The American Spectator : Religiously Opposing Missile Defense

Text Size

Special Report

Religiously Opposing Missile Defense

By Mark Tooley on 2.8.10 @ 6:07AM

The Religious Left's scorn for protections against missile attack have become gospel.

The Heritage Foundation has produced a new film touting America's need for missile defense against terrorists and rogue states called "33 Minutes: Protecting America in the New Missile Age." A scoffing researcher at the liberal Center for American Progress told Politico that the film failed to show that "any such attack was remotely likely."

Leftist scorn for protections against missile attack date to the 1960s and, though interrupted by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty banning nearly all defenses, angrily resurfaced when President Reagan proposed his "Star Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. It was not until 2001 that President George W. Bush actually withdrew the U.S. from the ABM treaty.

Purely defensive weapons that destroy incoming missiles seemingly would appeal even to pacifists. But most opposition to missile defense is rooted in an almost religious faith in arms control as the solvent for all strategic threats. In fact, liberal religionists have often been the chief opponents of missile defense, oddly preferring complete vulnerability to even accidental missile launches.

Early in the Nixon Administration, liberal churchmen organized the National Religious Committee Opposing ABM. "We unequivocally oppose construction of the ABM," they declared in May 1969. "We call upon church and civic groups to examine thoroughly the moral issues involved in the ABM and then to make known their beliefs." Most prominent among the signers was legendary Christian Realist thinker Reinhold Niebuhr, who had turned leftward in the 1960s.

"I heartily subscribe to the statement you sent me opposing the ABM," he wrote a key religious organizer of the anti-ABM movement in 1969. He even agreed to chair the campaign. Senator Ted Kennedy's office actually asked and motivated religious groups specifically to mobilize against missile defense, with some success. The National Religious Committee Opposing ABM was unveiled with a New York City news conference in April 1969. Five Protestant bishops and two Roman Catholic auxiliary bishops were among the signers, as were Niebuhr and 19 other religious notables.

A New York Times report of the religious press conference observed that Americans by two to one told a pollster they supported missile defense. Missile defense has always been largely popular when Americans are polled. But Religious Left elites, in sync with secular elites who share their zealous faith in arms control, have always targeted missile defense for uniquely threatening their utopian vision of a weaponless world (or at least of a weaponless United States).

The anti-missile defense religious organizers of 1969 were sweeping in their vision: "We call upon he American people to respond in such a way that when men of the future look back of this era of human history they will say, 'The defeat of the ABM proposal was the beginning of a great breakthrough, the moment when a major world power demonstrated its willingness to begin a new quest for peace, and repented of the old race toward war.'"

Unsurprisingly, the National Council of Churches (NCC) enthusiastically joined the anti-ABM coalition, as did the Presbyterians and the United Methodists, who helped fund the lobby effort. Three United Methodist bishops were involved, as was the senior executive of the United Presbyterian Church. The NCC's resolution decried missile defense's lamentable "effect on the arms race and disarmament negotiations generally."

Of course, the Nixon administration virtually signed away any meaningful prospect for missile defense with the ABM treaty in 1972. President Reagan's "Star Wars" proposal unveiled in 1983 to research missile defense through the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) did not advocate withdrawing from the ABM but still enraged the religious and secular Left. The United Methodist Council of Bishops unanimously denounced Reagan's initiative. One prominent United Methodist ethicist who advised the bishops warned ominously that SDI could "prove a cover for a first strike." He also opined that opposing SDI "could become the number one social justice issue on the churches' agenda." Naturally he condemned Reagan for refusing to abandon missile defense research at the 1985 Reykjavik summit with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Predictably, the National Council of Churches (NCC) also denounced Reagan's refusal at Reykjavik. "At that moment of such hope and possibility," the NCC mourned, "the Strategic Defense Initiative…stood in the way," with President Reagan "unwilling to give up on his 'Star Wars'/SDI dream," making SDI the sad "obstacle which dimmed the bright hopes for serious arms reduction." The NCC hyperbolically estimated that a missile defense shield for America might cost $1 trillion, perhaps even twice that. And besides, the Soviets would simply build a "similar space-based military 'deterrent,'" the NCC assumed.

Actually, after the Soviet Union's collapse, some former Soviet officials confessed SDI's crucial role in persuading Soviet leaders they could not compete with the U.S. technologically in missile defense. But the Cold War's end also delayed U.S. movement on missile defense. Nuclear proliferation among rogue states reignited interest in the 1990s, and President George W. Bush promptly withdraw the U.S. from the ABM treaty and deployed an anti-missile defense in Alaska, with psychotic North Korea particularly in mind.

Evidently believing that defenses against rogue nuclear states, or even against accidental launches, are unneeded, the United Methodist bishops in 2001 quickly denounced Bush's plans for missile defense deployment: "We must join together to see that the untold billions of dollars proposed for a meaningless search for security through a national missile defense system are not once again taken from the mouths of children and the poor." The Methodist bishops and other liberal Mainliners direly warned of an angry Russian reaction to the ABM's treaty's cancellation, which of course did not happen, and of astronomical missile defense spending, which also did not occur. "Heavy emphasis on unproven anti-missile technology to counter a speculative future threat from a few small nations neglects other elements of a comprehensive non-proliferation strategy," surmised an ecumenical group of liberal religious lobbyists representing the United Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian (USA) and United Church of Christ denominations, plus the National Council of Churches and Evangelicals for Social Action.

