Sacrilizing total war

Abstract

At Strategic Air Command Headquarters, Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, there's a chapel dedicated to combat crewmen of the Cold War. The chapel's stained glass windows, installed in 1959, feature key artifacts—as defined by the U.S. military—of the Cold War. Those windows, and the literature created by SAC to describe them, reveal core assumptions and values underlying U.S. participation in the arms race for over 50 years. They create what Roland Barthes called “mythologies“—signifying a set of beliefs that comprise the image the society has, or would like to have, of itself. Despite the alleged separation of church and state in the U.S., there is a long history of church participation in political affairs. As Lester Kurtz points out in The Nuclear Cage, although the church has played a powerful role in the U.S. peace movement, members of the Christian right supported the development of nuclear weapons in two ways. First, they waged an anticommunist crusade that viewed the former Soviet Union as the anti‐Christ—an atheist nation that must be opposed by moral America. Second, the Christian right contended that Armageddon was imminent, in the form of a nuclear holocaust. Rather than existing on the margins of American society, these minority religious perspectives became central to American foreign policy, especially during the Reagan years. The Armageddon “prophesy,” when linked to foreign policy, became a rationale for a “peace through strength” position.