Addressing a Sept. 24 forum on The Human and Moral Costs of the New Nuclear Arms Race,” Archbishop John C. Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico, emphasized that “the only sure way to end the nuclear threat is to end nuclear weapons.”
The forum was hosted by the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs at its Washington, D.C., office. The school’s Krock Institute for International Peace Studies and the Catholic Peacebuilding Network organized the forum, and the co-sponsors of the dialogue included the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Office of International Justice and Peace, The Catholic University of America, the Berkley Center for Religion at Georgetown University, the Fordham Center for Religion and Culture, the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, and the Sant’Egidio Foundation for Peace and Dialogue.
Archbishop Wester addressed attendees over Zoom, sharing that he felt a “personal responsibility” to work for nuclear disarmament given that the world’s first nuclear weapons were detonated within the boundaries of his diocese in the 1945 Trinity test. During World War II, he said, the Manhattan Project operated a secret office “just 100 footsteps from my Cathedral of Peace.”
Amid a tense geopolitical moment, in which President Donald Trump has threatened to resume U.S. nuclear weapons testing after a moratorium lasting over 30 years, Archbishop Wester underlined the Catholic Church’s longstanding opposition to nuclear weapons. While he noted that the Holy See was the first state to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017, he assured listeners that papal disapproval of the atomic bomb was not a recent development. St. John XXIII called for their abolition in his 1963 encyclical Pacem in Terris, published shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis; St. John Paul II called for “general verifiable disarmament” while addressing the United Nations in 1982; and Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his 2006 World Day of Peace message that “in a nuclear war there will be no victors, only victims.”
Nuclear weapons constitute “a threat to every moral principle imaginable,” Archbishop Wester said.
Beyond their threat to world peace, the archbishop said, the U.S. nuclear program has wreaked havoc on his home state. Two of the nation’s three nuclear laboratories, the Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, are located in New Mexico, and nuclear warheads are at an Air Force base that shares runways with Albuquerque’s main commercial airport. Generations of New Mexicans have suffered from cancer due to the residual effects of nuclear testing, and various facilities in the state, particularly the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, will contain radioactive materials for at least 10,000 years to come.
Meanwhile, both the federal and state governments’ massive allocation of funds and resources to nuclear testing have come at the expense of the state’s well-being. Archbishop Wester drew attention to the disparities between wealthy, well-funded Los Alamos County, where the national nuclear laboratory is located, and the rest of New Mexico, arguing that this inequality is a symptom of nuclear weapons’ “robbing the poor.” (In a recent study, New Mexico ranked 50th among U.S. states for education, 47th for economic well-being, and 41st for health.)
New Mexico is facing a $1 billion cut in federal funding “to help pay for tax cuts to the rich,” the archbishop said, and the funds earmarked by the Department of Energy for nuclear facilities in New Mexico are more than twice the amount of federal assistance for the state’s schools, hospitals, and other social services.
As the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops prepared for the annual October observance of Respect Life Month, Archbishop Wester said that nuclear disarmament is “a genuine pro-life issue on the largest possible scale.” He urged young Catholics to bring anti-nuclear weapons advocacy to their campuses, parishes, and communities, and suggested that parishes around the country establish “Peace, Justice, and Life committees” to better integrate the movement for disarmament into existing pro-life ministries.
Following Archbishop Wester’s address, a panel of Catholic academics and pro-peace advocates discussed several of the challenges facing the anti-nuclear weapons movement in Washington’s current political climate.
Dr. Maryann Cusimano Love, associate professor of international relations at The Catholic University of America, argued against the common conception of nuclear weapons as a deterrent to international conflict, which she termed a “fallacy of realist theory.”
Dr. Love contended that, not counting a minor American expeditionary force that intervened on behalf of the White movement during the Russian Civil War, the United States and the Soviet Union did not go to war before either country had developed nuclear weapons. Their arguable closest brush with direct conflict, the Cuban Missile Crisis, was a direct consequence of the nuclear arms race.
Echoing Archbishop Wester’s identification of disarmament as a pro-life issue, Dr. Love quoted Pope Leo XIV’s recent affirmation, in the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, that “peace is not simply one issue among others, but a prerequisite for the universal common good.” In a world where nuclear annihilation remains even a theoretical possibility, Dr. Love suggested, there can be neither integral human development nor genuine respect for life.
David Cronin, manager for government relations at Catholic Relief Services, called attention to the opportunity cost of the federal government’s renewed interest in nuclear weapons. Over the past two years, he said, the U.S. government’s investment in life-saving development assistance has cratered, leaving many of the world’s poorest people acutely vulnerable to disease and starvation.
“A budget is a moral document,” Cronin said, arguing that the government and the Church should be “co-responsible” for aiding the vulnerable. He argued that the federal government has sacrificed this aid in order to prioritize both nuclear weapons and military expenditures more broadly.
The Congressional Budget Office’s most recent report on nuclear weapons, published in April 2025, estimates that the Department of Defense and Department of Energy’s plan to “modernize” the U.S. nuclear arsenal would cost taxpayers $946 billion between 2025 and 2034, or roughly $95 billion per year.