Canada's declining liberal churches similarly denounced any deployment in of missile defense, under the pretext that the Bush Administration invited Canada's participation. The Canadian Council of Churches urged Prime Minister Paul Martin in 2004 to seek "binding controls over ballistic missiles as the most effective and practical means of working for the safety and protection of Canadians." As missile defense opponents have for decades, the Canadian prelates bewailed the "weaponization of space," as though the vacuum of outer space were more sacred than protecting earth-bound humans from nuclear terror.

The Obama Administration has controversially canceled missile defense deployments in Eastern Europe but supposedly will move forward on other anti-missile defenses. So far, the Religious Left has not renewed its 40-year sporadic campaign to keep Americans completely vulnerable to any missile attack. But, inevitably, it will speak again against any perceived threat to a supposedly far more important totem: the Religious Left's blind faith that arms control can eliminate all nuclear weapons.

topics:
Missile Defense, Strategic Defense Initiative, Heritage Foundation

About the Author

Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C. and author of Methodism and Politics in the Twentieth Century.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (24) | Leave a comment

Ken (Old Texican)| 2.8.10 @ 8:57AM

In the "real" world, good fences make good neighbors.
In the modern world, those fences are partially made out of missle defenses.

...At the same time, I would love to see a fence from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific along our national border.
...At the same time, I would enjoy a reasonable guest worker program.

Ryan| 2.8.10 @ 9:03AM

Yet again, the liberal churches in America run headlong away from the Great Commission.

It's not the political complaints that should be levied against them.

It's the spiritual and theological.

It's abandoning their core mission - spreading the Gospel of Christ to those who need to hear it.

Period.

Copyleft| 2.8.10 @ 3:08PM

The Great Commission is trumped by the Greater Constitution, which says the U.S. isn't in the missionary business.

Rod D. Martin| 2.8.10 @ 3:30PM

What a stupid response: you're actually suggesting -- in a response to Ryan's critique of leftwing churches -- that the Constitution prohibits *churches* from missionary activity? What kind of numbskull are you, either so reactionary that you instantly translate any discussion of religious activity into a call for state religious activity, or so ignorant of the Constitution you claim to defend that you are unaware of the First Amendment's free exercise clause. Either way, you neither addresses Ryan's comment nor the content of the article: you are just a leftist troll.

Ken (Old Texican)| 2.8.10 @ 3:40PM

Copyleft, you are such an ignoramus. Our US constitution has NO "trumping authority" on Christians' "Great commission".

Our constitution has NOTHING to say about Christians obeying the Great Commission. It's not a "US" thing. (Separation of Church and State,dumb ass.)

Copyleft| 2.8.10 @ 4:44PM

Nope, missile defense is a governmental policy issue. And the government has no business promoting the spread of Christianity.

You want to be a missionary? Fine. But don't expect the resources of the U.S government (including missiles) to back you up on it. The U.S. is not a Christian nation--thank God!--and it never will be.

Ken (Old Texican)| 2.8.10 @ 6:23PM

See folks, (Copyleft above)
This is why our communist, (pardon the shorthand), covert ops guys will never win.

They truly are stupid, aren't they?
heh.
Their arguments are too stupid to rebuke.
heh.

Alan Brooks| 2.8.10 @ 8:54PM

"And the government has no business promoting the spread of Christianity."

Then Arab nations have no business promoting the spread of Islam; since we have the bigger guns we can restrain them somewhat-- for now.

What will happen years from now, I do not know (am no optimist); but neither do you.

C.K. Amos| 2.8.10 @ 6:57PM

Wrong.

Ryan| 2.9.10 @ 8:20AM

I'm trying to figure out if you think I was saying that or if you just pulled it out of thin air.

Chuck M.| 2.8.10 @ 9:32AM

Consider this, "the United Methodist bishops in 2001 quickly denounced Bush's plans for missile defense deployment: 'We must join together to see that the untold billions of dollars proposed for a meaningless search for security through a national missile defense system are not once again taken from the mouths of children and the poor.'"

Hmmnn ... How MUCH money did the United Methodist Bishops spend ("take from the mouths of children and the poor") on their campaign to stop the government from doing the job it's actually SUPPOSED TO DO: protect us?

It's the job of the church to bring unbelievers to salvation and to feed the widows, orphans, and the poor. They should get to it.

MOS was 71331| 2.8.10 @ 9:58AM

My first job after leaving the US Army in 1968 was as a computer programmer on the Safeguard ABM system, first at Bell Labs in Whippany, NJ, and subsequently at the test site on the Kwajalein Atoll. Safeguard used interceptor missiles with nuclear warheads to destroy the incoming weapons, so the testing on Kwaj only demonstrated that the interceptors could launch and maneuver properly to explode their warheads with maximum effect on the enemy's warheads. (I assume our interceptor warheads were tested underground in Nevada or New Mexico, but I was never involved in that aspect of the program.)

