1 Obviously, there are other moral approaches to nuclear strategy that could be distinguished, but I think that the three I will be considering reflect the range of possible approaches that are relevant to the current debate over nuclear strategy.

2 In fact, the debate as to whether blacks are better off now because of the Great Society programs has taken a more scholarly turn. See Murray, Charles, Losing Ground (New York: Basic Books 1984)Google Scholar and Christopher Jencks, ‘How Poor are the Poor?’ New York Review of Books, May 9 1985.

3 This actually appears to be the most characteristic stance of those who endorse the Human Nature Approach in the current debate. See, for example, Grisez, Germain, ‘The Moral Implications of a Nuclear Deterrent,’ Center Journal 2 (1982), 9–24;Google Scholar U.S. Catholic Bishops, , The Challenge of Peace (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Catholic Conference 1983),Google Scholar especially the Introduction.

4 See Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1971)Google Scholar and my book The Demands of Justice (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Univer- sity Press 1980), especially Chapter 2. To guarantee unanimity, it is necessary to assume that persons behind a veil of ignorance will be motivated only by information they are permitted to take into account. This means they cannot have any free-floating motivations or interests. It is also necessary to assume that persons behind a veil of ignorance are not committed to an all-or-nothing fanatical conception of the good because such a conception would rule out the possibility of reasonable compromise as the basis for agreement.

5 Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars (New York, N.Y.: Basic Books 1971),Google Scholar Chapter 1

6 Ibid.

7 For example, Baier, Kurt, The Moral Point of View (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 1958);Google ScholarGewirth, Alan, Reason and Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1977).Google Scholar

8 For what that stronger defense of morality would be like, see my ‘Justifying Morality: the Right and the Wrong Ways,’ Synthese (Kurt Baier Festschrift) forthcoming.

9 For example, see Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica II II Q 64 A7 and II II Q40 A1.

10 Even if these bombings did help shorten World War II, and there is considerable evidence that they did not, they would have still been in violation of requirement (2) on just means.

11 See Walzer, 152.

12 Douglas P. Lackey, ‘The Moral Irrelevance of the Counterforce/Countervalue Distinction,’ The Monist, forthcoming in 1987. For a similar view, see Susan Levine, ‘Does the “Counterfactual Test” Work for Distinguishing a Means from a Foreseen Concomitant,’ Journal of Value Inquiry 18 (1984), 155-7.

13 This Nonexplanation Test also solves a related problem of distinguishing foreseen from intended consequences noted by Charles Fried. (Fried, Charles, Right and Wrong [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1978), 23-4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar) Fried was concerned with the following example, first discussed by Philippa Foot (Foot, Philippa, ‘The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect,’ Oxford Review 5 [1967], 5–15Google Scholar): ‘Imagine that a fat person who is leading a party of spelunkers gets herself stuck in the mouth of a cave in which flood waters are rising. The trapped party of spelunkers just happens to have a stick of dynamite with which they can blast the fat person out of the mouth of the case; either they use the dynamite or they all drown, the fat person with them.’ Now suppose someone would claim that using the dynamite was simply a means of freeing the party of spelunkers and that the death of the fat person was just a forseen side-effect. Fried's problem was that while he rejected this account of the action, he could find no way of successfully challenging it. What he clearly needed was the Nonexplanation Test. For suppose we employ the test and ask whether the death of the fat person helps explain why the dynamite was used to free the spelunkers from the cave, the answer we get is clearly ‘Yes.’ For how else could the use of the dynamite free the party of spelunkers from the case except by removing the fat person from the mouth of the cave in such a way as to cause her death? It follows, according to the Nonexplanation Test, that the death of the fat person was a means intended for freeing the party of spelunkers and not merely a foreseen consequence of the use of the dynamite.

14 It may even be the case that a weaker restriction on the foreseen harm allows more good consequences to be achieved than a stronger restriction on intended harm rules out.

15 See Harsanyi, John, Rational Behavior and Bargaining Equilibrium in Games and Social Situations (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Hare, R.M., ‘Justice and Equality,’ in Sterba, James P., ed., Justice: Alternative Political Perspectives (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth 1980), 105-19.Google Scholar

16 The two approaches also differ in their requirements for distributive justice (see Rawls, A Theory of Justice) and retributive justice (see my The Demands of Justice [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 1981], Chapter 3 and ‘Is There a Rationale for Punishment?’ American Journal of Jurisprudence 29 [1984), 29-43).

17 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 22-7

18 See, for example, Finnis, John, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1980),Google Scholar especially Part 3.

