Blessèd Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas

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 speaking for themselves. Their narratives powerfully reveal their hopes and fears, their sense of the meaning of history, and the future of the human race. Blessed Assurance won the year's Lillian Smith Award for the best book about the South in 1986.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

255 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Education: Columbia University (1970), Columbia University (1968)

Awards: Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada

(from Google)

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amarillo, Texas is home to Pantex, the final assembly plant for nuclear weapons in the United States. This book is a study into how the people of Amarillo feel about that fact during the Cold War in the early 80's. The book lets the people of Amarillo speak for themselves. This is the intention and readers who want something other than to listen to these individuals will be frustrated. The author herself in the preface declares, "Readers seeking dramatic confrontation, or a quick ideological fix, will find my text singularly resistant to their wishes." (page x). The author accomplishes just that. This is a first hand account of the town of Amarillo. The author makes comments here and there, but she does her job of staying in the background. It is not secret what she believes, but the book is not about her it is about the people in this community.

The question is why should I read a book from 40ish years ago about Amarillo and how those people felt? I don't know how to answer that question for you. But I could not put this book down. It was fascinating. Because this is a first hand account of the time period it remains timeless. This is not a tirade against nuclear weapons that does or does not hold up with the ages. It is an attempt to understand particular people at a particular time in a particular place. If reading about how people in Amarillo felt about being the home of the bomb in the 80's sounds interesting to you, then you will like the book. I loved it.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

2015 Reading Challenge - Nonfiction

[Alan Fuller · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating look at attitudes in Amarillo towards the final assembly place of the U.S. nuclear arsenal just 20 miles outside the city. Many fundamentalist Christians aren't worried since they expect to be raptured before Armmegedon anyway. Written in the 1980s.

[Mia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrifying.
I read this book for my current little study of all things a-bomb.
Mojtabi moves from New York to Amarillo to report on Pantex, the last assembly point for nuclear weapons.
Thinking her story would go elsewhere, she becomes most interested in dueling theologies: that of the Catholic bishop (a leader of a small minority group in town) who calls upon Catholics to not work at the plant and to support nuclear disarmarment, vs. that of various Pentacostal and S. Baptist ministers who think that it is the End Times; and that there can be no peace; and it's the individual self that matters, not the commonweal; and that to usher in said end is--perhaps--right. Etc., etc., etc.
Mojtabi is not a stylist but she is a great reporter.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful, fast-moving, nonfiction book, from an underappreciated writer, about “the intersection of nuclear reality and religious vision,” written in the 1980s. If you’re interested in fundamentalist Christian discourses and/or political, economic, and cultural accommodation to the war machine, this is a must-read.

Mojtabai’s style is crisp and lucid (the introduction is maybe the best I’ve ever read), and her observations on fundamentalist Christianity so impressively succinct as to convince me that, from now on, any discussion I hear on the subject will only be a waste of my time. More thoughts here:

http://alisonkinney.com/2015/07/26/a-...

Thanks!

[BJ Cefola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Account of life in Amarillo in the 80s, and how economic dependency on federal spending, the cold war, and evangelicalism fused together. Good preview of the kind of thinking that lead people to back Trump.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much more about the religious philosophy of residents of Amarillo than about Pantex. Not bad if you're looking for that, but I was expecting a bit more about the actual facility, which essentially becomes a footnote to the religious topics.

[Padraic · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this, in Pennsylvania, in the dark days of the mid-80s, as the hands on the nuclear clock kept inching toward 12. Years later, I found myself living in Texas, a whole lot closer to the Pantex plant than I would choose (were it not for the blessing of my Texas-born wife). How to reconcile God and the Bomb? Why do all those born-again folks love uranium so much? How can radioactivity corrode the bonds between human beings? This is a small book, told in a small voice, like God's, speaking in the silence.