ABSTRACT
On any single Sunday, almost as many Americans attend church services as go to all the major sporting events held in this country during an entire year. From its very origins, the United States has claimed a belief in a unique ethical foundation, a nation, as G. K. Chesterton said, "with the soul of a Church." The Catholic bishops' draft pastoral letter represents by far the most radical effort by any American church to define moral standards for the nuclear era. The historic American pacifist churches, of course, were pathfinders in the peace field, laboring diligently and long with little tangible success. The notion of deterrence, the draft pastoral notes, existed as well in the prenuclear age and previously was not widely challenged as doctrine. The "Bishop O'Connors" of the episcopate stressed that the pope had endorsed nuclear deterrence as "morally acceptable".
