Shock and Awe: Nuclear War and Man’s Theology Part 0

I remember the night, in 2003, when the Iraq War began — I would have been twelve at the time. That night stood out to me because I was a kid who checked out the same book from my school library every week: a book of photographs and details about U.S. Air Force fighter jets. I would pour over that book and others about the tanks, guns, ships, and bombs of the U.S. military for hours, along with history books that told the stories of their use. I remember being very excited as I watched footage from Baghdad of the cruise missiles and “precision guided bombs” that I so often read about crashing to earth, while commentators gushed about the “shock and awe” of it all.

I remember one other thing about that night. I remember my Mom looking me in the eye, with a kind of serious uneasiness. “You know that you’re watching people die, right?”¹

It is certainly not remarkable that I remember that night — it was a memorable night for many, especially for those who lost loved ones in the most terrible of ways that night. I return to them often though, with a kind of morbid fascination. I grew up with dreams of becoming a fighter pilot who got to fly those same jets and drop those same bombs. I also grew up to be a voracious researcher of the things that interest me, which meant that at some point, I had to face up to the fact that all of those shiny machines I enjoyed learning about so much had all been used to kill millions of people over the years over the past century or so² — and for reasons that I increasingly couldn’t justify.

I didn’t end up following the path toward a weaponized sky. I decided late in high school that I couldn’t square the idea of dropping bombs on people from ten thousand feet for reasons I didn’t know — or for any reasons at all — with the life and teachings of Jesus, who I was growing to know and love. This obviously isn’t the conviction that everyone arrives at…but it was mine at least. Nonetheless I return to these memories because I am increasingly uneasy about how this fascination with war shaped and formed me — especially when it comes to my understandings of my own masculinity. I often think about how my life might have turned out, if I had taken off into that weaponized sky, with all its shiny “toys.”

I already mentioned that I can be a bit of an obsessive researcher. There isn’t a subject in my life that I’ve researched more obsessively than the subject of War. I’ve never served in the military or the Pentagon, so I can’t claim that kind of direct experience or expertise. But I’ve read enough from arcane Defense Department budget postings, foreign policy white papers, military histories, and other such materials boring to 99% of people to have some informed opinions about a few things.³ One thing I’ve circled back to again and again is this: Nuclear weapons are the cornerstone of the United States’ standing in the world since World War II. Any account of U.S. military history and past and current American foreign policy, that makes any sense to me at least, understands that nuclear weapons are the sun around which our world order orbits.

Here’s another informed opinion of mine: Nuclear weapons are scary as holy hell.⁴

So why am I so fixated on nuclear weapons? Well, I think their existence, the possibility of their use, and the power dynamics they create in the world might have profoundly affected my culture’s conception of masculinity and the power dynamics tied to that identity. I also wonder if the rise of the nuclear order⁵ might have changed the way we think about God, in this case, the Triune God that I think Jesus revealed to us. I wonder how the fact that I grew up in the world’s inaugural and premier nuclear superpower shaped the man I am becoming and how I imagine God. But why do I think this is all connected?

Well, the short answer is, it’s a hunch.

Here’s the longer story of how I started to head down this train of thought.

Like the assault on Iraq in 2003, I also remember the September 11th attacks. I was in 4th grade, and watched the planes hit the towers while eating breakfast from what must have been a six inch black and white TV on our kitchen counter. That attack, and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, figured heavily in background of my formative years, and could have been where I went to war if I had made different choices.

The more I became suspicious of America’s “War on Terror,” the more I began to notice how little it is supported outside the United States. I only learned years later about the massive protests against the Iraq War around the world, which never made it into the “shock and awe” coverage I was fed. This led me to wonder: why didn’t the world stop us?

Well, because no one in the world can stop us — well except for Russia, who retains the nuclear arsenal of the USSR, and that would entail ending the world. The United States gets to do what it wants in the world because it has the ultimate trump card (yes, I suppose pun intended).

I think it should be unavoidable to note here that this power I just pointed to — the power to exert one’s will in the world backed by the threat of the “armageddon card” — that power was forged and has been stewarded almost exclusively by white men guarding white masculine hegemony. The power of nuclear weapons has been used in America to grant supremacy to people just like me, and to grant that supremacy under threat of incineration. For some reading this, making explicit connections between nuclear weapons, racism and colonialism, and sexism and patriarchy might seem unfounded or strange. I hope over the course of this series I can carefully show more why I think attending to these connections is warranted and vitally important for theology.

