James Carroll’s “Revelations of the War in Ukraine”

What the war in Ukraine tells us about the unabated danger of nuclear weapons.

The ubiquitous Cold War-era “fallout shelter” signs, which still dot the American landscape, rusted and ignored, as memento mori.

For the past 40 years, there has been no more eloquent or passionate opponent of the madness of nuclear weaponry than James Carroll.

A child of the duck-and-cover era and son of a three-star Air Force general, Carroll entered adulthood as what used to be called “a radical priest,” part of the anti-war Catholic Left of the 1960s. After leaving the Paulist order in 1974, he turned prize-winning author of both fiction and non-fiction, on matters ranging from the Cold War to the history of anti-Semitism in the Church, as well as a longtime columnist for the Boston Globe. On the topic of nuclear disarmament, he is arguably without peer in the English language.

Yet Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine caused Carroll to reconsider the anti-war beliefs that have undergirded his entire adult life, and nuclear disarmament in particular. Watching Vladimir Putin’s naked aggression, and the bravery and devotion of the Ukrainian people in response, he writes, “For the first time in decades, I was unabashedly in favor of war.”

Carroll has crystallized those thoughts in a lengthy essay called “Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An Anti-War Activist’s Personal and Political Reckoning,” a profound survey of the…