Catholic Bishops Quotes

The use of explosive "atomic weapons," whether by air, sea, or land forces, cannot as such be regarded as violative of international law in the absence of any customary rule of international law or international convention restricting their employment.

What about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Were there not innocent civilians there? We are simply taking the rules of engagement that you have invented and turning them back against you.

The last thing we want to do is to go into an area and inflict unnecessary civilian casualties. One is too many.

The troops are therefore empowered and are in duty bound in this war to use without mitigation even against women and children any means that will lead to success.

It is a rule of international law that weapons and methods of warfare which do not discriminate between combatants and civilians should never be used.

The only moral question with suicide bombing is who the target is. And in that sense, the suicide bomber is no different from the stealth bomber or the cruise missile. If it is targeted at civilian people, then it is morally wrong, whether done by Bush, Blair, or a suicide bomber.

You can't bomb a people just in case.

Having found the bomb we used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands of thousands of young Americans.

(a) The use of nuclear and thermo-nuclear weapons is contrary to the spirit, letter and aims of the United Nations and, as such, a direct violation of the Charter of the United Nations; (b) The use of nuclear and thermo-nuclear weapons would exceed even the scope of war and cause indiscriminate suffering and destruction to mankind and civilization and, as such, is contrary to the rules of international law and to the laws of humanity; (c) The use of nuclear and thermo-nuclear weapons is a war directed not against an enemy or enemies alone but also against mankind in general, since the peoples of the world not involved in such a war will be subjected to all the evils generated by the use of such weapons;

According to the laws of war, a warring party can just walk away from civilian harm that they have caused.

This idea of weapons of mass extermination is utterly horrible and is something which no one with one spark of humanity can tolerate. I will not pretend to obey a government which is organizing a mass massacre of mankind.

We have begun to repay the Japanese for their brutalities and their mass murders of helpless civilians and prisoners of war. We will not quit until they are completely crushed. You have an important part to play in their defeat. There must not be a letup!

Such a weapon [the proposed Hydrogen Bomb] goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide. It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he happens to be a resident of an enemy country... The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.

I think that Donald Trump is the most dangerous politician I’be ever encountered, and I did a campaign against a guy in the Congo who got accused of war crimes in the Hague. If that guy would have won, he wouldn’t have had nuclear weapons.

We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn't stop with Hiroshima - the Japanese weren't surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing.

Weapons of mass destruction - nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons - are just that, and no cause can excuse their use.

I really believe that carpet-bombing, bombing civilian populations, is a form of terror - it's state terror as opposed to vigilante terrorism.

Israel never targets civilians deliberately, period.

I don't think that Israel has any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon.

Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for zyklon b, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental missiles , military space platforms and nuclear weapons? If memory serves it was not the Vatican.

Human-rights advocates, for example, claim that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is of a piece with President Bush's 2002 decision to deny al Qaeda and Taliban fighters the legal status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

The world must know that America holds to the highest standards of military conduct and human rights protections. Anything less is unacceptable.

No, the United States does not target civilians.

Saddam Hussein has openly admitted to the rest of the world that he had weapons of mass destruction. He used those weapons to kill his own people.

Don't let that weapon technology proliferate. Don't let Saddam Hussein get capability for nuclear or chemical weapons, because he's already shown a willingness to use any weapon at his disposal.