This week (Oct. 16) in 1978, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was elected by his fellow cardinals as the youngest pope in 132 years, the first non-Italian pope in 455 years, and — being a native of Poland — the first Slavic pope in history.   He took the name John Paul II, and then he took it upon himself to bring down the Soviet empire — an empire that had controlled Eastern Europe, including his native Poland, for more than 30 years.

In June of 1979, nine months after his election, he took his first significant step toward that goal by making an official visit to his Polish homeland, and when he disembarked from his plane at Warsaw’s airport and promptly kissed the ground, his countrymen burst with joy, pride and religious fervor.  Hundreds of thousands of Poles greeted his visit to Warsaw, shouting, “We want God!  We want God!”   And as he traveled the country the crowds swelled, culminating in the city of Krakow where he addressed nearly 3 million Poles.

His message to his audiences was simple.  “Be not afraid,” he told them, because “faith,” “hope” and “love” will help them overcome any obstacle or enemy, and he reminded his countrymen that religious freedom was their fundamental right, despite what the Soviet-puppet government that ruled them might say.

He also reminded his countrymen, and all the captive peoples of Eastern Europe, how disparate were their personal belief systems — their values, ethics, dreams and religious faith — from the illegitimate and stultifying political systems they lived under.  He was convinced that once those disparities were clearly understood, these political systems would quickly crumble.

His audiences got the message, starting — as he undoubtedly had hoped — with his fellow Poles.  A year after the Pope’s visit, Lech Walesa, an unemployed electrician from the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, and a man who had once led an illegal strike against that shipyard, stood outside its gates, a picture of Pope John Paul II beside him, to announce the formation of the first-ever independent trade union in a Soviet-controlled country — the trade union Solidarnosc, or “Solidarity.”  “We have the right to strike!” Walesa announced to thunderous cheers. Continue reading →

“The condition upon which God has given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.” – John Curran

Sixty-four years ago the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created when 12 Western democracies joined together in a military alliance whose purpose was mostly defensive. World War II was a fresh memory, but the greatest threat to peace in 1949 was the Soviet Union, which had dropped an “Iron Curtain” — in Churchill’s memorable phrase — around the nations of Eastern Europe, strangling their freedoms and rigidly controlling their economic, cultural and political institutions.  The Western European democracies feared greatly that the Soviet army, the largest in the world, would someday invade their territories and do the same to them.

So did America, which joined NATO to help defend its members.  U.S. troops were stationed in Europe both as a defensive force in case of a Soviet attack and as a “tripwire,” meaning that should any American blood be shed it would ensure an American retaliation that might eventually involve nuclear weapons.  The intent was to make crystal clear to the Soviets that, as Article 5 of the NATO charter stated, an attack on one NATO member was considered an attack on all, including America.

It worked. Not once in NATO’s history did the Soviet army enter NATO territory, meaning that not once was Article 5 ever invoked, and with the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 and the release of its Eastern European satellites from its grip, NATO was considered history’s most successful military alliance.

And then on September 11, 2001, the world changed forever and so did NATO. On September 12, 2001, after five hours of deliberation among NATO members, NATO’s secretary general, Lord George Robertson, not only invoked Article 5 of the NATO charter for the first time in history, but did so with an expanded definition of NATO’s mission.  No longer would NATO exist solely to protect members from threatening states, but also from threatening entities such as terrorist organizations.  Upon proof that the September 11 attacks came from a foreign origin — and soon it was definitively shown that al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were behind them — then this attack on America would be considered an attack on all NATO members.

And so, for all of our disagreements, past and present, with our NATO allies over how best to meet the menace of terrorism, we should not forget on the anniversary of the terrible tragedy of September 11 that our allies stood with us when it counted.  Indeed, the irony is that after 60-plus years of thinking America would one day have to come to the aid of its NATO allies, it was the NATO allies who came to the aid of America.

The significance of the anniversary of the bombing of the Japanese city of Nagasaki, which this week (Aug. 9) in 1945 became the second city ever destroyed by a nuclear weapon dropped in anger, is simply this:

Nagasaki is also the last city destroyed by a nuclear weapon dropped in anger.

Before the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (three days earlier) and Nagasaki at the end of WW II, advances in weaponry had always expanded the scope of war’s possibility and destruction. The machine gun killed more soldiers in five minutes than the rifle killed in fifteen. The submarine created a new battleground — under water.  The tank made the battlefield mobile. The aircraft carrier allowed aerial battles in conjunction with naval ones.  The bomber put distant cities in harm’s way.  In sum, every new invention in the field of weaponry increased the likelihood of war as it increased the number of combatants and casualties. Until the nuclear weapon.

The nuclear weapon crossed a unique threshold because, for the first time in history, a weapon that was more destructive than anything before it became less feasible.  In Nagasaki’s wake, the U.S. and the Soviet Union built huge nuclear weapon stockpiles, conducted countless nuclear tests, and were joined in the “nuclear club” by a half-dozen other countries, including several dictatorships, some of dubious stability.  Yet not once in more than 50 years has a nuclear weapon been used in war.  In effect, the ultimate war weapon became the ultimate guarantee that it would not be used. The costs of using nukes so far outweigh the benefits that there literally could be no victor in such a war. So why wage it?

In his book Now We Know: Rethinking Cold War History, author John Lewis Gaddis illustrates this point thusly:  “Their (nuclear arms) distance from conventional arms—to resort to a football metaphor—was roughly that between getting a new kind of shoe allowing better traction in tackling the other team’s players, on the one hand, and on the other, developing a device capable of instantly destroying not only the other team, but also one’s own, to say nothing of the playing field, the spectators, the stadium, the parking lot and the television rights.”

Which is not to say that someday, somehow, somewhere, a nuclear explosion won’t cause massive destruction, either by terrorism or by accident.  But that is a different subject.  The nuclear genie has been out of the bottle for sometime now and there is no putting him back.  My point is simply that with the advent of nuclear weapons a new phenomenon occurred. Their unimaginable power has made using them in war almost equally unimaginable.