EDITORIAL The real evil that lurks in missile
silos
Much has been made of young 1st Lt.
Ryan Berry, the standout officer, West Point graduate and devout Catholic who
objected to working in the close quarters of a missile silo with female
officers.
Berry, 26, who is married and has a child, serves in the Air
Force. He said his Catholic beliefs compelled him to request that he not be
required to work with a woman who is not his wife in the close quarters of a
silo on 24-hour shifts, 100 feet below the ground in a space where there is
only one bed.
It has been said his convictions are rooted in traditional
Catholic teaching about avoiding occasions of sin.
Reportedly a number of religious groups as well as Berrys
Air Force chaplain have championed his cause. Cardinal John OConnor of
New York, himself a former military officer, said hell back Berry right
up to the president.
We commend the young soldier for having the courage to stand on a
matter of conscience even to the detriment of his career.
The sad thing, of course, is that no one -- from his chaplain to
OConnor -- is raising the more compelling moral issue of whether the
young man should place himself in a situation where carrying out ultimate
orders would cause the indiscriminate killing of countless thousands,
including, inevitably, many innocent civilians.
Maybe Berry has worked through the moral thicket of how to spend
days poised to push the nuclear button despite the persistent condemnations by
a litany of popes, bishops and moral theologians of nuclear weaponry and modern
warfare. In all weve read, no one has raised the question.
Perhaps here is where young Berry stands in for all of us who,
hunkered down in our domestic bunkers, maintain a moral vision that stops at
the front door. Many of us would sacrifice mightily to preserve marriages and
families without giving a thought to the moral horror we assent to through our
silence and military taxes.
During the decades of the Cold War, Americans tolerated the
perennial raid on the national treasury by the Pentagon and military
contractors because many were convinced a total effort was needed to thwart the
ambitions of the Soviet empire.
So, year after year, the United States poured enormous sums of
money into technology and armaments -- redundant to a ludicrous degree -- that
we hoped we would never have to use.
Although the Soviet threat has disintegrated, the United States is
still spending as if the Evil Empire were at the door, buying and
developing the very weapons systems that belong to a past era.
Some will argue that we have gone soft, that defense spending has
dropped to a dangerous level. But the figures dont bear that out.
And the fact that we have become, post-Cold War, the worlds
major arms merchant deepens our complicity in spreading violence around the
globe.
The evil of our continued military gluttony is apparent on several
levels. As a culture, we are squandering resources and our childrens
future. Money that should be going to education, health care, the creation of
jobs, restoring the infrastructure and a host of other pursuits keeps getting
poured down the bottomless gullet of the military-industrial complex.
The figures -- the hundreds of billions -- are so large as to be
nearly incomprehensible. The stakes, thus, are exceedingly high for a relative
few who will not quickly, or without a fierce battle, give up such easy
money.
The temptation to dream that all is well, that the nuclear threat
is over, that the United States is the benign champion of the downtrodden, that
the military spending is necessary to sustain our superpower status -- that is
an occasion of sin.
The tug to go along, to be complicit in such enormous violence and
waste, thats an occasion of sin and a magnitude of evil that clearly
dwarfs that of the impure thoughts of a lonely couple in a nuclear missile
silo.
National Catholic Reporter, August 13,
1999
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