The main criticism of Safeguard was that our defenses could be overwhelmed by hundreds or even thousands of incoming warheads arriving within a time interval measured in minutes. Essentially, if we had 100 Spartan (range about 300 miles) and Sprint (range about 15 miles) interceptors, at best we'd eliminate the first 100 Soviet warheads, and the rest of their warheads would get through.

Clearly, North Korea and Iran couldn't field ICBMs with so many warheads. Equally clearly, the "accidental" launch of one or two ICBMs couldn't involve more than a dozen or so warheads. (I've never been involved in MIRV [Multiple Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicles] technology or nuclear weapon development, but I expect the maximum number of RVs per ICBM would be around 5.) Even assuming North Korea and Iran could somehow develop or acquire MIRV capabilities, it should be many years before those countries could overwhelm a defense based on twenty or so interceptors.

Given the horrendous consequences of a single nuclear warhead exploding over us or one of our allies, I consider ABM development and deployment a relatively cheap insurance policy.

Nick| 2.8.10 @ 11:37AM

As someone who was but 2 years old in '69, and a teenager when the nuclear freeze kooks were railing against SDI, could somebody please explain what the arguments were against missle defense?

Besides the bogus "it's a first-strike weapon" argument. I know that was just a Soviet talking point distributed to the Useful Idiots around the world.

Was that all they really had? "It's not fair the U.S. is so far ahead of the Soviets, so we must have weights put on us so the commies can catch up?"

How can anyone in their right mind be agianst defending ourselves from ICBM's?

ncatty| 2.8.10 @ 3:12PM

Mutual assured destruction was assumed to be a good strategy, and it depended on the "mutuality." Anything that jeopardized that mutuality was contributing to "instability." Instability could lead to adventurism, risk-taking and war. That was the theory.

Nick| 2.8.10 @ 4:04PM

ncatty,

Thanks for the info.

That sounds like typical liberal logic.
Anything that would endager MAD was more dangerous than actual thermonuclear weapons landing on U.S. cities.

Jack Neidlinger| 2.8.10 @ 4:11PM

This is why this lifelong Methodist is now a Missouri Synod Lutheran. The UMC council of bishops is a pro gay rights activist group who never met a left winger that they didnt love.

Liberal| 2.8.10 @ 7:22PM

Hi ur misguided XD liberals arent stupid, but yet, that last line seems to portray them as such. So, to you (the author) i have this to say: America as a whole is tired of your right wing B.S. and we would all appreciate it if you would cease lying to us, and do your job (which i believe is called reporting, but it's so misguided now, i don't know what to call it) now before your misinformed-conservative buddies try to rip this comment to shreds, im only 14, and i dont think it bears repeating as to where you all can shove it. Thanks for killing "News" as we know it, i'm sure future generations will be able to appreciate the extent of the lies which pass through the despicable thing you call a mouth. - Michael Johnston

Ryan| 2.9.10 @ 8:21AM

What was the lie and how is it wrong? Better learn to back up with facts, kid.

newscaper| 2.8.10 @ 11:23PM

I'm infuriated whenever Obama's dangerous twaddle about 'eliminating' nuclear weapons comes, and the media uttely fails to note that he did *not* campaign on that.

Yosemeti Sam| 2.9.10 @ 4:46AM

Yikes!

Eastern Europeans - unwalled from communism -
no doubt spell gratitude to liberal churches for
accomplishing for them what Pershing missiles
could not when easily targeting the smallest of rooms in the Kremlin politburo.

R Givens| 2.15.10 @ 12:18PM

The only "moral" objection to missile defense is the possibility that attempting to employ such a system could provoke a preemptive attack.

My objection is because at best a missile defense system could only stop a fraction of the incoming ICBMs. Relying on a fraudulent missile defense could cause a leader to go into a war with the notion that we would suffer very little damage.

Such is not at all true, because the entire nation could be sent back to the stone ages with fewer than 20 hydrogen bomb strikes.

The overwhelming destruction that H-Bombs are capable of causing is a very good reason for eliminating Atomic war from battle plans.

Even if the missile defense stopped every attacking missile, we would be destroyed by our retaliatory strike.

Contrary to General Curtis Lemay's 1960s notions of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) a 100% successful preemptive strike would also kill us.

NUCLEAR WINTER is one drawback to detonating very many H-Bombs. Also the radiation going around the world will not spare anyone in the Northern hemisphere.

It is worth mentioning that Lemay's battle plan called for carpet bombing a path to Moscow using nuclear weapons. If this were ever done it would insure a NUCLEAR WINTER of enormous proportions.

BOTTOM LINE: A missile defense program could lead to disaster if it gives a leader the notion that a missile war is survivable.

Greed Killz| 2.23.10 @ 4:59PM

The US is dead broke.
Almost 13 TRILLION in debt and it will only get worse even if half the massive government and worldwide US military were to be cut .
Alot of very ignorant people.
It matters not at all what the Military Spending percentage of GDP is in the US.
You are broke.
Can you get that?