Good afternoon, and thank you for the chance to speak to such an illustrious group today.

From where I sit, it has been both valuable and stimulating to have the chance to listen to our participants here today offer such erudite comments on nuclear weapons ethics from the perspective of the Catholic Church.  I myself, of course, am no Catholic theologian – nor even a Catholic at all.  As some of you may know, I am in fact a Buddhist, and indeed a lay chaplain trained just up the road from here in Santa Fe a number of years ago.

For what it’s worth, my instinct is that in terms of Christian thinking on these particular issues – and with apologies to the Cardinal and Archbishops sitting across from me here at the table – we can probably learn more that is of use in the world today from St. Augustine and Pope John Paul II than we can from Pope Francis. 

To my eye, deterring war, especially nuclear war, is a profoundly moral undertaking, nothing less than a moral imperative.  And if nuclear weapons help us do that in the present strategic environment – which I believe they do – then I’m all in, and make no apologies about it.  In fact, when it comes to dealing with nuclear-armed revisionist great power predators, forswearing the tools needed to continue deterring aggression would strike me as being rather immoral.

But my own views on the morality of nuclear deterrence – which in any case won’t surprise you – aren’t the main point of what I would like to discuss here this afternoon.  For this panel, I’d like to take a slightly different approach, and remind you that as we debate these matters within the Western intellectual and theological tradition, we are not the only players who matter.

If we wish to fulfil the moral imperative of deterring aggression – especially nuclear-armed aggression – we also need to understand how our strategic adversaries think about nuclear weapons, as well as how they think about nuclear weapons ethics. 

So with the caveat, of course, that these are only my personal views, let me offer just a few musings about Russian and Chinese thinking about nuclear weapons ethics.

I don’t claim to have magical insight here, and part of my point is that it is very hard to know their real views.  In neither country do they usually discuss such things openly as we Westerners do, and in both cases the ruling regime exercises ferocious and heavy-handed authoritarian control over the national information space, making it challenging – if not often impossible – to distinguish between genuine views and government propaganda.

That said, I’d like to offer a few thoughts on why I suspect that Russian and Chinese thinking on these issues might be very different from – and perhaps not even remotely consonant with – the kinds of things said at conferences like this one in Western settings.

The Orthodox Nuclear Fetish 

With regard to Russia, I would recommend that you start by reading a 2019 book by my friend, the Israeli scholar Dmitry Adamsky, entitled Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy.  In it, Dima recounts in some detail the multiple ways in which the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has been, in effect, co-opted by the Putin regime into playing the role of state-sponsored sanctifier and “cheerleader” for Russia’s nuclear weaponry and its weapons establishment. 

(Frankly, it must be noted that the ROC has become so morally unbalanced and corrupted that it now acts as a full-spectrum cheerleader for all Putin’s brutality and aggression both at home and abroad – from expeditionary warfare in Syria to aggression in Ukraine, and from crackdowns on domestic dissent to what is said to be “Holy War” against the West in general.  That said, I’ll only be talking about nuclear weapons issues here.)

Dima calls this ROC nuclear cheerleading the “theocratization of the nuclear complex,” and he recounts some remarkable details.  Russia’s nuclear weapons industry, its strategic missile forces, its long-range nuclear bombers, its ballistic missile submarine fleet, and its nuclear high command have all now been provided with their own official patron saints by the Russian Orthodox Church.  Individual nuclear bombers are often consecrated with an ROC rite specially developed for this purpose, and an Orthodox monk is apparently even permanently assigned to the Russian nuclear test site at Novaya Zemlya.

Russian Orthodox Church officials such as Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, moreover, have stressed what they describe as “the vitally important role” of nuclear weapons in “preserving an independent and united Russia” and helping Russia combat the “spiritual and psychological violence” represented by Western liberal ideology and its associated hedonistic cultural values.  Kirill himself praises Russia’s nuclear weaponry because through it, he says, “our country has preserved great power status.”  Upon the 50th anniversary of the first Soviet nuclear weapons test, in fact, the ROC Archbishop of Nizhni Novgorod praised “the nuclear shield, which stopped the aggressive aspirations of the Fatherland’s adversaries” and – he said – had enabled Russia to save the world.

As I understand it, Dima is presently working on a deeper study of what might be the emergence in the Russian Orthodox world of some loose analogue to the Catholic Church’s Just War theory.  I don’t know what he’ll conclude, of course, but I suspect it’s safe to say that given the co-opted ROC’s mutually-parasitic relationship with the Putin regime, such ROC theorizing won’t involve the careful and conscientious, even agonized, ethical reticence that characterizes Western nuclear ethics debates.

