NUCLEAR WAR IS NOT A PERMISSIBLE FORM OF SELF-DEFENSE. War, Nuclear War, and Nuclear Deterrence Some Conceptual and Moral Issues. Richard Wasserstrom. Ethics, Vol. 95, No. 3, Special Issue Symposium on Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence (Apr, 1985), pp. 424-444. Published by The University of Chicago Press. Stable URL http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381030 To use nuclear weapons, in even the most plausible case, as a means of national self- defense against a wrongful, evil, murderous aggressor would still always be monstrously wrong and never in practice justifiable, even as a lesser of awesome and awful evils. For if our ideas about the permissible use of deadly force in national defense are to have any meaningful connection with our ideas about individual self-defense, the individuals against whom deadly force is used in a war of self-defense must have some causal, or closely analogous, connection with the danger at hand before they can rightly be deliberately killed by the weapons used in a war of self-defense. And if, as surely is the case, there are many such individuals in any country (no matter how aggressive) who have no such connections, then the use of weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction against them is not, and cannot be, founded on an intelligible or defensible recourse to ideas of legitimate, national self-defense.
