From Pope Leo this week, according to the National Catholic Reporter: "Pope Leo quotes Bob Dylan song in book foreword calling for nuclear disarmament."
Pope Leo XIV said the conscience of just one person can "be worth the entire world" when it comes to preventing a nuclear catastrophe, in a new book foreword that also quotes an unpublished Bob Dylan song about the atomic bomb.
The pope made the remarks in a foreword published July 21 for a forthcoming book, "Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift," which the Vatican Publishing House says will soon be released in English.
In the essay, Leo cited lyrics from an unpublished 1963 song by Bob Dylan, "Go Away You Bomb," and he praised the pacifist Servant of God Dorothy Day as an example of someone who worked for peace.
"Above all in the atomic era, the affirmation of the truth must push through: it is not atomic weapons that generate peace, but disarmament," the pope wrote.
I am not sure why quoting Bob Dylan is a headline news item for the National Catholic Reporter, but there you are. Pope Leo broke no new ground for the papacy here, taking the same position that prior Popes have taken.
I make no criticism of the Pope for this. I was trained in my military career as a nuclear target analyst and in two assignments I was directly in the chain of command had orders for use of nukes come down. So how do I feel about nukes?
Well, I hate the damn things!
That said, however, I think that total nuclear disarmament worldwide would not be the panacea that its proponents seem to dream. What would a nuclear-weapons-free world look like? I suspect that disarmament advocates think it would look like this:
But we already know what a nuclear-free world looks like.
It looks like this.
From the first world war to the second was only 25 years. World War II ended almost immediately after the first (and thankfully only) use of atomic weapons. It's been 81 years since the end of the second world war. There has been no third world war. I don't mean that the past eight decades have been unicorns and rainbows, but can you imagine what a third world war might have been like even if fought with only conventional weapons?
