CORRESPONDENCE
CORRESPONDENCE A-Bomb Post Mortem New York, N.Y To the Editors: Your lead editorial, "The World of Survival" [Nov. 25] is as shaky a bit of cultural casuistry as has crossed my eyes in some...
...It extinguishes all hope...
...It made no least mention' either of the South Bronx and its agonies, or a possible exchange of views...
...That is, to devise such a joining of means and ends, of symbols and risks, of community and right conduct, as will save our humanity, our faith, our children...
...Please do not urge their harridan caper...
...DANIEL BERRIGAN, S.J...
...We have urged people to stop paying taxes or death...
...Your editorial, willy nilly, goes with all this—the militarization of conscience...
...Nor is our bible to my knowledge, particularly indebted to the bloody secular glosses offered by Herman Kahn or the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists...
...have in fact offered during the Korean war, the Vietnam era, the second World War, even the first World War...
...a crime against humanity...
...The book of Revelation speaks of a time of destruction, when the living will envy die dead...
...Muste, of Thomas Meiton, of the Catholic Worker, of James Douglass, of die Vietnamese Buddhists...
...It ignores the resources which religious radicals have to offer...
...And in a dying culture whose nuclear artifacts are an unbearable epiphany of its state of soul, such faith is a precious resource indeed...
...But let's build a fence around hell...
...or in areas of secular insight and courage, of Bertrand Russell, Daniel Ellsberg, Sidney Lens, Seymour Melman...
...Why not offer something better to think of, something more noble to do, than dig in for death...
...Exactly...
...die letter was written by a Major General, to whom, as he explained, the president had assigned the task of answering my letter...
...The logic seems to be...
...We believe in the Grave— but only because it is empty...
...there have always been wars, there will always be etc...
...Our top authority in this deadly matter, is military...
...Many of us for years now, have been standing at the White House and die Pentagon, and being jailed for it...
...Rather in the ironclad sense of the historical rigorists who during the Vietnam war (and every previous conflict, one is willing to bet) threw the past in our faces as the only measure of the future...
...In such a scenario, only die chicken-hearted would demur...
...Why not, in such a time, bring to our attention our own tradition, which is that of the prophets, of Jesus, of Gandhi, of Martin King, of A.J...
...It arises in the midst of a deadly frictive politics of necessity, whose source is sin, and whose outcome is—ashes...
...We may be cursed or blessed, living as we do in the Kingdom of Necessity, where mad authority wastes the earth as a prelude to wasting all of us...
...pile up the folly, we may reach wisdom...
...endlessly inventive in the locked box he would have us all inhabit...
...Christians do not dig shelters, nor pay for them, nor live in them...
...I asked to talk with him on these matters...
...don't jump...
...It does not call on people to resist...
...Three weeks ago, I wrote to President Carter (I am addicted to lost causes) telling him of the connection I drew between the destruction of our cities, and his fervor for a neutron bomb...
...It puts on the sulphurous mantle of Kabn, invking us once more, to "think the unthinkable...
...Last August was the largest national observance of Hiroshima Day in 25 years...
...Within a discreet week, I received an answer...
...Kahn's is no more than a mortician's realism...
...Any more than they build gas chambers, or slums, or draft boards...
...Kahn aids and abets in die preparation of crimes against humanity...
...You call in fact for an atmosphere in which a whole hecatomb of "shelters" will be built, a national grave-site for the unlucky undead...
...His fascination was not, as they say, "value free...
...Which is to say, it considers the weapons and ideology of the nuclear tinkers as inevitable...
...That means among other things, that the Big One could m fact be dropped, and on several occasions has very nearly been dropped, by some besieged or maddened local commander in some remote field of interest to the military—right down the ranks, Ellsberg says, to Majors...
...I may be forgiven for injecting a religious note into this discordant foolish 'scenario.' Strangely enough, as I reflect on your editorial, I am thinking of my beloved and broken South Bronx, where I teach urban poor people...
...No such thing...
...It extinguishes hope, and the works of hope...
...It was a long jargon-ridden apologia for the New Bomb...
...But this is not by any means the whole story...
...The fact that they see no breakthrough, no alternative, to a rodent population blindly nosing its way through the earth', is of no particular embarrassment to biblical faith...
...Now I am a very demon for symbols...
...Your editorial also steps gingerly back from the shotgun morality of die shelter nonsense of the '50s...
...This seems a curiously tainted credential to present to us in Commonweal...
...better, to jump in...
...But the trouble with Kahn, as Paul Goodman and others have pointed out, is that he helped create the unthinkable he wanted us to think...
...And the final twist was this...
...REV...
...25] is as shaky a bit of cultural casuistry as has crossed my eyes in some time...
...And if Christians dig graves (We have dug many a symbolic one on the White House lawn) it is neither to inhabit them ourselves, nor to thrust others into them...
...Not in the sense of "facts of life," which all must cope with and sweat through...
...In this case, the ashes precede the death...
...Why not remind us sternly of such statements from our own church as, "The possession of weapons of indiscriminate killing is...
...As Daniel Ellsberg has been trying to say for some months, and has been documenting meticulously, nuclear decisions as to development, and especially deployment, are not in the president's hands at all—and haven't been since Eisenhower...
...But not so far back...
...Take a look if you must...
...And I thought, writing the civilian president on a matter of high human concern, surely ought to rate a response from at least a third-rank civilian employee...
...Anti-human, anti-life, anti-hope, all of these...
...It scrambles responsibility, an ethical time sense...
...inventive in every task except escape...
...Or indeed, closer home, of the Second Vatican Council, of Pope John...
...Their taste is in the mouth of those who are submissive or complicit in the rule of the Mad Tinkers...
...All of this is a free-breathing politics of liberation...
...There is another scripture than theirs, there is another Lord...
...He was and is die kind of 'inventive dwarf Brecht has Galileo mourn over...
...But have you (or Kahn for that matter) taken into account the spiritual degradation, die despair, the unutterable misery, of this blasted lunar wasteland...
...Then he urges us (frontier macho at its best) to peer over the brink...
...It is also profoundly defeatist, in an antibiblical sense...
...We have been organizing the new Mobilization for Survival, which this year has planned some 200 teach-ins across the nation, in campuses and churches...
...One could point to all sorts of hopeful signs and acts, arrests, vigils, new communities east and west, dedicated to nuclear resistance...
...And this has been our crime, after all...
...If you would prepare us consequentially for a nuclear "exchange," please prepare us for this...
...Our real task is to think the thinkable...
Vol. 105 • January 1978 • No. 1
