NEITHER SIDE IS JUSTIFIED IN LAUNCHING A NUCLEAR WAR. 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 engage in nuclear war by being the first to devastate those living elsewhere would surely be to act too soon in light of the magnitude of the certain murderous slaughter of the innocent that the weapons would produce to respond to a nuclear onslaught by launching nuclear weapons in return would be to act too late and in an equally murderous way in light of the danger that no longer can be averted. Whether consequences to the innocent can ever justify the murder of other innocent persons can here be left a theoretically open question because in nuclear war the relevant consequences are either too uncertain and anticipatory to license the certain, massive murder inescapably linked to a first nuclear attack or too fixed and already irremediably determined to license the certain, massive murder equally inescapably linked to a second responsive attack.
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