Blessèd assurance

by A. G. Mojtabai

In 1982, with Cold War anxieties running high, A.G. Mojtabai set out for Amarillo, Texas, home of Pantex, the final assembly plant for all nuclear weapons in the United States. Through the lens of this particular city, she sought to focus on our adaptation as a nation to the threat of nuclear war. Her interviews began with Pantex workers assured of both the necessity and the safety of the work that they did, and in the steady, beneficent, advance of science. Working alongside them were fundamentalist Christians who believed in inevitable catastrophe, and who testified to quite another, blessed, assurance of Divine rescue from the holocaust to come. This startling juxtaposition of apocalyptic and technocratic world views was not confined to Pantex. Blessed Assurance brilliantly examines this clash of spiritual visions as it presented itself repeatedly in the streets, churches, and corporate offices of Amarillo. The voices that you hear in this book are those of the people of Amarillo sp