As Spiritual Leaders

If nuclear or biochemical weapons are used during your tour of duty, you will not have 38 years, as I have had, to slowly assess the immorality of nuclear war. It could be the end of our beautiful world with all its high ideals of freedom, justice, and peace.

I was on Tinian Island when the Enola Gay and the Bok's Car planes dropped those fateful bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. They were small bombs by today's standards, but how well I remember the utter devastation at both sites. Several months later, when I visited both sites with our occupation forces, I remember especially the suffering of hundreds of survivors in makeshift medical centers, children horribly burned and in the last stages of radiation sickness.

Like you, I was still at that time convinced that such horrors were necessary to win the war, to bring peace, our peace to the world. It was only slowly through 20 years that the nagging, squirming pain in my gut forced me to re-evaluate the morality of those acts. I offered Mass, read the scriptures, especially the Sermon on the Mount, studied Gandhi, and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. I discovered that this was not what Jesus taught, lived, and died for. The crucifix was constantly before me. Lent and Good Friday were clear signs of how his peace was to be attained.

One thought kept recurring. It was not the Enola Gay and Bok's Car that dropped those first bombs. It was Paul Tibbits, Charles Sweeney, and their crews who guided those planes, pulled the levers, pushed the buttons. I was one of them. I cooperated with them. I was part of that system that directly slaughtered 200,000 people, most of whom were innocent non-combatants.

St. Augustine said 1,700 years ago that a just war could only be fought as long as non-combatants, civilians, were not harmed. I think of those little children in the makeshift medical centers, suffering, dying. Is this the collateral damage we are preparing for by the tens of millions?

You have time and the obligation to search your conscience on these questions. I wish in 1945 someone had urged me to examine my conscience on the immorality of slaughtering innocent people. I was brainwashed then by my country, by my church, and by my family. So are you now. No, not by torture or force, but by a millennium of propaganda glorifying war, romanticizing it, justifying the wholesale slaughter of civilians. Einstein was right when he said that with the splitting of the atom, all things have changed except our way of thinking, and so we drift hopelessly toward unparalleled destruction.

I urge you as spiritual leaders of your flocks to seriously examine the morality of nuclear and biochemical war. I know that deterrence is the name of the game. However, you know, I know, and "they" know that if "necessary" those "deterrent" bombs will be used.

You have studied moral theology. It is intrinsically evil to directly kill innocent human beings, and that is all that modern nuclear weapons can do. Collateral damage and just war language belong to another, past era, an era that is gone forever. We are in a new age in which the past designations no longer fit. It's either nonviolence or non-existence, as Martin Luther King Jr. said. It is up to us, you and me, with the help of God, to make our day a resurrection to life—a new life, the life that Jesus promised us if we are faithful to him and his teachings.

In the peace of Christ,

Rev. George Zabelka
Ret. Lt. Col. AUS Chaplain

George Zabelka served as Army chaplain in 1945 to the squadron that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the time this article appeared, he assisted in diocesan work in Lansing, Michigan, and conducted workshops on nonviolence.