MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION IS M.A.D, Gerald J. Gregg
Matthew 26:45~-52 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
February 18, 1979 Columbus, Ohio

As the Gospel according to Matthew tells the story, one of the earliest teach-
ings of Jesus was about peace, He spoke encouragingly to the crowd gathered at the
foot of a mountain and made a promise: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall
be called sons of God."' Concluding His account the same Matthew reports that the
very last teaching of Jesus' earthly ministry also concerned peace, You heard it as
the last verse of today's scripture lesson: Jesus said, "All who take the sword will
perish by the sword," It was a sharp reprimand, a warning to His disciples gathered
then in the Garden of Gethsemane and to followers in churches in all generations
since, It has haunted me for some time now, Are we trying today to live by the
sword?

Throughout my entire career in the ministry I have made personal commitments ~
sometimes costly commitments - to relate the gospel of Christ to the problems of
society. I have never gone looking for social concerns; there have always been
enough and more than enough right at hand, crying out for attention. I have always
been kept so busy with the problems right in the community where I lived, that I felt
no twinge of conscience about leaving the worldwide problems to the experts, the
diplomats and statesmen, So, while I prayed for peace and disarmament, I didn't get
involved, There was more than enough to do at home, In fact, to be very frank, many
of the characters most vocal about disarmament struck me as kooks, on-the-fringe
types with whom I identified very little,

Since last October I have become increasingly uncomfortable with that situation,
Heaven knows, there is a superabundance of problems calling for our Christian minis~
try right here in Columbus and in this immediate neighborhood, And it is vital that
we care for them, But now I have to raise the question whether we Christians must
not take a bigger share in the biggest question concerning our world's future, the
question of peace and disarmament, I am finding more and more that the Gethsemane
words of Jesus are pointing at me and at my nation and at my world: "All who take
the sword will perish by the sword,”

My thinking has been changed by a lot of reading done since last October, It
began when I was given a book entitled The Global Connection, a book written by
Dennis Shoemaker, when he was one of the national staff leaders of our denomination,
You will be interested to know that the Reverend Shoemaker and his wife Mary now
live in Columbus and have regularly been attending our worship services in prepara~
tion for joining this congregation two weeks from today,

Last Friday I phoned for permission to mention him in this sermon, Until then,
he didn't know what impact his book made on me, In fact, I haven't talked about
this with anyone very much, I had a lot of homework to do, a lot to catch up on, a
lot of personal ignorance to inform, a lot of thinking and praying to do before I
could trust myself to speak. I wanted to go at the issue as factually as possible
and not get drawn into someone else's emotional fervor,

I am sure some of you are far ahead of me in this concern, Whether you are or
not, perhaps you can relate to my lifelong attitude that it was plenty to take care
of problems just in the community, So I'd like to tell you just a little of what
has gripped my conscience these last four months, The details are very complex and
intertwined, but I'll try to capsulize a few points, I don't have any anecdotes to
lighten this account, I simply ask you to work hard with me for the next fifteen
minutes or so,

~2-

First, a word of caution, I'm going to be speaking primarily about our own
nation's part in the most horrendous situation our world has ever faced, That is
not to say other nations do not share responsibility, They certainly do, most
notably Russia, But our own nation's role must concern us first for three reasons,
Number one, as citizens we are primarily responsible for our own national policies,
Second, there is little we can do about policies of other nations except as they
react to our national strategy.

The third reason is very hard to discuss right now, when America's ambassadors
and international representatives are being murdered and American citizens are being
harshly treated by peoples we have befriended. America has a great deal of pain
right now and any criticism is hard to take. So the third reason is a bitter pill to
swallow: we Americans must focus first on America when we talk about peace and dis-
armament because the documentation is overwhelming that at nearly every stage of
nuclear escalation our country has taken the first atep, made the first threat,

Now, a word about money, I've had a hard time appreciating the enormous sums
involved, dealing in hundreds of billions, How much is a billion dollars, after all?
Take just one portion, the increase in military spending proposed for the new
national budget, The recommended increase is quoted as being a "real three percent
increase", which means three percent on top of the inflationary increase, On the
surface that doesn't sound so bad, Very few political figures are debating the Penta~
gon on the matter, Hardly anyone is pointing out that already more than half the tax
dollars which Congress can allocate are going to the military, What does another
three percent matker?

Well, I had to put that question into terms 7 could understand, The Largest
financial transaction I have ever been involved in personally was buying a house
when we moved to Columbus, So I wondered, how many houses like the Greggs! could be
purchased with the proposed military increase - just the increase? f didn't believe
the calculator readout at first, so I worked it out again, Is it possible the mili-
tary increase for just this one year would buy outright a home like the Greggs! for
every family in Columbus? More than that; it would buy each family two such houses,

That helped me understand the billions involved, but of course two more homes
for every Columbus family is not the world's greatest need, What about hunger,
worldwide hunger? I believe in the self-help programs to combat hunger, helping
people so they can raise their own food and become self-supporting, But for this
comparison I wanted a simpler example; how much food could be bought to feed the
world's starving millions? 1 took the figures of Church World Service, by far the
largest non-governmental agency dealing in world relief - the anency which distributes
our One Great Hour of Sharing Offering, by the way, Of course, we couldn't expect the
government to be anywhere near as efficient as a church agency, 90 let's figure thirty~
three percent, At one-third efficiency, what effect would the military budget in-
crease have if applied to world hunger instead? The answer; it would completely
eliminate hunger, The moral issue is extremely clear: more bombs or eradicate world
starvation? That issue shouldn't surprise us, More than seven hundred years before
Christ two great Old Testament prophets, Isaiah and Micah, used precisely the same
words to tell us the moral solution: "They shall beat their swords into plows, and
their spears into pruning hooks,"

