ABSTRACT
This chapter begins the moral evaluation by considering whether it is possible to provide a justification for nuclear deterrence even if one believes that any use of nuclear weapons would be morally impermissible in any circumstance. This is the position, for example, apparently adopted by the US Catholic bishops in their recent Pastoral Letter on War and Peace. Someone has found a way of systematically contaminating the source with a deadly cumulative poison whose effects are unnoticeable until they can no longer be cured. The house is regularly inhabited by a small group of party chiefs, with their immediate families, who are in control of a great state; they are engaged in exterminating the Jews. In that case the man could legitimately be held to have the intention to prevent a Nazi plot to exterminate the Jews. But once the consequences become too remote and ill-connected with the action, their use to characterise the intention underlying the action becomes implausible.
