Here in California, where there’s a good bit of dreaming, some dreams are nightmares. They feature earthquakes. The ill-starred San Andreas fault is likely to host the next mega-quake, the “big one.” As it happens, my family lives along the Inglewood-Newport Beach fault. The predictions for folks like us are pretty grim. So, what are our options? We could move away, at the cost of seriously uprooting ourselves. We have retrofitted our 1940’s tract house. We do update our “emergency measures” file. And for now? Pray, Lord, keep us safe from natural disasters.

And what of human disasters? The news that Mr. Trump is bargaining with Saudi Arabia to provide it with critical nuclear know-how underscores the worsening human disasters of nuclear proliferation and blind reliance on nuclear deterrence. The morally untethered regimes of the United States and Saudi Arabia, as well as those of Russia and China, of Israel, and of Pakistan and India are themselves monstrous characters of a global nightmare.

How are Catholics to address the human disasters of the widening nuclear fault? Turning away our attention, however tempting, amounts to complicity. For a start, then, we need to be clear about just war thinking. Because the use of nuclear weapons means deliberately killing the innocent, nuclear war cannot be just. Next, we need to admit what follows: because it is wrong to use nuclear weapons, it is also wrong to threaten to use them. But this is what the policy of nuclear deterrence amounts to. (Indeed, we even refuse to agree to a “no first use” pact.) For a compelling development of this argument, see the analysis of John Finnis, Joseph M. Boyle, Jr., and Germain Grisez: Nuclear Deterrence, Morality and Realism (Oxford, 1987).

In 2017, at a conference on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, Pope Francis spoke directly to the bankruptcy of deterrence. Noting “the catastrophic humanitarian and environmental effects of any employment of nuclear devices,” and “the risk of an accidental detonation,” he adjudged that “the threat of their use, as well as their very possession, is to be firmly condemned.” The nuclear threat and its arsenal, he insisted, “exist in the service of a mentality of fear that affects not only the parties in conflict but the entire human race.”

Just this past month Pope Leo affirmed that “it is not atomic weapons that generate peace, but disarmament. This truth, which seemed clear in past decades when we witnessed a nuclear de-escalation, has been obscured by a race to armament that today frightens and terrifies.” Enter now artificial intelligence. Leo continues, the question of “the survival of the human species” is one which “the combination of the cyber domain and global rearmament” seriously poses (Vatican News, 19 June 2026). In the end, AI is mere digital machinery that some would have us worship like an idol of old.

Consulting our moral compass can, and should, point us in new directions. In the pastoral order we need to speak up, again and again, about the grave evil of nuclear stockpiling. In the political order, we need to vote for disarmament here and now. In the personal order, the order of our hearts, we need to understand that peace begins with us. The consequences of our taking these new directions might well be staggering. In the pastoral order, Catholics who are often at odds about what it is to be pro-life for the whole of life will surely struggle with, and sometimes dispute, a pastor’s call for immediate disarmament. In the political order, we will be hard pressed even to find candidates who will publicly oppose the possession of nuclear weapons. In the personal order, any peacemaking that is life changing will make us strangers in a society built on possessive individualism.

In every order — pastoral, political, and personal — discernment will be critical. Each of us has a personal vocation. Nonetheless, discernment centers on a searching examination of one’s conscience. In every order we can find exemplary pathfinders. Pope Leo has honored the witness of Dorothy Day; she honored the witness of Gandhi; he begged that Christians witness to Christ. And Christ himself, at the close of his Sermon on the Mount, charged us with being perfect, “even as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). We are perfect, that is, complete insofar as we fully realize our shared vocation to love and to love even our enemies. Doing so depends on being open to God’s amazing grace.

Another pair of pathfinders, one political and the other fictional, comes to mind. In the political order, there is reason enough to suppose that if the United States renounces its nuclear weaponry, it will be subject to nuclear blackmail. The sociologist Gordon Zahn (a past contributor to NOR), explored the cost of discipleship in his German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars (Sheed and Ward, 1962) and his In Solitary Witness (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), the story of Blessed Franz Jagerstatter. In addition, Zahn perceptively outlined the strategy of nonviolent resistance in a nuclear world. His Alternative to War (Council on Religion and International Affairs, 1963) is a slender classic which merits our close study.

A second pathfinder prompts us to an exercise of moral imagination. Walter M. Miller’s novel A Canticle for Leibowitz tells the story of nuclear war, arduous recovery, and yet a second Armageddon in which nuclear tactics finally lead to a new Rome safely removed from a ruined planet. Miller’s story mixes the mundane and farcical with, yes, religious practice and the search for the sacred that mirrors our contemporary disorders.

In the midst of these disorders, these only too human fault lines, we might well ask whether we ourselves “see and hear but do not listen or understand” (Matthew 13:13). But how many times will the Lord stay his hand? We might well pray that peacemaking somehow dismantles the structures of nuclear sin.