Cardinale Reverendo Keith

Does Space-Based Laser Technology now signal the end of the ICBM Era? What does this mean for the old 70s military doctrine of Nuclear Deterrence?

It is estimated that some 100,000 young people turned out for demonstrations and manifestations during the 5th day of the Cop-26 conference and summit in Glasgow the other day for the 5th November 21. People power - no wonder some powers want all of that silenced. Democracy looks like Greta the Great, the young schoolgirl that has brought more and more populist pressure to bear on stand-alone politicians and presidents in a modern democracy-friendly epoch. Like CT or Clarence Thomas. But I digress. Without wishing to sound it all out like an ebullient newsreader Mark Dolan style on GBNews, it is good to note that Cardinal Keith, the young go-about-town giovane cardinale, had only recently switched on his lights to the prevalence of this military doctrine of nuclear deterrence or nuclear stand-off in modern times, as he reflected on the comings and goings - all legit - at the submarine base at Faslane nearby in Scotland GB, but over time, and with increased reflection brought on by the thousands of ordinary students and people that turned out for the Cop-26 demonstrations, he quickly grew less and less convinced of the military doctrine as enshrined in the older sort of official manuals, as he himself turned over page after page of the new doctrines found in the CCC back at homebase in Rome.

To begin with the older manuals were based on the idea that large numbers, vast swathes in fact of civilian populations, might be coolly and clamly and even legitimately exterminated in a nuclear exchange between super powers such as Russia and China and Usa and France and the UK. This underlying assumption he more and more found intensely objectionable, not only because the civilians were innocent parties, but because the notion assumed a huge divide between the classes, the knows and the know-nots. Why should military men, and their pawn like prime ministers, be allowed to carry the nuclear football, as the secret case is called with all of the codes and triggers for an exchange of this horrendous nature. So Cardinale K is become less and less convinced of the ethics and morals of having ten submarines on stand-by armed with nuclear missiles of the Trident kind and all pointed at Russian and Chinese cities - a terrible dilemma for a modern go-ahead cardinale like Keith.

Greta the Greats and others have more and more challenged the assumptions of nuclear deterrence, in part urged on by conscience, in part urged on by 90s songs like Nena's “99 Red Balloons”, in part urged on even by the slow realisation in church circles that the expression nuclear deterrence really had to go from official manuals of present day gospel guided doctrine - the populist Jesus would blanche at the idea of large scale extermination of women and children just to keep military heads clacking together. So whereas the phrase appeared in all of the early French and German editions of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, by the end of the redaction process, it had all but disappeared from the official Latin editions of the new catechism, especially in the paragraphs numbered CCC 2302-2317. In those paragraphs a neat and silent excision had taken place and the expressions about such stand-offs carefully replaced by other formulaes that bespoke the idea of the imprudence of recoursing to proliferant arms and weapons in cases of nuclear tension, the "ne ... ut" doctrine of the council catechism and the "proliferatio ne arma" doctrine of the same catechism - all of this in a silent velvet revolution that was undertaken behind the scenes of redaction by the official powers at Rome up at the North American College of all places, thanks to the sterling work of Fr Dave MacC and others Mgr C, growing concerned about the older secular doctrines being given pride of place in gospel guided populism manuals of the holy mother Church, mother to the free, spiritual angel to the children, and light in general or Lumen Gentium to the nations. It all went right against the whole tenor of the Gaudium et Spes doctrines of the last general 1962 council. So this military doctrine is slowly being erased from church manuals and church catechisms - it is only right, it is only about time. Women and children first.