Title: Blessèd assurance
First published: 1988
Description: 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.
Subjects: Social life and customs, Moral and ethical aspects, Moral and ethical aspects of Nuclear weapons, Religious aspects of Nuclear weapons, Pantex Plant (U.S.), Religious aspects, Nuclear weapons, Church history, Fundamentalism, Millennialism, History, Texas, social life and customs, Indians of north america, southwest, old, Texas, biography, Ethik, Atomare Rüstung, Nuclear weapons -- Moral and ethical aspects, Amarillo (Tex.) -- Social life and customs, Millennialism -- Texas -- Amarillo -- History --, Manners and customs, 20th century, Nuclear weapons -- Religious aspects, Amarillo (Tex.) -- Church history, Pantex Plant (U.S.).
Places: Amarillao (Tex.), Amarillo, Amarillo (Tex.), Texas
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: U264 .M64 1986, U264