Faslane Submarine Base

Scotsman David Stewart SJ argues that the threat to use nuclear weapons is its own form of violence.

As the days darkened late last Autumn, some of us, Christians and others, gathered at the gates of Faslane submarine base on Gareloch, one of the Clyde sea-lochs of western Scotland. We had a prayer service outside those gates, repenting for the presence of the submarines and their dreadful cargo of sea-launched nuclear missiles. We did this because we believe that the presence of these weapons, and the British state’s implied threat to use them, is an affront to God’s peace and justice.

Two seasons later, our prayer-protest and witness comes back to mind as the Holy Father presents his prayer-intention for April, that we ‘pray for the spread of peace and nonviolence, by decreasing the use of weapons by States and citizens’. We do not, in our time, have a culture of peace. Pope Francis asks, through his personal prayer-network, that we pray for such a culture to spread, to replace our violent ways, be those individual or communal. A threat of violence is violent. When a nation-state possesses thermo-nuclear weapons and launch systems, it places the implied threat of violence at the heart of policy. Our small gathering at the nuclear subma-

Pope's Intention: We pray for

spread of peace and non-violence, by decreasing the use of weapons by States and citizens

rine base in Argyll was a refusal to accept the inevitability of such a policy. As Pope Francis suggests this month, there is another way.

This lochside fortress, officially known as H.M. Naval Base Clyde, is home port to the UK’s force of four nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed submarines. Nearby, Coulport Naval Base is where the actual warheads are stored. When these subs slip out of the Clyde estuary into the Irish Sea, they are always armed; each boat carries enough firepower to instantly kill millions. Our gathering that day, which included the Catholic archbishop of Glasgow and the moderator of the Church of Scotland’s general assembly, wanted to say that this is wrong. The presence, indeed the very existence of these weapons of mass destruction is an affront to God’s creation. We contemplated for a moment the outstanding natural beauty of this part of our common home, God’s creation in Argyll, and then the appalling irony of what destruction even one detonation would cause, here or anywhere.

Also wrong is the spiralling cost of this hardware. The UK government plans to upgrade the warheads and boats. They will spend at least 200 billion pounds on the latest system to replace the current Trident missile system. This costly new system will be useless against the range of threats, such as terrorism and cyber-security, that face us in this century. Estimates of global military spending since 1945 run as high as two trillion dollars.

Archbishop Nolan, president of the National J&P Commission, points out that these huge costs divert resources from the poor. He notes that the annual UK nuclear weapons spend of around four billion pounds per annum is about the same as what was cut from the foreign aid budget.

Over forty years ago, the Catholic bishops of Scotland issued an outspoken statement on nuclear weapons. Their landmark letter of March 1982 claimed that if it is immoral to use such weapons, then it is immoral to threaten to use them. There is no moral good attached to the possession of these weapons, which wipe out combatants and non-combatants alike, and no good in the inexorable readiness to use them.

Since the Second World War Catholic thought on nuclear weapons has developed. In his 1967 encyclical, Populorum Progressio, Pope Paul VI drew an explicit link between justice and peace, calling development ‘the new name for peace’, noting that ‘peace is not simply the absence of warfare, based on a precarious balance of power; it is fashioned by efforts directed day after day toward the establishment of ... a more perfect form of justice’. In 2014 Pope Francis decried how expenditure ‘on nuclear weapons squanders the wealth of nations’. Those Scots bishops, over forty years ago, stood in that tradition; Francis, in Hiroshima in 2019, used almost exactly their words.

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