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Philadelphia's influential Archbishop, John Cardinal Krol, 72, is liberal on disarmament and conservative on church discipline and doctrine. He suggested that the pastoral letter should more clearly acknowledge a nation's right to resist attack and tyranny from unjust aggressors by all means that are morally licit.
The most difficult issue in the draft was a statement on the morality of nuclear deterrence. Here the bishops took their guidance from a message by John Paul to a United Nations General Assembly disarmament session last June. The Pope had written: "Under present conditions, 'deterrence' based on equilibrium—certainly not as an end in itself but as a stage on the way to progressive disarmament—can still be judged morally acceptable. However, to ensure peace it is indispensable not to be content with a minimum which is always fraught with a real danger of explosion." The question facing the bishops was whether they should be more specific than the Pope.
In the midst of the discussion, the White House launched a carefully wrought defense of its nuclear policies. What deeply concerned the Administration was fear that the bishops' criticism of nuclear deterrence would encourage the peace movement in the U.S. and abroad and build pressure for unilateral rather than mutual disarmament. That, in turn, might undermine U.S. efforts to negotiate arms limitations agreements with the Soviets.
The Administration's case was made by National Security Adviser William Clark, a Catholic layman. In an open letter to Bernardin, he said that the White House agreed with the Pope's stand and, indeed, with much of what the bishops were saying. But Clark said that he and President Reagan were "especially troubled" that the draft ignored American proposals "on achieving steep reductions in nuclear arsenals, on reducing conventional forces and, through a variety of verification and confidence-building measures, on further reducing the risks of war." Clark noted that the Soviets had mounted a huge arms buildup during the past decade when the U.S. was holding down arms spending. He also argued that it was perfectly moral for the U.S. to make certain that "our deterrent forces remain sufficiently strong and credible to assure effective deterrence." The goal, he said, is "to prevent war and preserve the values we cherish." As for the bishops' stance on the MX, the Administration argues that their opposition to the development of more sophisticated weapons would reduce the prospects of limiting a nuclear war.
The bishops also had to face the terrible paradox of deterrence: it is based on fear and therefore cannot work if one side or the other can be absolutely certain that nuclear weapons will never be used. This point was advanced by William V. O'Brien, a political scientist at Georgetown University, who noted in the Washington Quarterly that