ABSTRACT
Most people feel that the existence of nuclear weapons confronts us with some kind of moral difficulty or dilemma, or that their advent on the scene has somehow made a moral difference. The British plans for civil defence against nuclear attack are a nice example of this: the plan seems to be to preserve a government structure by preserving the lives of key local government officers. The opponent of nuclear weapons confronts them with the horrors of nuclear war. Casuistical rebuttals reject the blanket charge of enormity and try to show that though it attaches to some possible and perhaps to some actual pro-nuclear stances, it certainly does not attach to all. The object is presumably to neutralize the moral revulsion that crusaders might otherwise induce in relation to these arguably acceptable stances and thus remove a possible obstacle to their adoption.