Big reductions in military spending? What would happen to our national
economy? Wouldn't unemployment zoom? Several authors reminded me about the Old

-3-

South's reaction to the movement to abolish slavery more than a hundred years azo,
Moral questions aside, slavery was absolutely necessary to the economy, so said
popular opinion, But the economic argument for slavery was not true then, as history
proved, and many analysts say it is not true for the gross military expenditures
today,

They point to Japan, for instance, Since their surrender in 1945 that nation
has been prohibited from developing a military force - no money for bombs and arma-
ments, As a result their economic growth has completely outstripped America’s and
now, in many industrial areas, we simply cannot compete with Japan,

i have read statistics showing that money spent for military hardware provides
far fewer jobs than equivalent amounts spent in other areas such as health care and
education, Military spending by its very nature does not produce consumer goods or
services and that means inflation spirals up. An increasing number of economists
these days are saying that military spending is far and away the major cause of our
nation's inflation,

World hunger and our own pocketbocks - those are two good reasons to be concerned
about increased military spending, If that isn't enough, there is a third reason:
sheer survival. In 1967 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara formulated a national
policy called Mutually Assured Destruction, The initials spell out the word ‘mad",
and in fact that was the shorthand word used in national policy circles, M,A,.D.
meant simply that we would maka sure the Russians never fired their nuclear missiles
at us because, while their bombs were on the way to destroy us, we would quickly
launch missiles enough to wipe cut ali the Russian cities, Secretary McNamara was
asked what that would require by way of our own missile buildup, He replied we must
be capable of completely destroying Russia’s major cities, 219 of them, No one con-
sidered him a dove, But in the next ten years America increased its nuclear capabil-
ity so that by 1977 we could destroy Russia's 219 cities 36 times over, Of course
they soon became able to do just about the same to us, We have gone on building and
stockpiling three more warheads each day since, Doesn't there come a time to say
enough is enough?

America must be strong in order to preserve peace, That is the argument Long
used to justify our nuclear stockpiling, But now I have to wonder: what is America's
strength? Is it just the strength of military power? I've always been a proud
American because of the moral power and courage of this nation, I think that is our
veal strength, But what does it say about cur moral leadership when the Defense
Department announces in 1970 that we have nuclear stores sufficient to kill everyone
in the world thirteen times over and then continues to stockpile higher and higher?
Thirteen times worid overkill isn't enough military power? Where is the appropriate
balance between military power and moral power?

And what about the morality when a few years ago American military minds decided
being able to cremate Russia many times over wasn't enough? We had to have a "first
strike capability", be able to destroy all Russia's missiles before they could fire
them, Our nation was informing the world that we would be the first to push the
doomsday button, I have great difficulty seeing the morality in that, It sounds
like a sthoolboy bully daring anyone to step over the line, Someone might be just
juvenile enough to take the dare, Is it possible that we are bypassing moral leader-
ship in our unquestioning reliance on military might? In his monumental book A
Study of History, Arnold J, Toynbee argued that that ia exactly what caused the down-
fall of every previous civilization in history,

~&4-

All the experts I've read agree there is no real defense against nuclear devasta~
tion, no military way to prevent the destruction of America and Americans, The only
assurance all our weapons provide is that we probably could retaliate and destroy the
destroyer with our Last gasp, In reality every step of nuclear escalation has re-
sulted in less security and greater danger for everyone, The first SALT agreement
barely slowed the process, SALT IE is vital; it's the best we have going, but no one
expects very great things from it. Meanwhile, the possibility of nuclear holocaust
grows likelier and Likelier, Some good thinkers are now saying it is inevitable and
the reasons they advance are very hard to dispute, ,

I could go on and on, Chapter and verse could be cited endlessly, If could quote
from my reading to describe sickening scenarios of doomsday, It dees not get any
better. All my reading seems to say that we either work to abolish nuclear weapons,
in fact abolish war, or we will instead abolish civilization.

This whole subject is very upsetting, But I'm really a pretty nice guy, so why
am I telling you these awful things? Pirst of all, because I trust you, TI trust you
to see that I am deeply concerned and I trust you to take the concern seriously, even
to share it, I'm telling you because I believe this is part of what it means to be a
minister, to try to point out where there are serious failings to follow Christ's
teachings, I'm telling you because in all my reading these past four months today's
seripture lesson has reverberated over and over in my mind: "All who take the sword
wili perish by the sword,"

And I'm telling you because I want your help, 2 want you to read about the dis-
armament crisis and then help me judge whether I'm on the right track or not, I've
made a list of the major books which have influenced me, Maybe you'd be willing to
read some of them, ‘They are easy to get hold of. Copies of the List are in the
literature racks and in the church library, When you've studied the situation, let
me know. Should I not be so concerned? Or if you think the concern is valid, should
we get together to see what we can do?

In none of what I've said do I mean to be disparaging of our nation's leaders,
By and large those we elect to national office serve us Americans with dedication and
integrity, But it seems the armament problem hes gotten way beyond them, They need
help to change the present insane direction, ‘That help just may be us and others
like us,

When it comes right down to it, we have always known political power is not
enough to bring peace and wholeness to our world, Economic power won't do it, And
military power is certainly not the answer, We know what the chureh has taught us
all our lives, that the way of Christ offers the only real hope to our troubled
world, E believe that way has never been more desperately needed; For the sake of
every man, woman and child, the vorld must heed Christ's warning to all who live by
the sword, It seems to me that if ve Christian churchpeople fail to represent Christ
against the bomb, no one will,

Our heavenly Father, You have given us Life and then in the Christ you gave us
the love to support us, even in the midst of the world's terrors, In You we have
strength and courage, Help us now to live bravely as peacemakers, showing the way
of Jesus as the only way of life for this world encircled by instruments of death,
In His name we pray,

Amen,.