern moral order. What has been advanced as a kind of Track 1.5 Diplomacy or Covenantal Pluralism are both promising models in this respect.^[23]

4. Clarity and transparency in one’s own nuclear policy must also be a high priority. It should not be forgotten that as much of a mystery as other societies or civilizations may be, our social and political priorities may be equally as opaque to others. A clear and transparently communicated system of escalation, including the absolute removal of any possibility of first-strike, must be—as far as possible—widely understood and internationally published. Nuclear weapons should never be suggested for civilian targets or cities. No nuclear weapons should ever be aimed at them. It should be understood that under no circumstances would nuclear weapons be used in this fashion. Structures should be put in place to ensure this. Such clarity may also offer diplomatic advantages in “escalation domination,” in which rationally structured decision processes arrived at ahead of time reduce the risk of irrational, misinformed, or fearful missteps.

5. This relates to a very important and, so far, largely undiscussed topic: the nuclear chain of command. This undoubtedly needs more attention, but significant structural attention must be given not only to the weapons but to the decision-making nuclear chain and its checks and balances. The speed and destructive power of modern war was simply unimaginable by the framers of many of our modern constitutions, most significantly the US Constitution. Not for the first time, the problem of “undeclared wars” (Keynes 1991) and the balance of power between the US Congress and the president raises real concerns. The “Framers did not confer authority on the President to initiate war or military hostilities, to transform defensive actions into aggressive ones, or to defend U.S. allies against attack. From the Framers’ eighteenth-century perspective, only Congress could change the nation’s condition from peace to war” (Keynes 1991, 3). And yet, as with many technological innovations in the twentieth century, realities like the nuclear football and the speed and response time of modern war have necessarily centralized decision-making and dramatically reduced the possibility of due process and public debate. The president may not initiate war, but before Congress could even be summoned to their seats, he could end life on the planet as we know it. It is an astonishing and troubling example of how new systems (technologies) challenge or undercut other systems (the politics of checks and balances) and need significant moral and political attention. Centralization comes with its organizational advantages, but it also has significant long-run shortcomings, ones which, in my opinion, are the special genius of the US Constitution. The nuclear chain should and must be re-examined in this light.

Conclusion: What would Abraham Kuyper Nuke?

Trapped as he was in the middle power dilemmas of early twentieth-century Dutch politics (Joustra 2017), Abraham Kuyper’s Calvinism would undoubtedly support multilateral reductions in nuclear arms, and transparency, clarity, and checks and balances in nuclear posture and deterrence. He may even have argued for outright abolition, especially toward the end of his life, ruminating on the tragic events of the Great War. There, in particular, he became convicted that “the best, corrupted, had become the worst”^[24] and to trust to any people or any state the apocalyptic powers of the nuclear age would have seemed a foolish and terrifying prospect. His own people, in his own time, even Christian people, even Calvinist people, had proved too frail and too false even for the minor powers of imperial industry at the turn of that century. How could he imagine trusting the post-secular, resurgent nationalisms of the twenty-first century with power far beyond even that? What would Abraham Kuyper nuke? It is hard not to wonder if he would have nuked the nukes themselves.

And yet the nukes are here, and—as another old aphorism goes—the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. So, we are once again condemned to live in Augustine’s proximate justice. The utopianism of unilateral disarmament is far more dangerous still than a proximate, qualified deterrence. This does not leave us nowhere or with the status quo. The qualifications I have offered us on a Calvinistic doctrine of deterrence are morally serious ones, and ones which require considerable wisdom of technological, structural, and political practice. They alert us that nuclear weapons, though not moral agents, have moral qualities, that those qualities imply logics, systems, and even theological anthropologies, which may be insufficient or even dangerously wrong. Understanding nuclear weapons helps us understand, as I have argued, their place in a just war. It reminds us that any just war must aim at a just peace, and such a peace is hard to imagine to a nuclear wasteland.

And so, we may not be able to purge these technologies from the international order, but then we must, with ethical seriousness, study them and understand them so as to be aware of what human capacities they enlarge, which ones they diminish, and how we might—somehow—turn them to the best use that we can. We must not become trapped in the systems of our making. To say, as Wolterstorff does, that embedded in our systems, our technologies, and our institutions is a logic, a set of presuppositions, is not the end of the matter. It is the beginning.