DISARMO. — The common good, the essential end of the State, imposes upon the public authority the duty of providing for internal order and of defending against possible external aggression the rights of the society over whose life it presides. It therefore renders legitimate the maintenance of an organized force at the disposal of the executive power, to suppress the causes of internal disorder and repel aggression from without. The size of this public force, however, must be strictly proportionate to the demands of the goal to be achieved and consequently kept within reasonable limits, so that it may not, on the other hand, prejudice other important elements of the common good. Catholic doctrine consequently, just as it does not in principle judge war illegitimate, provided that it meets certain conditions, so neither does it declare illegitimate either the military profession or a corresponding armament, provided that it does not exceed the necessities of defense.
The neglect of these norms caused the arms race that developed from the seventeenth century onward. The policy of equilibrium, founded solely upon the relationship of forces, compelled nations to remain perpetually on a war footing, since an arrangement resting upon so unstable a foundation could collapse at any moment and give rise to armed conflict. The process was further fomented by an atmosphere of suspicion regarding the intentions of others, since one does not arm oneself only to keep the powder dry in the powder magazines, and by the consequent lack of confidence in fidelity to international agreements. A purely mechanical order, constructed without the support of any moral and juridical principle valid in the face of the power of the great nations, cannot generate security. Legal positivism contributed to nourishing the arms psychosis. If a State, according to international law as interpreted by the positivists and accepted for convenience by politicians, possesses complete freedom to wage war for any reason whatsoever, the other States have no choice but to protect themselves, entrusting their security to force rather than to law.
All these causes, and others besides, led the States to adopt the formula of the armed nation, maintaining permanent armies, introducing compulsory military service, and progressively increasing their strength, in a dizzying competition of expenditures harmful to the general economy of the country, whose resources were largely swallowed up by military budgets.
The voice of the Church did not fail to warn peoples of the dangers of such a ruinous policy. Leo XIII, in the apostolic letter Pervenuti all'anno vigesimo quinto of 9 March 1902, deplored «the disastrous criteria that consecrate material forces as almost the supreme law of the world: hence the progressive and immeasurable increase in war preparations; that is, that armed peace comparable in many respects, in its most disastrous effects, to war». Pius X, in a letter sent on 11 June 1911 to the Apostolic Delegate in the United States, praised the initiative of the Carnegie Endowment in favor of disarmament, which, he said, was necessary «especially at this time when the numerical strength of armies, the power of war machines, and military science, so greatly advanced, allow us to glimpse the possibility of wars that ought to inspire lively fear even in the most powerful princes». The proposals made by Benedict XV to the belligerent peoples of the First World War, made public on 1 August 1917, are well known. For the attainment of peace, among other things the Pope advised «a just agreement among all for the simultaneous and reciprocal reduction of armaments, according to norms and guarantees to be established in the measure necessary and sufficient for maintaining public order in the individual States». Pius XI expressed himself in the same sense in the encyclical Ubi Arcano Dei of 23 December 1922. The Church has therefore made the cause of disarmament her own.
Attempts to reach an agreement on this subject have not been lacking in the history of international relations. The aspiration to reduce the means of offense for the benefit of humanity has always been alive among peoples and among certain statesmen, but it has never succeeded in taking concrete form. In 1814, while the Treaty of Paris was being negotiated, Talleyrand proposed that the victorious powers seriously examine the possibility of reducing armies in peacetime. The untimely proposal was not accepted, because France, exhausted by twenty years of war, did not then enjoy sufficient prestige. In 1831 France itself took the initiative in making an identical proposal, to which Prince Metternich replied that the return of armies to a peacetime footing could only be the consequence of the security and confidence achieved in the good will of States to honor their commitments.
More serious was the attempt of Tsar Nicholas II, who revived the idea of a general reduction of armaments by inviting the States in 1898 to a conference to discuss the question. The small nations responded favorably to the invitation, which was coldly received by the great powers; at the Hague Conference of 1899 they definitively caused the proposal to fail, despite the fact that Russia had restricted the original program to the modest proportion of a general undertaking not to increase armaments for a few years. These repeated and fruitless attempts demonstrate that it is impossible to resolve the problem of material disarmament without prior moral disarmament and the transformation of that selfish mentality concerned solely with the triumph of the particular interests of each nation.
The persistence of this mental attitude and the hegemonic aims of the great powers, which were never abandoned, rendered futile the more recent efforts of the League of Nations to reach a collective agreement on the reduction of armaments. At the end of the First World War, the States, instructed by recent experience, showed themselves more willing to accept, through Article 8 of the Covenant, the principle that was a requirement of peace: to reduce national armaments «to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations», entrusting the Council with preparing plans to be submitted thereafter for the approval of the governments. In the meantime they undertook to exchange all information concerning the level of their armaments and their military, naval, and air programs. The prospects for disarmament were confirmed by the preamble to Part V of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), which stated that Germany undertook to observe strictly the military, naval, and air clauses imposed upon it, «with a view to rendering possible the preparation of a general limitation of the armaments of all nations».
However, 12 years had to elapse before the Plenary Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments was convened. Inaugurated in 1932, it conducted its proceedings amid insurmountable difficulties raised by the conflicting directives of the powers; it had to be suspended in 1933 because of Germany’s withdrawal, while Germany was already secretly rearming, and it closed without achieving anything. The arms race resumed unchecked until the outbreak of the Second World War, at the end of which the victorious powers, who had drawn up the Charter of the United Nations, granted disarmament only passing mention, as a matter whose feasibility might attract the attention of the General Assembly and the Military Staff Committee (arts. 11 and 47), without undertaking any formal commitment to its implementation.
The need to bring about a reduction in armaments nevertheless remains urgent. Pius XII repeatedly insisted upon it during the years of the last conflict. In his Christmas message of 1939, he warned that “peace settlements which did not attach fundamental importance to mutually agreed, organic, progressive disarmament, both in the practical and in the spiritual sphere, and which did not seek to implement it loyally, would sooner or later reveal their inconsistency and lack of vitality.” He returned to the same subject again at Christmas 1941.
The achievement of this lofty goal will not be possible without the prior realization of certain prerequisites. Moral disarmament, mentioned above, must be accompanied by a revived sense of the sacred character of law, together with the abandonment of the fatal principle that force should replace or produce it; by a consequent mutual trust among States, assured that their rights will not be violated with impunity; and by the establishment of an efficient international organization, entrusted with the defense of small and great nations and with control of their armaments. Certainly, reaching these goals is arduous, but the development of international law and institutions must consistently strive toward them, in order to free peoples from the specter of war and from the unbearable burden of unproductive expenditures, which devour national resources and impoverish the economies of peoples.