NavyChiefDiscussesMoralityandWeapons.html
Text of term of reference 1) i) to June 23, 1984 registered
letter to President Jimmy Carter
Pentagon
Navy's Chief Discusses Morality and Weapons
By RICHARD HALLORAN
Special to The New York Times
WASHINGTON, May 5--After Adm. James D. Watkins, the Chief
of Naval Operations, received an honorary degree of Doctor of
Humane Letters at Marymount College in Arlington, Va., last
summer, he turned to the audience to accept and said, "I am a
moral man."
"I am constantly making choices every day of my life, choices
between good and evil," he said. "It is a constant battery of
choices. Sometimes I must also choose between one good and
another good, or between a greater good and a lesser good, or
even perhaps between two apparent evils."
Among those choices, he told the gathering at the Roman Catholic
women's college, were those pertaining to national defense.
"For our nation," he said, "we have chosen deterrence over war.
We have chosen strength over weakness."
Since then, the admiral has expanded on the theme of the moral
man in the military service in several articles, including a
message to the senior class at the Naval Academy in which he
said, "We have chosen possessing the weapons of potential
destruction to ensure our peace."
Recently, Admiral Watkins who has been the Navy's senior
officer for a year, reflected again on moral choices confronting
military leaders in the nuclear era, contending in an interview
in his Pentagon office that the concept of mutually assured
destruction was morally unsound in the long run but that
deterrence was legitimate until something better could be found.
Meantime, the nation's Catholic bishops this week approved a
pastoral letter in which they gravely questioned the morality of
deterrence. That has brought them into public conflict with top
officials of the Reagan Administration, who have
asserted that national security made the threat of nuclear
retaliation a moral imperative.
Admiral Watkins, a Catholic, declined to comment directly
on the pastoral letter, saying that he had not yet seen the
text. But he said, "I have been carefully following this debate
and I believe it quite healthy."
The Admiral has been the only senior military officer to voice
his moral views in public. He said he had discussed the issues
with other service chiefs at their twice-a-month prayer
breakfast, saying, "Most of us agreed that we had never
approached our responsibilities from what you might call a moral
direction."
He said he had decided to "approach this whole issue not from
the Soviet threat and the U.S. response but rather to go back to
fundamentals and deal with it on what I would have to call a
moral basis."
In the admiral's view, Soviet military objectives are "morally
flawed" while those of the West are "morally acceptable." Thus,
he argued, "I have to look at the balance between the evils
involved in nuclear exchange and I pick the lesser of the evils."
"That may be a negative way of looking at it," he said, " but I
don't like to be overly positive about nuclear weaponry. I
happen to believe that we ought to get rid of them."*
Admiral Watkins drew a line between the morally
acceptable now and the morally unacceptable in the future. He
focused on the concept of mutually assured destruction, which
holds that the Soviet Union and the United States would blow
each other up in a nuclear exchange.
'The Way the World Has Been'
"Mutually assured destruction has never been a concept that I
could understand," he said. "I don't think it is morally
sound." But he said it was reality today, and added, "I cannot
condemn the United States for a mutually assured destruction
concept, which is the way the world has been for 20 years."
As a long-term objective, Admiral Watkins said, "I
believe the whole emphasis of this country now to rid the world
of the employment of nuclear weaponry as a tool of political
might is proper." He referred to President Reagan's
ambitious plan to replace the nuclear offense with a network of
defenses.
He asserted that much of the debate over the MX missile had been
futile. "There has been too much focus on basing mode A versus
basing mode B," he argued. "You have to go back and get your
fundamental underpinnings for the whole deterrent strategy or
you lose the picture."
The Catholic bishops, in their pastoral letter, argued that the
nuclear weapons were immoral because they were so indiscriminate
and so destructive.
'I don't like to be overly positive about nuclear
weaponry. I happen to believe that we ought to get rid of
them.'
Admiral Watkins said he found that distinction hard to
make because, he said, even a conventional bomb dropped
indiscriminately was immoral.
'A Very Significant Problem'
He said he found chemical weapons to be "more insidious than
anything else." Emphasizing that this was a personal view, he
said: "I find it more evil to use chemical weapons, nerve gas
or these things that make people bleed. To me, that's the worst
of all."
The Reagan Administration has proposed that an arsenal of
new chemical weapons be acquired as a deterrent to the Soviet
Union, which has been accused of using such weapons in
Afghanistan and providing them to the North Vietnamese for use
in Cambodia.
The bishops also asserted that the first use of nuclear weapons
would be immoral. "That's a very significant problem for me
from a moral standpoint," said Admiral Watkins. "We've
always been the first ones to take a blow to the cheek. I
believe as a policy we should never allow ourselves to be so
rigidly structured that we don't raise questions in the mind of
the Soviet Union."
Asked what would be his moral criteria for employing nuclear
weapons, Admiral Watkins paused and then said: "I would
have to know the entire scenario up to this point. How did we
get into this situation? What alternatives do we have? Have I
used up every single alternative at my fingertips? Are we about
to see the demise of everything that we cherish? Are we about
to lose the Western world and democracy? Is it very clear that
it is now a question of subservience for an undefined period of
years? Have I attempted to negotiate with the Soviet Union with
the most powerful tools that I have left? Have we reached a
stage of hopelessness?"
"Those are the kinds of things that would go through my mind,"
he said. "It would have to be that hard."
(article accompanied by photograph of Admiral James D.
Watkins, captioned:
Adm. James D. Watkins, Chief of Naval
Operations)
(text of article from May 6, 1983 New York Times
*-RE TALKING WITH SAM OF U.N. ASSOCIATION AND HE
TOLD HE WOULD "NEVER FORGIVE THE U.S. FOR USING THE HIROSHIMA
NUKE"==========
DON'T THINK THE WISDOM OF THOMAS
JEFFERSON IS PASSÉ YET IN WHAT YOU ARE ENTITLED
TO FROM YOUR GOVERNMENT? LET YOUR VOICE BE HEARD: TAKE A BRIEF SIDESTEP HERE TO SIGN MY
GUESTBOOK.
TAKE YOUR NEXT
FOOTSTEP HERE TO SEE THE TEXT OF AN "OFF-THE-RECORD" TERM OF
REFERENCE TO THIS SUBMISSION TO PRESIDENT CARTER.
This page hosted by