The Public Debate on Weapons

In these various issues that we've been discussing -- Central America, the nuclear issue, and so on -- there seems to be a problem in political education, the way these issues are debated publicly. In the nuclear debate, for example, there are often elements of distortion, of hysteria, of whipping up the electorate at the time of election. What are your views there? Is part of this intrusion of a moral dialogue [an attempt] to elevate the quality of the debate? Is that partly what's going on here?

Well, I agree very much with a statement which McGeorge Bundy has made in a couple of speeches recently in which he says the primary task of the public order regarding the nuclear debate is to tell the truth. That we must work at the effort to tell the truth. I don't think that necessarily means that lots of people are lying, but I do think it does mean that issues get projected in a certain kind of way, that something can be done for one reason and have multiple consequences, and one just doesn't talk about the consequences.

So Bundy's proposal, that we all must work at telling the truth and at making sure that we define the issues with a certain kind of fairness [so that] public constituencies are given an honest interpretation of the issues, is a very important question today. It's important because these issues are enormously technically complicated, and therefore it is very easy to carry on the discussion in a way that cuts out the general public. So, telling the truth isn't simply stating the facts, it is trying to translate the significance of various choices that we face. That's a first step.

A second step can be seen by just comparing different cases. We've had a major debate in the eighties about, for example, the deployment of the MX missile. The Bishops' Conference took a position against the MX, and I think it was a wise position. Right now, we're prepared to deploy fifty. It would be my hope that we wouldn't deploy the fifty, because I think even the fifty are a mistake. But it was precisely the public debate, and the public elite debate together, that reduced the first proposal of two hundred MX's to fifty.

In the mid-1970s we took a decision that had much more implications for the future direction of the arms race, namely, the MERVing of nuclear weapons, the placing of multiple warheads on single missiles, which has had a fundamental impact on the nuclear arms race for both the Soviets and us. That was a decision which, essentially, there was no public attention paid to. It wasn't that anybody was hiding it, that isn't the point. It was in the Congressional Record if you wanted to see it, if you wanted to read about it in the paper. But there was no mobilization of the public to look at that.

Now, to my knowledge, almost everybody today feels that the MERVing decision was a mistake. And yet we made it, we live with the consequences of it, and there was no public discussion of it. Telling the truth means not just getting out the facts but getting them into the public arena so that that kind of decision receives sufficient attention. I think that's a major function of a letter like ours, and of that kind of activity on the part of the Church.

So in a way, the involvement of the bishops was almost an inevitable result of the spilling over of this nuclear debate into the public realm. Once that happens, people are going to look to different sources of education on these issues.

To some degree, the letter was both a response to it spilling over, and the letter served as a major catalyst to projecting the nuclear issue into the public debate.

Another issue that undoubtedly will be coming up, that will be on the bishops' agenda, would be the relation of U.S. policy toward the Third World. We're now going through the throes of the discoveries with regard to "Iran-gate." When one looks at the Tower Commission report, embedded in that are perceptions of the Third World and our involvement in that. Does the Church have a special perspective from which it may help to inform ethical considerations on U.S. policy toward the Third World?

I think, again, the Church can be a useful participant in the public debate here in the United States. Its special perspective, if you will, will come from two places. One, again there is a rather systematic tradition of moral analysis about how you think about not just questions war and peace, but questions of distributive justice and human rights in international relations. That's part of the moral tradition also. Secondly, there is this link that we talked about earlier, of the Church in a number of countries and the Church in the U.S. Catholic bishops in the United States, as I say, have been very involved in the Central America debate all during the eighties. That's a result of both the moral tradition about social justice and human rights, and the links with the Catholic Church in Central America. We have very close links with the Church in the Philippines, with the Church in South Korea, with the Church in South Africa, Brazil, Chile. Those links are already in place and, what happens is precisely because of a dialogue that goes on between the Bishops' Conferences.

In addition to that, you get U.S. missionaries who serve in these countries and then come back, or send back information about how issues are perceived there. So you get these linkages that then feed themes into the Church in the U.S., and the Church in the U.S. can then project those themes into the public policy debate. Now that task of projection is a task of translation. You have to hear from other countries, and then you have to do an analytical job of relating what you hear to the ongoing U.S. policy debate.

