Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives

Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious ana secular Perspectives, Sohail H. Hashmi and Steven P. Lee, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 534 pp., $85 cloth, $37.99 paper.

Chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons have long been the subject of special scrutiny. The arguments about the moral standing of nuclear weapons go back to the 19405, and there is a long-standing consensus that chemical weapons are morally different from conventional arms: the Romans condemned poisoning even enemy wells in war, and the moral arguments against chemical weapons underlay the banning of their firstuse in war through the Geneva Convention of 1925. More recently, in 2003, the Bush administration asserted that searching for WMD was reason enough for military intervention in Iraq. However, the moral reasoning behind the reactions against chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons has not always been clearly articulated. This collection systematically elucidates ethical arguments about WMD and war.

There are two elements that set this volume apart from the many books and articles written in the 19808 and 19905 on the morality of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence. The first is the very wide range of religious and secular ethical traditions applied to the issues. The authors make arguments about WMD from the perspectives of Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, feminism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, liberalism, natural law, pacifism, and realism. The result is a splendid, thoughtful contribution to the literature on ethics in war. The second innovation is the explicit inclusion of chemical and biological weapons along with...