Ilyinist Ideology and the Putin Regime

To my eye, if you’d like a bit of a taste for what official Russian Orthodox Church morality on issues of the use of force and violence may look like in the age of the shamefully Putin-co-opted ROC, you could do worse than to turn to an old White Russian émigré writer from the early 20^th Century named Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin (1883-1954). 

I haven’t chosen to discuss Ivan Ilyin lightly.  I have not cherry-picked a crotchety White Russian extremist in order to make Russia’s modern spiritualized politics sound grotesque and frightening.  Ilyin is actually widely read in Russia today, and is apparently a great personal favorite of Vladimir Putin himself – who has sent copies of Ilyin’s work to Russian government officials, urging them to read it, and who has quoted from Ilyin in several presidential addresses.  (Putin also personally played a role in returning Ilyin’s remains to Russia for reburial in the Donskoi monastery in Moscow, making the man almost a kind of national saint.) 

Ilyin, in fact, has been described by one historian as the writer “most often cited as the ‘key’ to Putin’s ideology.”  As Laqueur puts it,

“Putin and his colleagues believe that the long search for new doctrine has ended and that in Ilyin they have found the prophet to present their much-needed new ideology.” 

According to Russia’s minster of regional development, “[t]he demand for his ideas in today’s Russia is so strong that sometimes there is a feeling that Ivan Ilyn is our contemporary.” 

Given this degree of the Putin regime’s approval of the man’s work, therefore, I think it’s worth knowing who Ivan Ilyin was and what he believed.

The answer to this question isn’t very pleasing.  Ilyin was essentially a Russian Orthodox fascist.  Ilyin openly admired European fascism, though he much preferred the quasi-Christianized versions professed by Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal to the more racialized and paganized German and Italian flavors.  He even worked for a time in Germany – in Joseph Goebbels’ Nazi Ministry of Propaganda, no less! – though they fired him in 1934, perhaps in part for that reason.  All in all, as Walter Laqueur has noted, Ivan Ilyin “considered Nazism a positive phenomenon that with some modifications and adjustments could serve as a model for the future of Russia.”

Anyway, Ilyin wrote many things in his years of angry exile after the Bolshevik coup of 1917, but to give you a flavor for the man’s thinking, I’ll draw here primarily upon his 1925 book, On Resistance to Evil by Force.  I won’t bore you with all the details, but the key point – for present purposes – is that there is nothing in Ilyin that looks, sounds, or feels anything at all like the kind of anguished moral self-interrogation that is so characteristic of Western debates on nuclear ethics.

For Ivan Ilyin, who absolutely despised the pacifism of Count Nikolai Tolstoy, the reality of the human world was “the black abyss of history and the human heart,” which constituted “the tragic burden of the universe.”  To combat this blackness, he idealized what he called the “Orthodox knightly tradition” of “Russian warriors of Christian favour,” and he was all but fixated upon the duty – as he saw it – of such steely-eyed men to fight evil, ungodliness, and spiritual corruption. 

For Ilyin, “[a] person who does not observe spiritual hygiene is a hotbed of universal, societal contamination,” and suppressing such vermin was an Orthodox Christian’s moral duty.  Not for Ivan Ilyin did Christian ethics require turning the other cheek.  In his view, 

“[s]piritual love knows that … every man must earn and justify his right to life, that there are people who are better off not having been born, and there are others who are better off being killed than allowed to do evil. … Calling on us to love our enemies, Christ meant the personal enemies of a man himself ….  Christ never called us to love the enemies of God, to bless those who hate and trample upon all that is Divine, to assist blasphemous seducers, to kindly sympathise with the obsessive molesters of souls .… The teaching of the Apostles and Fathers of the Church, of course, advanced a completely different understanding.”

Ilyin made this theological point repeatedly, also noting in his 1937 book Foundations of Christian Culture that “Christ nowhere condemned the sword – not the sword of government, nor the sword of the military.”

Ilyin’s conceptual and spiritual model here was thus not the Sermon on the Mount, but rather Jesus throwing the moneylenders out of the Temple: 

“In one great and terrible historical moment, the act of divine love, in the guise of wrath and scourge, drove out a sacrilegious crowd from the temple.  This act was and will always be the greatest prototype and justification for all spiritually and meaningfully justified manifestations of negative love.”

