Reviving Nuclear Ethics: A Renewed Research Agenda for the Twenty-First Century (Essay‪)‬

In 1976 the noted Catholic ethicist J. Bryan Hehir expressed concern about the waning sense of moral urgency over the existence of nuclear weapons with each passing year that superpower nuclear war was avoided. Acknowledging that international ethicists had justifiably turned to other global problems, such as world hunger and poverty, Hehir still worried that the This hiatus in nuclear ethics lasted until the Reagan administration reasserted a confrontational posture with the former Soviet Union, including a proposed comprehensive missile defense system (colloquially referred to as Star Wars), at which time popular fears of nuclear war resurfaced. In response, the journal Ethics devoted an entire volume in 1985 to superpower nuclear ethics. (2) Nonetheless, another hiatus followed the end of the cold war in anticipation of a broad peace dividend. International ethicists again turned their attention from issues of great power security to such demanding and seemingly more immediate issues as human rights, humanitarian intervention, refugees, democratization, and economic globalization.