19 See Chandler, John, ‘Divine Command Theories and the Appeal to Love,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 22 (1985) 231-9.Google Scholar

20 Narveson, Jan, ‘Pacifism: A Philosophical Analysis,’ Ethics 75 (1965), 259-71CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Ryan, Cheyney, ‘Self-Defense and Pacifism,’ in Sterba, James P., ed., The Ethics of War and Nuclear Deterrence (Belmost, CA: Wadsworth 1985), 45-9Google Scholar

22 The Effects of Nuclear War (Office of Technology Assessment, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office 1979), 94, 100; Calder, Nigel, Nuclear Nightmares (New York: Viking 1979), 150;Google ScholarLens, Sidney, The Day Before Doomsday (Boston: Beacon Press 1977), 102Google Scholar

23 Sagan, Carl, ‘Nuclear War and Climate Catastrophe: Some Policy Implications,’ Foreign Affairs 62 (1983), 257-92CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 The Effects of Nuclear War, 83, 91; Kahan, Jerome, Security in the Nuclear Age (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution 1975), 202;Google Scholar Sidney Lens, 98, 99, 102

25 Sidney Lens, 78-9; Keeny, Spurgeon and Panofsky, Wolfgang, ‘MAD versus NUTS,’ Foreign Affairs 60 (1981-82), 297-8;Google ScholarClark, Ian, Limited Nuclear War (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1982), 242Google Scholar

26 Sidney Lens, 73

27 McGeorge Bundy, Kennan, George F., McNamara, Robert S. and Smith, Gerald, ‘Nuclear Weapons and the Atlantic Alliance,’ Foreign Affairs 61 (1982), 757;Google Scholar it should be noted that Bundy, Kennan, McNamara and Smith believed that their endorsement of a doctrine of no first use of nuclear weapons may involve increased spending for conventional forces in Europe. Others, however, have found NATO's existing conventional strength to be adequate to meet a Soviet attack. See Barash, David and Lipton, Judith, Stop Nuclear War (New York: Grove Press 1982), 138-40;Google Scholar Harold Brown, U.S. Department of Defense Annual Report (1981).

28 On my view, to succeed in threatening two conditions must be met: (1) One must have the intention to carry out the action one is purporting to threaten under the stated conditions; that is, one must expect that if the stated conditions do obtain then one will carry out that action. (2) The preference structure of the party that one is trying to threaten must be so affected that something the party might otherwise have wanted to do is rendered less eligible.

29 Caspar Weinberger, ‘Why We Must Have Nuclear Deterrence,’ Defense (March, 1983), 3

30 The New York Times, May 9 1985

31 See Leonid Brezhnev's message to the U.N. General Assembly on June 21982.

32 See Kahan, Security in the Nuclear Age; Lens, The Day Before Doomsday; Kendall, Henry and others, Beyond the Freeze (Boston: Beacon Press 1982);Google Scholar George Kistiakowsky, ‘False Alarm: The Story Behind SALT II,’ The New York Review of Books, April 2 1979; Les Aspin, ‘How to Look at the Soviet-American Balance,’ Foreign Policy 22 (1976), 96-106; Gordon Adams, ‘The Iron Triangle,’ The Nation 116 (October 1981), 425, 441-4. Much of this evidence is reviewed in my paper, ‘How to Achieve Nuclear Deterrence Without Threatening Nuclear Destruction,’ included in The Ethics of War and Nuclear Deterrence, 155-68.

33 It might be objected that this proposed policy is hypocritical because it al· lows a nation following it to benefit from an adversary's uncertainty as to whether that nation would follow its moral principles or its national interest. But it seems odd to deny a nation such a benefit. For we all know that moral people can lose out in many ways to those who are immoral. Occasionally, however, being immoral does have its liabilities and one such liability is that it is hard for immoral people to believe that others will not act in just the way they themselves do, especially when the benefits from doing so are quite substantial. Why then should not moral people be allowed to extract some benefit from the inability of immoral people to believe that moral people are as good as they say they are? After all, it is not the fault of moral people that immoral people are blinded in their judgment in this regard. Consequently, I see no reason to allow a nation to benefit from its adversary's uncertainty as to whether it will follow the requirements of morality or those of national interest.

34 Soviet Military Power (U.S. Department of Defense, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office 1983); Holloway, David, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1983);Google ScholarCockburn, Andrew, The Threat (New York: Random House 1983), Chapter 12Google Scholar

35 Now it might be objected that these same practical implications could be derived from a Utilitarian Approach to nuclear strategy. This is certainly a possibility although defenders of the Utilitarian Approach have not claimed to have derived such implications. Yet given that the utility calculations are so complex in the case of nuclear strategy, it seems preferable to establish the theoretical superiority of the Social Contract Approach and then use that approach to derive practical implications for nuclear strategy rather than to try to establish a practical reconciliation between these approaches to nuclear strategy.

36 U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, Ballistic Missile Defense Technologies (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing House 1985); Union of Concerned Scientists, ‘Ballistic Missile Defense: A Dangerous Dream,’ in Braking Point 2 (1984), 1-2

37 See Colin Campbell, ‘At Columbia, 3 Days of Arms Talks,’ New York Times, February 11 1985 and ‘Star Wars Chief Takes Aim at Critics,’ Science, August 10 1984.

38 Union of Concerned Scientists, ‘Boosting Stars Wars,’ Nucleus 6(1985), 2, 4

39 I wish to thank Michael Walzer, Edmund Pincoffs, and Andrew Oldenquist for their comments on an earlier version of this paper which was presented at a Conference on Just and Unjust Wars held at Pace University. I also wish to especially thank David Copp for his very helpful comments on a penultimate version of this paper.