For the time being though, I’ll list three assumptions, all of which would require long separate conversations to justify (which we may or may not have later in this series), that have coalesed for me to motivate me to spend a whole semester of my last year in graduate school thinking about this:

1. The first nation-state to achieve and wield the power to destroy the world was a nation-state built on the foundations of white and male supremacy.⁶
2. The first nation-state to achieve and wield the power to destroy the world understood itself as a “Christian nation,” and the individuals who formed the nuclear order often understood themselves in Christian terms and shaped nuclear policy in explicitly Christian religious ways.⁷
3. The scientists, generals, and politicians who held decisive power over the development of nuclear weapons, strategy, and policy — those who shaped the nuclear order we have today — were almost exclusively white American men.⁸

These are my assumptions, and they form the questions that I have been wanting to ask. What does it mean that the first nuclear test was named Trinity? What does it mean that nuclear strategists have been called the nuclear priesthood? What does it mean that the bikini swimsuit was named after the Bikini Atoll nuclear bomb tests? What does it mean that I wrote a paper about why the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified when I was in middle school? What does it mean that I never once observed a discussion about the possibility and implications of nuclear war in Church growing up? How has growing up in a country where the President could blow up the world shaped how I understand what it means to be a man? How has the American church’s widespread negligence to question this status quo shaped how I understand what God is like?

I learned something arresting in a recent article by a young American Orthodox thinker named Nicholas Sooy, about the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki:

Three days later, another bomb was dropped over Nagasaki. The crew were all Christians and just before leaving, they sat with two Christian Chaplains who blessed them and their mission. Nagasaki was home to the largest Christian community in Japan. Over half of the Christians in Japan were killed by the bomb, succeeding where 200 years of intense persecution by the Japanese government had failed. The steeple of the Cathedral of St. Mary was used by the bombers for targeting. The bomb exploded directly over the Cathedral, which was the largest Christian Church in the orient at the time, with over 15,000 members.

This wasn’t the first nor will it be the last time that Christians kill each other. But it is poignant to me that the body of Christ served as the aimpoint for one of the first weapons created by humanity capable of ending life on Earth. There’s something there.

I’ll end with a quote that I think sums up perfectly this “hunch” I have, from Arundhati Roy’s The Cost of Living:

It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they’re used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness.

If you’ve made it this far into this reflection, then I am so grateful for your interest (as well as any feedback you might offer either by commenting or by contacting me in some other way if you know me personally. I will be spending the rest of this semester thinking and writing about how nuclear weapons, masculinity, and theology relate. I’ll be blessed by whatever interest you, dear reader, have. I will hopefully be posting new reflections every other week or so. Welcome to my little journey.

Footnotes

(Because I am a graduate student. Also, its my blog, so deal with it)

1. I don’t know if that was exactly what she said. But that was the spirit of it, and that is what has stuck in my memory.
2. I have to give a shout out here to the incredible work of Neil Halloran, who visualizes the death toll of World War II in the most compelling way I’ve ever seen in his video “The Fallen.” Check out his work, it’s worth your time.
3. Not that that is qualification for anything more than blogging on Medium, but alas, here we are.
4. It’s 2018, so I think I can safely assume anyone reading this is capable of using Google to learn about how horrifying nuclear weapons are when they are used. Nevertheless, I’ll offer two tools I think are helpful for conceptualizing this horror here. First, again, Neil Halloran serves us so well with his excellent visualization of the possible death toll of a nuclear exchange in the first half of his video “The Shadow Peace.” I also recommend a really excellent tool named “NUKEMAP” which is an interactive map that allows one to visualize how destructive a nuclear blast would be anywhere in the world — including your hometown.
5. When I say “the nuclear order” I mean any and all of the following things: the development of nuclear weapons, their actual or possible use, and how their existence shape the world every day.
6. This assumption has been well developed by many thinkers far more adept than I. I particularly recommend Dr. Willie Jennings’ The Christian Imagination and Dr.Robin DiAngelo’s What Does it Mean to Be White? as two resources, theological and practical respectively, that forward this argument about Western culture in general.
7. We will absolutely explore this assumption in detail throughout this series.
8. Also white Soviet men, but we’re focused on the United States here, because I grew up in the U.S., and can’t read Russian.