Ilyin was also rather flexible about the means it was permissible to use in administering such “negative love” to suppress evil and spiritual corruption. He believed that if you were spiritually pure – naturally, in a Russian Orthodox sense – you were justified in using “unrighteous” means for a proper spiritual end.  The Orthodox warrior must be willing to “transgress the limits of his moral righteousness,” as Ilyin put it, in service of a higher good.  In a fallen world in which Orthodoxy was assailed by evil and corruption, the virtuous man can be, he wrote, “forced to unrighteousness … and accepting this unrighteousness, he is required” to see things through. 

“The compromise of the sword-bearer is that he consciously and voluntarily accepts through his will the morally unrighteous outcome as a spiritual necessity; and if every deviation from moral perfection is unrighteousness, then he takes upon himself unrighteousness; and if every conscious, voluntary assumption of unrighteousness by the will creates guilt, then he accepts the guilt of his decision. … He takes up not only the burden of death, but also the burden of killing, and in the burden of killing not only the pain of the act itself, but also the burden of decision, responsibility[,] and perhaps guilt.  His spiritual destiny leads him to the sword, he accepts it, and the sword becomes his destiny, and in this outcome, in this heroic resolution to the central tragic dilemma, he is not righteous, but he is right.”

Using the sword for such purposes with a pure spiritual heart “is neither a fall, nor an offense, nor a sin.”  Accordingly, Ilyin felt, “a true struggle against evil can and should be conducted precisely in combining spiritual compromise with religious/moral cleansing.  It is the process of purification,” and the strong, virtuous warrior bears “the burden of spiritual compromise, the burden of descending to the grave, violent and cunning means of struggle.” 

“The warrior is the bearer of the sword, and his world-embracing compromise necessitates a monk as a confessor, a source of living purity, religious wisdom, a moral pleroma [i.e., the fullness of the Godhead as it dwells in Christ]: here he receives grace in the sacrament and receives strength for his actions, here he steels his conscience, confirms the purpose of his service and cleanses his soul.  And his sword itself becomes a fiery prayer.”

For Ilyin, moreover, human suffering was not something to be avoided, but rather something almost to be gloried in – at least in pursuit of the righteous cause of destroying evil.  It is in suffering, we wrote, “that the soul deepens, grows stronger, and begins to truly see. … Therefore, the vital wisdom consists not in escaping from suffering as from imaginary evil, but in accepting it as a gift and a pledge, in utilising it and wading through it.” 

The spiritually righteous man will thus “find in himself the determination and strength to cause suffering to himself and his neighbor in the cause of a higher spiritual need.”  Ilyin viewed the many traumas and tribulations of Russia’s 20^thCentury history as actually having redemptive value, for they

“sweep[] over our souls like a searing and purifying fire. … [I]n this fire our religious and public ministry is renewed, our spiritual pupils are opened, our love and will are tempered.  And through this the first thing that will revive within us is the religious and state wisdom of Eastern Orthodoxy and especially Russian Orthodoxy.” 

Here we see what might be described as almost a cult of self-exonerating warrior-militancy that exults in the nobility of suffering in an eternal Holy War against evil and spiritual corruption.  This is a tradition that surfaces repeatedly in Russian politics, religiosity, and culture.  One sees aspects of it, for instance, from the conviction of  Ivan IV (“The Terrible”) that he was, in the words of British historian Orlando Figes, “a sword-bearing archangel, an agent sent by God to protect the Orthodox and purge the world of infidels and sinners before the Apocalypse,” all the way up to Vladimir Putin’s much more recent fulminations about the need to resist “Satanic” Western forces of spiritual pollution that threatened Russia’s “traditional values.” 

Such glorifications of spiritual conflict and worldly suffering may even trace their roots all the way back to the semi-mythical Boris and Gleb, the first saints of the Russian Orthodox Church.  Russian tradition, after all, presents them (e.g., in the 12^th-Century Primary Chronicle) as noble “passion-sufferers” (strastoterptsy) who had – as Figes recounts – “willingly laid down their lives for the salvation of the Russian land” and whose sacrifice forced “a covenant between God and the newly baptized Rus, a new Terra Sancta, which was thus endowed with special grace.”  In the traditions of such thinking, Ivan Ilyin’s writings do not seem so outlandish.

At any rate, Ilyin clearly had no fear of the horror and destruction of warfare.  He even noted pointedly that “the best, bravest[,] and most heroic men die in war, while the sneaky and cunning survive it.”  The suffering caused by war was apparently not to be feared.  For him, “the essential purpose of Christianity” was “to sanctify every moment of earthly toil and suffering.”  Indeed, the entire world “may be rejected … insofar as it is not in God or is against God … insofar as it is a source or weapon of godless lusts.” 

