Compare Traditions on One Technology
Choose a technology and read the traditions' recorded stances side by side — each with its rationale in its own terms. The comparison is the section's method in one view: the differences are in the reasons.
Nuclear weapons
Deterrence priced by just-war doctrine: a documented migration inside one tradition — from conditional tolerance in 1982 to condemnation of possession in 2017 — with the scientists’ own manifestos making the same journey in parallel. The full register entry
Catholic
Condemned
The tradition moved: indiscriminate destruction was condemned absolutely at Vatican II, deterrence was tolerated in 1982 only as a step toward disarmament, and in 2017 Francis condemned possession itself. The Church ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as the Holy See (2017) — among the first states to do so.
- Pope Francis, Address to the Symposium on Nuclear Disarmament (2017)
Jewish
Contested within the tradition
Jewish rulings divide on deterrence as they do on other weapons: weapons that cannot be used without massacring innocents strain the tradition’s limits on war, while possession for deterrence has defenders under the law of self-defense (rodef). No consensus ruling exists.
- J. David Bleich, Contemporary Halakhic Problems, discussions of warfare
Mainline Protestant
Condemned
Mainline bodies (the US Catholic bishops’ 1983 pastoral is Catholic; the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran statements are parallel) largely condemned first use and pressed abolition through the Cold War, and the mainline peace churches remain abolitionist.
- National Conference of Catholic Bishops, The Challenge of Peace (1983)
Secular and naturalist
Condemned
The scientists’ own secular movements (the Russell–Einstein Manifesto of 1955, Pugwash) made abolition a professional-ethical position inside science itself; state practice has ignored both manifestos and magisteria with equal consistency, which the register records without editorializing.
- Russell–Einstein Manifesto (1955)