Total War and Limited Government: the German Catholic Debate at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age

The chapter recovers the debate among German Catholics over North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO’s) introduction of tactical nuclear weapons into the new West German army (Bundeswehr). Young Catholic scholars Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde and Robert Spaemann forcefully opposed nuclear weaponry in debate with German theologian Gustav Gundlach. The arguments turned chiefly on natural law and papal authority, less so on theology. The chapter reconstructs the argument and recasts it in terms of political theology, a category that seems well suited for thinking about an issue of such gravity and finality (nuclear apocalypse being the ultimate Schmittian exception) and which the authors knew but avoided because of its discrediting under Nazism. The birth of a critical political theology in the 1960s enabled thinking about creation and divine sovereignty that could argue the case and exploit Catholicism’s global standing without lapsing into pre-critical biblical interpretation and philosophical methods ill-equipped to think about nuclear war

Behind the veil of good intentions: power analysis of the nuclear non-proliferation regime

Susan Strange argued that one of the main problems with the use of the concept of regime in IR is the way in which it ‘distort[s] reality implying an exaggerated measure of predictability and order in the system’. Instead, she claimed, scholars should look at the numerous and dynamic bargains on which regimes are based. This article examines four bargains displaying various operations of power that have underpinned the nuclear non-proliferation regime. The four bargains are: first, the superpower collusion in the establishment of the non-proliferation treaty; second, coercive diplomacy and the use of force in preventing access to nuclear materials and technology; third, institutional contestation regarding the aims of the non-proliferation regime and its technical maintenance; and fourth, the creation of particular hierarchies of states via the non-proliferation norm. These bargains have been hidden behind the veil of good intensions, which is the conviction that preventing the spread of nuclear weapons is an unquestionable global good. The veil of good intentions, in turn, has helped to maintain the unequal distribution of material capabilities at the heart of the non-proliferation regim