So if Ivan Ilyin’s work sounds creepy and sinister to you – especially from the perspective of what such sentiments might mean in the context of nuclear weapons ethics – well, it jolly well should.  I, for one, am not too comfortable seeing nuclear weaponry in the hands of a ruler who idolizes Ilyin, and if Ilyin’s Christianized vision of righteously transgressive sword-wielding and embracing redemptive mass suffering is any indication, contemporary Russian Orthodox nuclear weapons ethics may be alarmingly permissive. 

Especially in a Russian nationalistic Orthodox context suffused with what has been called a “cult of sacrifice” – in which the Soviet Union’s appalling casualty rates during the Second World War are invoked, as Figes has noted, “as proof not of Soviet inefficiency and callous disregard for human life, but of Russia’s sacrifice, the price it paid to save humanity” – the world doesn’t need that kind of Ilyinist “fiery prayer” thinking in the nuclear business.

Communist China

And that’s just Russia, where at least there are religious officials who pronounce publicly on nuclear weapons issues.  It is even harder to tell where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is on these matters.  It’s not merely that China has no clear analogue to Just War theory in the first place, but also that so much of what its officials do say about nuclear weaponry is so deeply propagandistic and performative – intended, as the saying goes, to influence more than actually to inform. 

In its official messaging to the outside world, China does lay claim to a superlative nuclear morality, not least in purporting to take a “minimalist” approach to nuclear deterrence and to have an ironclad nuclear “No First Use” (NFU) policy even while engaging in a massive nuclear build-up and moving its strategic forces increasingly to “launch on warning” status at a time when Beijing faces what is surely the smallest military threat from the outside world, in relative terms, since the late 18^th Century.   Honesty and candor about sensitive issues aren’t precisely the CCP’s strength, however, and there’s no clear way to separate the chaff of propagandistic virtue-signaling aimed at Western and Global South audiences from the wheat whatever actual beliefs may lie underneath.

The last time a senior Chinese official actually spoke clearly and directly about nuclear war issues, in fact, was Mao Zedong himself, who infamously declared that nuclear proliferation was a “great contribution to the cause of peace.” Indeed, if you believed Mao, nuclear war should almost be welcomed, for it would lead to the “total elimination of capitalism” and thus usher in an epoch of “permanent peace” because “the whole world would become socialist.”  I can’t quite imagine anyone in Beijing today believing that, of course, but while we sit around in academic fora debating nuclear deterrence, Just War theory, and Pope Francis’ recent pronouncements against nuclear weaponry, what CCP officials and People’s Liberation Army generals truly think about nuclear ethics is anybody’s guess.

If anything, though modern CCP-ruled China often likes to project a kind of quasi-Confucian moralism, there is some reason to worry that even this framework will not correspond in a recognizable way to the dictates of what we ourselves might deem genuinely moral.  After all, back in ancient times, orthodox Confucians only accorded homo sapiens the status of being human by degrees, corresponding to the extent to which they had become Sinicized and conformed to Confucian rituals.   In this view, only Chinese people were truly human, and at the outer edges of the empire’s imagined civilizational topography, distant “barbarian” peoples who refused or were incapable of following Chinese norms were quite literally no better than beasts. 

No wonder, then, that it was quite proper that, despite Confucians’ general disdain for the military arts within China, what Confucius called “punitive military expeditions” could and indeed should proceed from the civilized Sinic core to show such barbarians their place.  When you don’t regard the foreign “Other” as being fully human – and in fact regard them as being subhuman or even bestial precisely to the degree that they live by a value system different from your own – I’dimagine that your operational military morality vis-à-vis such foreigners can get pretty permissive. 

So how, if at all, do such ancient traditions map on to modern CCP thinking?  That’s very hard to say.  In terms of basic understandings and deep ethical traditions, however, one suspects that, as I observed a moment ago with Russia, China’s operational nuclear morality may be very different from the doubt-ridden and self-interrogative ethical positions one sees in Western nuclear discussions such as our own here in this conference.

Problems of Ethical Asymmetry

So what are the implications of all this?  I do worry that in discussions like this, we spend so much time debating among ourselves whether or not to be in the nuclear deterrence business in the first place, but we gloss over the impact that such largely intra-Western debates may have on real-world issues of deterrence and strategy.  As with the civil-society activism of the nuclear disarmament movement – which by its nature is more likely to constrain nuclear decision-making in free democratic societies than in the nuclear-armed authoritarian powers whose revisionism lies at the root of the world’s contemporary nuclear anxieties – I would urge us not to ignore the potentially asymmetric impact of our being, in effect, the only players really focused upon such questions of nuclear morality.