So, for example, in Central America, the theme of the Catholic bishops has been that the fundamental mistake is to look at the Central America question primarily in what you might call a geopolitical perspective. In other words, if you see Central America as simply a test case of U.S.-Soviet conflict, what happens is, you miss the roots of the conflict -- for example, in El Salvador you miss the historical roots of long-term injustice, long-term denial of human rights, and a people that is determined to change that. If you see it simply as Soviet involvement, you miss it analytically.

Secondly, if you take a geopolitical view as your primary view of the issue, that has ethical implications because it reduces the people of the region to a "means" in the geopolitical framework.

Our approach has been to say that if you understand the background historically in the region, you get a better angle of vision on it. Our policy ought to be to treat the people of the region as important in themselves, and to ask how U.S. policy can be helpful to that region. That doesn't mean that there's not a geopolitical dimension to it. It means that the geopolitical dimension ought to fit in secondly, not primarily. So you do get angles of vision on this.

The implications of what you're saying for the way we make our policy is that our policy elites have to be receptive to a kind of diversity of viewpoint, both within the country and from without the country. For example, just in the case of the Church as a transnational transmission belt for ideas. So a policy decided by the elite without recognition of this isn't going to succeed, ultimately.

I think that that's right, in the sense that you are going to have groups like the churches and others who are going to press issues into the debate, that it isn't going to be just a few people that are going to decide policy. Although it's true that you don't get enough debate on foreign policy in the U.S. even as it is. But the elite debate can be very important, it's a question of what's the content of the elite debate. In other words, what I just said, namely, that in viewing Central America policy we ought to look at the local roots of the conflict, we ought recognize that there is a geopolitical dimension, and then thirdly, we ought to recognize -- and this is what the bishops have said -- that our most important contribution as a country is at the regional level, trying to talk about a regional peace in the area. Well, that three-fold analysis of how we ought to think about policy is a perspective that many people in the policy community would support.

In other words, within the policy community, the academic community, for example, there are a number of people who would say that a geopolitical perspective as the primary focus on Central America is a mistaken perspective. What you hear out of the Church also get empirical confirmation from a number of analysts in the political arena.

So if the people who are making our policy aren't attuned to the broader consensus that they have to build on these issues, they're not going to succeed.

It depends. We've had an enormous fight about Central America policy. Every year, at this time of year, in the spring, it's almost a ritual for us at the Bishops' Conference to be up on the Hill testifying about Central America policy. We've been doing it since 1980. We haven't been totally successful. I think the effect of a lot of the public debate about U.S. policy in Central America has been to forestall certain things happening. Because of public resistance, there's been a limit placed on the degree to which we use the military option; that doesn't mean we've changed the logic of the policy. I don't think we have.

One final question. How does the individual fit in to these equations that we've been discussing, in which foreign policy is harder to make, in which a larger number of voluntary groups such as the Church are being brought in, where we're getting a greater sense of what the world is like out there that we're acting on -- what does this mean for the individual in their involvement as a citizen concerned about the making of foreign policy?

When the Church publishes something, its first audience is its own community. Members of the Church are also citizens of the United States. So as you publish these views and ask individuals in the Church to think about them, you want them to think about them precisely as citizens. Secondly, whether you take the nuclear question, or you take the Vietnam debate, or to some degree, the Central America debate, American citizens on the whole have become aware at different times of how directly policy intersects their lives as citizens. That was very clear in Vietnam. I think some of the concern in the eighties about nuclear weapons was that when physicians came into a local community and said, "Let me tell you what the local hospital is going to look like after a nuclear attack," people grasped hold of that. The direction of Central America policy, if there are not certain restraints placed on it, [will make] it very easy for us to get into a situation where we're faced with either "go in," or "retreat in a major way." That would have enormous implications for citizens.

So there's a whole lesson here that these policy questions don't float above the air, they touch people directly. I think the response to the South Africa question has been remarkable. In local communities, in corporations, in a variety of ways, people have said, essentially, that what is going to happen in South Africa eventually is dependent on people in South Africa, but clearly there is an influence from the U.S., there is a posture, and I'm going to try and take that posture in a given way. So there are signs that people find that linkage. We probably need a lot more of it, on a large range of issues. But there are interesting signs.

Father Hehir, thank you very much for joining us for this very fascinating conversation on ethics and foreign policy. And thank you very much for joining us today.

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