The Disturbing Secrets of the Air Force’s Jesus Loves Nukes Nuclear Missile Program

From Gizmodo:

Jesus loves everyone. He loves innocents, he loves sinners, he loves cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels. And according to the United States Air Force, Jesus loves atomic intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear mass-murdering too. That's basically what they have been telling their nuclear missile officers for decades under a special ethics training program colloquially known as Jesus Loves Nukes. It seems that the use of nuclear weapons to destroy enemy populations is perfectly fine according to their interpretation of Christian ethics. Now, after being exposed by Truth-Out and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the Air Force is canceling it.

What is it?

The "ethics" training—imparted by USAF chaplains—uses many passages of the Old and New Testament to justify the use of atomic weapons to obliterate innocent populations (aka the enemy). Its core document, a 43-page Powerpoint presentation, also quotes St Augustine's Causes to Just War. It contains references to Hiroshima and Nagasaki too, teaching the official—and much debated—excuse for the bombing of those two Japanese cities.

The document also dedicates an entire slide to rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun, who justifies the use of missiles as a morally just decision:

We knew that we had created a new means of warfare and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.

Braun, before becoming one of the fathers of the space program, was a Nazi scientist who used Jewish prisoners to make the V-2 missiles that terrorized London during the end of World War II. Those words were his justification for the use of those bombs. By the way, the emphasis on that quote is in the original document.

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