To be sure, it’s certainly worth considering – as an ethical matter – how much such asymmetry of impact should matter.  But as a strategist and national security policy professional, I think it does. 

Already, for instance, one of our geopolitical adversaries is conducting a war of aggression under what might be called an “offensive nuclear umbrella.”  Vladimir Putin clearly hoped – and to some extent continues to hope – that we will be sufficiently afraid of nuclear escalation and rattled by his brazen nuclear saber-rattling that we will simply stand by while he invades, annexes, and destroys a free, sovereign neighboring democracy.  And Xi Jinping is himself now engaged in a massive expansion of China’s nuclear capabilities, perhaps with a similar “offensive umbrella” in mind in support of his desire to subjugate the free citizens of Taiwan. 

Both dictators seem to be trying to weaponize our nuclear neuralgias, assuming that the West’s otherwise commendable distaste for nuclear weaponry and our anxious concerns about nuclear ethics will make us more easily coerced and allow our friends to be more easily devoured.  In that sense, the asymmetry in nuclear ethics is already having major geopolitical implications, and they’re not good.

From a more philosophical standpoint, however, I could at least imagine an argument that this asymmetry doesn’t matter. A Kantian deontologist, for instance, might not care whether our adversaries bother their strategists and nuclear planners with ethical restrictions.  Nor might that deontologist particularly care whether, when they see us debate nuclear ethics so earnestly, our adversaries draw conclusions about us that actually encourage aggression – thus, ironically, making war, and even nuclear war, more likely.

For my part, however, I can’t persuade myself not to care about those things.  You don’t have to be Ivan Ilyin to suspect that while “turning the other cheek” is a praiseworthy ethical system up to a point, applying such a simple ethical reflex in the same way both to a mere slap and to a brutal war of aggression and conquest isn’t actually all that ethical. 

During my professional career dealing with nuclear weapons issues, I have occasionally heard disarmament activists suggest that due to the potentially species-existential stakes of nuclear warfare, the only moral response to nuclear weapons threats is simply to surrender to the nuclear-armed aggressor.  Such claims, however, are uncommon, and most observers probably think such a position would be quite problematic. 

While one could reasonably debate the notion that surrender to tyranny might be preferable to a certainty of global extinction, I believe that’s a false choice.  In the real complexity of the real world, such simplicity represents only a pseudo-ethical mode of thinking.  The world’s vicious authoritarian aggressors may want us conscientious Westerners to adopt such thinking, but we should not. 

Ethics, I would argue, indeed does require us to consider the risks of nuclear holocaust, and it would be madness to assert that it does not.  But it also requires that we consider the degree of risk that such a horror will occur, and that we consider the moral implications – and the likelihood – of how things might be without nuclear deterrence, especially in a world of predatory states that but for our nuclear weapons posture might well be committing even more great evils than they are today. 

I cannot offer a crisp algorithm that lets someone calculate ethical answers to these questions with mathematical certainty, of course, but I feel pretty confident that an ethical system that gives no thought to these complexities is not truly ethical at all.

In reality, just as the Law of Armed Conflict the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) encourages and empowers us to engage in nuanced moral reasoning when weighing military necessity against the principles of proportionality, distinction, and humanity in wartime, I also believe that our ethical traditions give us rich resources with which to struggle with these dilemmas without having to collapse into simplistic cartoon-caricature conclusions that see all nuclear weapons possession and all deterrence asprima facieimmoral. 

For my part, I remain firmly convinced that nuclear deterrence remains both possible and a profoundly ethical choice.

The challenge for us, both morally and practically, is how to wrestle with these questions and arrive at answers that reflect the fact that while it is of course an ethical imperative to avoid nuclear Armageddon, it is also an ethical imperative to deter aggression and keep evil predators from devouring sovereign polities and enslaving free peoples.  I believe nuclear deterrence provides us the real possibility of doing both these things at the same time – though of course not simply or easily, nor without any risk of failure. 

In struggling with such challenges, moreover, we cannot avoid factoring into our thinking our strategic adversaries’ ownnuclear morality – or perhaps, by our lights, their lack it.  If we wish to deter aggression by such powers, as I believe it is part of our moral duty to attempt to do, we need both to understand how they think about these issues and to appreciate the ways in which our own debates over nuclear morality may affect their calculations.

Thank you.

—Christopher Ford