Some USA extreme Christians look forward to nuclear war

At least some portion of the population also practices mental readiness for a nuclear strike. The country’s solitary final assembly plant for nuclear weapons is located in Amarillo, Texas. Twenty-five years ago the journalist A. G. Mojtabai set out to understand how the people of this city bear the psychic burden of this work. As she reported inBlessèd Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas, many members of the population believe in the Rapture—the end of the world and the gathering of true believers into the arms of Christ. For many of these believers, nuclear weapons, far from being something to repudiate, are vehicles to this blissful end-time event…….

Jerry Falwell stated, “In terms of its impact on Christianity, [Left Behind is] probably greater than that of any other book in modern times, outside the Bible.” But whether or not readers believe in the literal claims of the book, they are surely being counseled to regard nuclear disarmament as morally sinister and nuclear weapons as morally good, even godly...

Until late July 2011, the Air Force had a mandatory course on Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare for its missile officers…The course—“mandatorily teaches its nuclear missile launch officers that fundamentalist Christian theology is inextricably intertwined with the ‘correct’ decision to launch nukes.”

Extreme Injury, Boston Review, Elaine Scarry, September 2011 “…….Our nuclear weapons are, at every minute of the day and night, ready for use Just as the nuclear briefcase is within the president’s reach, so all other steps between the order to launch and the launch itself are relentlessly in place. ……

Some students in the Air Force’s Nuclear Ethics course called its theological justifications for nuclear strikes the ‘Jesus loves nukes’ part.

As the president is kept ready and the Pentagon is kept ready, so the submarines are kept ready…..the U.S. Strategic Command, located at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, demands “that the subs cover all the target packages twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No excuses.” …s a nonstop description of emergency exercises: launching a missile, dealing with a dissident crew member, dealing with a commander suffering an “attack of pacifism,” stopping a fire, stopping a water leak, doing two or three of these exercises simultaneously. No one who expresses hesitation about firing nuclear weapons can be a crew member; still, the daily drills develop procedures to deal with hesitation, should it suddenly arise….^..

Not all readers take the ideas of Left Behind literally. But many do. The authors certainly press for literal belief in the Rapture and, seven years later, the final Glorious Appearing, even providing an appendix elaborating the biblical bases of the novel’s events (the biblical citations are also included, recited, and analyzed in the interior pages of the novels). Jerry Falwell stated, “In terms of its impact on Christianity, [Left Behind is] probably greater than that of any other book in modern times, outside the Bible.”¹¹ But whether or not readers believe in the literal claims of the book, they are surely being counseled to regard nuclear disarmament as morally sinister and nuclear weapons as morally good, even godly.¹²

As the study of Amarillo makes clear, the Left Behind series does not originate, but taps into, a set of associations between nuclear weapons and evangelical belief that pre-dates and post-dates the books. Those beliefs are held not only by some of the people who assemble nuclear weapons, but by some of the people who are positioned to launch them. Until late July 2011, the Air Force had a mandatory course on Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare for its missile officers, a course whose materials were recently obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, whose president, Mikey Weinstein is an Air Force Academy graduate and a former Air Force Judge Advocate General. The course—as Weinstein summarizes it—“mandatorily teaches its nuclear missile launch officers that fundamentalist Christian theology is inextricably intertwined with the ‘correct’ decision to launch nukes…. http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.5/elaine_scarry_nuclear_weapons.php