ABSTRACT
R: After reading Jim Sterba's chapter and Steven Lee's response there are some questions I find myself asking. I've been thinking about nuclear deterrence and the moral position it puts us in. It seems to me that wars, if they can be justified at all, have to be justified on the basis of some value that is under threat. They are not just about real estate. This value has to be pretty fundamental if it is to justify the sort of destruction that wars characteristically bring about. In the nuclear age we seem to be in a situation where in order to protect fundamental values we have to be ready to destroy them. (One thinks of what was said in Vietnam: "We have to destroy the village in order to save it.") How can we justify possessing an arsenal of these weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction in the name of human dignity or any other value?
