Reading Strozier, the concept he outlined which I found most intriguing was that of the “shift of agency” that occurred when we entered the Atomic Age. With the detonation of the first atomic bomb, humanity was no longer required to defer to nature or god when talking about destruction en masse, because we’d figured out how to do it ourselves. While it might sound extreme at first when Strozier says that “nuclear weapons are the religion of our age,” the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove greatly strengthens this assertion, particularly in the cases of the unhinged army general, Jack D. Ripper (whose very name is a disturbing historical reference), who’s responsible for the eventual destruction of the world, and in the various crewmembers of the B-52 who deliver the first strike. Throughout the film, General Ripper speaks with a kind of fanatical religiosity, his obsession with ridding the world of impurity and its champions hearkening back to any number of apocalyptic zealots we encountered in Kirsch’s book, and the fact that he decides to play God, bringing about an apocalypse using nuclear weapons, makes him a prime example of Strozier’s idea of nuclear weapons being our religion. The crewmembers, unwitting agents of Ripper’s fanaticism, perform their various duties (the pressing of various buttons, switches, maintaining the aircraft) in a grave, ritualistic manner that reminds one–more and more too, as the story goes on–of religious actions, like the recitation of prayers in tandem with the fondling of rosary beads. Indeed, when looking through the prism of nuclear weapons as the modern religion, doesn’t the “Duck and Cover” video also take on a kind of eerie religious significance, especially when one considers the relative ineffectiveness of such a technique in the face of an atomic explosion? Doesn’t it look a bit like a violent re-imagining of kneeling in prayer?